This morning for some reason, I got thinking about how “in him we live and move and have our being.” … And how God’s love surrounds and upholds all of us all the time.
There are so many moments where God’s presence erupts boldly and unexpectedly and creates a spontaneous moment of awe and quiet - a hush - often followed by a roar of excitement and thanksgiving and praise. Often the praise and our need to express it isn’t even understood clearly. Maybe we think we’re praising the singer or the song or the songwriter - but ultimately behind all of this who is the real artist? Is it not the one who brought it all into existence? And isn’t it just possible that when we praise any of this we are (knowingly or unknowingly) praising This One? (think of how we might praise a painting - are we not indirectly praising the artist him/herself?).
In 2010 KD Lang knocked the socks off millions of tv viewers around the world during the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony. Surrounded by over 50,000 fans and athletes in the stadium she silenced the house with Leonard Cohen’s anguished love song/anthem/hymn, Hallelujah. The song begins with the iconicallly-imperfect biblical hero, King David, and goes on to speak of our struggles to know love - love of others and love of God.
Now, much of that audience had no idea what the song is about and frankly many, living in the peak of their youth and health and vitality weren’t in the place to fully appreciate the message. But KD was. As a lesbian woman from the bible belt country of southern Alberta, it’s a pretty sure bet that she has known her share of pain and rejection over the years. She was out of the closet long before it was as normalized as it is today.
As awesome as that Olympics moment was, I prefer a different performance of this song that KD gave at the 2005 Juno Awards (Canada’s music industry awards ceremony). Here we can better see her body language and facial expressions as she conveys clearly that she hasn’t merely memorized lyrics to a song but rather has lived them and deeply “gets” what Cohen was saying to the depths of her being. These words are poetic. This is not a Hallmark Card moment. They speak of life lived in all its pain, ecstasy, confusion, disappointment and hope. We all struggle to know love and experience it, but our human forays into love are so imperfect and so far from what we sense it is really all about.
In brokenness and despair we can discover that love and God become real - more so than all the other times when we might claim to “know” God. Of all the times we connect with god, the deepest most authentic are often in times when from the depths of our souls we cry out a spontaneous “hallelujah” — beyond our control. Beyond our understanding.
In this presentation of the song I like how right up through the end as KD receives the accolades of her colleagues and fans, she does so in a humble and shy demeanour. Entirely in keeping with who she is and what she has just sung.
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