This is the script of this mornings Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball (for the last time).
I realize that December has one big date in it, but this month there is another. Do you know what it is?Well, it’s the fortieth anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s epic song ‘Hallelujah’.
Just about everybody has covered it and it is rumoured that Cohen wrote around 150 verses for the song – which nearly drove him to despair. But, it means you can choose which version you like and stick to it.
I’m afraid I’ma bit picky: the only version I really like is Cohen’s own – that ‘lived-in’ voice when he did it live in 2017 with a fantastic band at the age of around 80.
On the 25th anniversary I was interviewed for a Radio 2 documentary on the song. The interviewer asked me whether Cohen had (and I quote) “hijacked religious language”. My response was that he had understood it.
The song tells the stories of some complicated people from the Bible – recognising that the saints and heroes of the faith are all compromised in some way. King David the king who had his friend killed so he could take the wife, … but who wrote sublime poetry. Samson, the strong man who lost his way – and his hair – and then his life.
Then Cohen sums it all up in a single phrase: “the holy or the broken Hallelujah”. And his point seems to be that you have to have both. I know exactly what he means. I – and I suspect many other people – know themselves to be both: holy and broken. We don’t need anyone else to point out our failings and deficits – we face them every time we look in the mirror. And yet … and yet, it is out of the acknowledged brokenness that the holiness emerges. Because it has dropped illusions of perfection and faced the truth about my real life.
According to Cohen, this is where God is to be found – as Cohen put it in another song about the ‘cracks’, this is where the light gets in.
So, on my last time with you, Zoe, I say thank you for not being ashamed of the cracks and the broken bits. God bless you in all that lies ahead.