Love Is
As A Baffled King
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Love Is
The first duty of love is to listen.
I once heard a song which I heard a thousand times. I heard it once, then I was compelled to listen until it was part of me. Just about everyone knows it by now, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. I can hear it again whenever I want in my head. I just have to pause and think about it.
“I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord…”
And I hear it now, even now. I feel I’ll hear it forever, which suits me just fine. I can hear it as Jeff Buckley sang it. I hear it as Rufus Wainwright sang it. I even hear it as Leonard Cohen struggling to get through in his original rendition. At least it sounds like a struggle to me.
But I cannot sing it. I can hardly read it aloud all the way through. I’m fine getting through a few lines or a word or two here and there. In fact, I can sing most of it as long as it’s mindlessly along with the song as it plays.
Yet I cannot do it alone. Not without an awful lot of feeling boiling up to the surface, breaking my voice and my composure. I have a few ideas as to why this happens, mostly stemming from the message and how I see the song itself. It may also have to do with what I understand about the background of the song, the poem, and the guy who wrote it. Why he wrote it. Who the chord is, perhaps. Maybe who, or what, Hallelujah is to him. To me.
One good thing about being a Dad such as I am and not being able to care about much outside of my duties as a father is that if I’m wildly off base with my interpretation of the song… well… that’s fine. I love it anyways and I’ll keep it as it is. About halfway through there was a shift in how it came out. More of my accent, somehow, crept in. I kept it as it was, don’t let it throw you.
The song, to me, is love. Love as it is, the beginning, the middle, and the potential end. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if love was everlasting? But that’s only guaranteed once, by one being, everything else can change. That doesn’t mean it will, but it can.
So here’s how I see Hallelujah in the most succinct form I was able to slap together. Though this piece isn’t about the song, per se, it is about love. For better or worse, the song kept calling me back to it, to be recognized for what I see it to be. Love in words.
There’s a song a man carries in him, sometimes buried deep, sometimes humming low under his breath without him even knowing. It starts when he thinks he’s found something, be that a truth, a woman’s love, or a reason for the ache that keeps him restless.
He reaches out, plucks at the strings of his life, and for a moment, Lord, it feels like he’s found it. That secret chord. The one that might set things right, might ease the hunger that’s been gnawing at him since he first opened his eyes to this world. He calls it holy. He calls it good. He calls it hallelujah.
But it doesn’t stay pure. That’s the second part. It always follows as he is imperfect. That thing he reached for slips through his fingers, or maybe he holds too tight and crushes it. Love turns sharp. The promise breaks like thin ice underfoot. He remembers how it felt at first in the warmth and the light but now he’s standing in the cold, empty-handed.
And still, even then, some part of him whispers hallelujah. Because even the fall is part of the song. Even the breaking teaches him what the whole never could. He would still choose to dance despite knowing what it may bring. He would choose that dance precisely because he knows what it could bring. The devils be damned, the suffering too, the dance is worth it. The dance is the hallelujah.
Then comes the long middle stretch. No more illusions. No more dressing up his failings in fine words. He stands in the wreckage, looks out at the road he’s walked, and knows he’s neither hero nor villain, just a man doing his best with what he’s got, which most days ain’t near enough. The hallelujah now, well it ain’t clean, it ain’t proud. It’s a tired man’s prayer, a cracked voice lifting what little he can offer to the stars above, hoping maybe that’s enough.
And at the end, when the fires have burned low and the nights stretch long, he sings it still. Not because he’s won, not because he’s been made whole, but because the singing itself is all that’s left. A hallelujah for the broken, for the lost, for the ones who kept walking even when the light failed. A song that says: I’m here. I’ve loved. I’ve fallen. And I’ll keep singing anyway.
You see, that walk, that slow, stumbling dance of the broken hallelujah, that is love. Not the kind the songs on the radio tell you about, nor the kind that burns bright and easy like a match struck in the dark. No, it’s the kind that stays, that endures. The kind that binds itself to you soft as a shadow, without asking permission, and walks beside you even when you’re too weary or too proud to name it.
Love ain’t just the sweet beginnings, the soft hands and promises whispered when the world is young and new. Love is what keeps a man moving when the sweetness turns to ash on his tongue. Love is what steadies his hand when he’s tempted to lay his burden down and be done with it. It’s what calls him back, again and again, to the work of mending what’s been torn, of building what’s been leveled by time and mistake.
Every broken hallelujah a man sings, every time he lifts his voice, even cracked and low, that’s love speaking. Love of what could be, love of what was, love of what still might rise from the ruin. The whole journey, with all its dust and sorrow, with all its brief glimmers of light, every step is worth it because it’s carried by love.
And that’s the secret it seems. That’s the truth Cohen was reaching for and what I’d be trying to say too: it’s not the victory that makes the song worth singing, it’s the singing itself, and the fact that you kept walking the road, loving as you went, even when your feet bled and your heart near gave out.
And when a man comes to the end of that road, looks back on all of it, the heartbreak and the grace, the falling and the getting up again, he’ll see it plain: it was love all along. It was love that made the journey holy. Love that made the hallelujah matter, broken as it was. Love that made it all worthwhile.
Below you’ll find Jeff Buckley singing Hallelujah. Leonard Cohen has a few versions out there and I love them all. Rufus Wainwright, too. But if I am to choose just one to introduce someone to this song… it must be Jeff’s.
If you’re familiar with Rufus’ version this one may throw you off. Go into it as though you don’t know the melody. Just let the music take you. Let Jeff feel the song for you, nobody has done it better.
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I have songs like this, too - what they mean, and what they mean to me.
Top-shelf post, good sir...
Thank you for writing this.