“Just a Kid with a Dream”
Although he wrote several beautiful romantic songs and a handful of clever political compositions, the late Canadian Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs have to do with the tragedy of the human condition and the grace that flows from spiritual brokenness. His musical career spanned five decades; Bob Dylan thought he was the best songwriter of his generation.
When Cohen was in his early sixties (“Just a kid with a dream,” he quipped), he decided to end his musical career. He had a devoted following yet modest enough to support but one certified gold album. He found his primary success in Canada and Europe but was largely unknown in America. When he called it quits, his biographer Sylvie Simmons noted that Cohen had lost so much faith in himself and his art that he entered a Zen monastery in the mountains of southern California. His life was austere: His day began at 3 a.m. and consisted of meditation, cooking, and cleaning.
Leonard left his finances in the hands of his trusted manager, Kelley Lynch, a former girlfriend; when he left the monastery three years later as an ordained Buddhist monk, he discovered Lynch had stolen virtually all his money, somewhere between $10–13 million. To pay taxes on the money he no longer had and to re-earn enough to carry him through old age, he made the difficult decision to go on tour, though he was now in his seventies and had not played in over a decade. His insecurity had grown into an abject fear of public humiliation; but, by the end of the eighteen-month tour, he had played 247 three-and-a-half hour concerts, grossed $85.7 million, and become a global superstar. He is now the subject of several documentaries. An important feature of his legacy is a peerless performance recorded for DVD at the O2 Arena in London in 2008. He passed away in 2016 at the age of eighty-two.
He penned some of the loveliest songs of his era, including “Suzanne,” inspired by his muse Suzanne Verdal and memorably covered by Judy Collins. Another is “So Long, Marianne,” inspired by yet another muse—he seemed to collect them. (No one has ever accused Cohen of being chaste. His bawdy “I’m Your Man” should dispel any doubts.) The moving “Dance Me to the End of Love” gives a new definition to musical elegance.
Cohen’s clever political songs include the dark “The Future,” used in the soundtrack of the disturbing Natural Born Killers along with two other Cohen songs. “The Future” anticipates a violent, nihilistic age. Cohen described “First We Take Manhattan” as a reaction to terrorism, and the kitschy “Democracy” is simultaneously cynical and hopeful about democracy in the US, a bit reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which the Frenchman published after touring the country in the 1830s.
“That’s How the Light Gets In”
Cohen’s most popular song is “Hallelujah,” which has been covered scores of times by various artists. Its theme is the spirituality that flows from brokenness. When he first recorded it, it was largely ignored until several other artists took it up. The best rendition may be his own, performed late in life and preserved for posterity on the London DVD.
Jeff Buckley first made the song popular. It is beautifully sung by Pentatonix, the Texas-based a capella quintet, but Bono of U2 butchered it on the Cohen tribute album, Tower of Song: Songs of Leonard Cohen. The list of covers is far too long to recite, but it includes Johnny Mathis, Celine Dion, Bon Jovi (Yes, it’s true, and it is quite reverent.). Justin Timberlake has a beautiful, mellow cover. Unfortunately, Adam Sandler gave it a try. Not to be missed is a cover by Tori Kelly that ice-skating prodigy, gold-medalist, and Cohen’s fellow Canadian Kaetlyn Osmond skated to in the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics. To call the rendition graceful only begins to describe it.
The first verse sets the tone, introducing the psalmist David, who, because of his conduct, is confused and “baffled.” We might pause to ask how a scoundrel like David could write such spiritually profound psalms. The answer: It’s precisely because he was a scoundrel, but one who learned to repent. He had plenty of practice.
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Cohen hits his stride in the second verse, which is a conflation of two prominent Old Testament figures who were broken by their sin. David reappears because of his unrestrained lust for Bathsheba and reprehensible assassination of her husband, Uriah the Hittite. Samson was doomed by his flippant foolishness with Delilah. To punctuate the contemporary relevance, Cohen has Samson tied to a “kitchen chair.”
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
The song “Anthem” picks up where “Hallelujah” leaves off. It seems it has brought comfort to more than one suffering from their own weakness and mistakes. The tenor is communal, but much more importantly, it speaks to the inner recesses of the individual.
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be
The heart of the song is the exquisite chorus that could only be written by someone guided by an intimate understanding of the human soul:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
A crack is the consequence of a mistake, an accident, a misdeed. It is a break. Yet, it is the crack of brokenness that permits an illuminated sliver of grace. There was a time when I was anxious for the welfare of one of my teenage children. I knew I had made mistakes, plenty of them. (If only we could start out as grandparents!) The chorus to “Anthem” sustained me through that season.
The Philosopher, the Pope, and the Artist
Many years ago, I spoke with a young woman who had been raised in an enthusiastically evangelical family but upon adulthood had become an atheist. I asked her why. She explained, “I couldn’t stand the certitude.” Some Christian versions of “Hallelujah” change the lyrics so as to remove the ambiguities. What a shame. You may be able to extract the ambiguous lyrics from a script, but you can’t excise the ambiguity and doubt from life, even the Christian life.
A crack is the consequence of a mistake, an accident, a misdeed. It is a break. Yet, it is the crack of brokenness that permits an illuminated sliver of grace.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling, named from the phrase in Philippians 2:12, has to do with the apparent contradictions and paradoxes within the Christian faith. God’s order that Abraham sacrifice his long-awaited son Isaac may seem a simple test of faith, but Kierkegaard convincingly exposes all of the heart-wrenching contradictions inherent in such a command. Though theologically it is called a sacrifice, ethically it is murder—the kind associated with the awful pagan rituals of the peoples surrounding the Israelites.
Kierkegaard posits that Abraham sinned against Isaac with the most lurid of lies and deceived Sarah by omission, neglecting to tell her the nature of the mysterious early morning departure. Kierkegaard observes that no matter how much faith Abraham might have exercised, he would have nonetheless been filled with dread of the violent loss of Isaac at his own hands, and the abandonment of the promise that, after so many years of waiting, he was to be the father of “many nations.”
But that’s just Kierkegaard, right? He was just a “Christian existentialist” preoccupied with the shadier side of faith. Indeed, it was Kierkegaard; and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), in his important Introduction to Christianity, quotes Kierkegaard on the very first page. He then proceeds to explain that faith is not so far from doubt, and the believer walks along a thin path between the two so that doubt is no less a companion than faith. This is what Ratzinger calls the Christian’s “insecurity of his own faith, the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe.”
All are subject to the state of the fallen world, and its “law of imperfection,” as Kierkegaard calls it. It means that he who works does not always eat and he who doesn’t work too often enjoys a satisfying meal. His “law of indifference” means that the reward too often goes to the vicious rather than the virtuous—something about rain, the just, and the unjust (Matthew 5:45).
This is what Cohen, in his dark manner, attempts to say in the pessimistic “Everybody Knows”:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
………………………………………….
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Ratzinger soberly explains that “the believer can perfect his faith only on the ocean of nihilism, temptation, and doubt.” That’s not easy. As Cohen writes,
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
To be sure, Leonard Cohen was no orthodox believer; music seemed to be his lodestar, as his iconic “Tower of Song” suggests. He seems to have done a lot of seeking, but there is no clear indication he ever found what he was looking for, if indeed he knew what he sought. When that is the case, more times than not the problem is not theological, nor is it intellectual. Rather it is a question of moral character.
I suspect the core of Cohen’s weakness was an unwillingness or inability to commit to anything or anyone for very long. His biographer notes that Cohen left girlfriends all over the Western world. But as Flannery O’Connor learned from Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, art doesn’t necessarily depend on the character of the artist. (The Italian painter Caravaggio was a lothario and a murderer.) Cohen did, however, possess keen insight into the human spiritual condition and a unique ability to present it artistically, and for that his musical and literary contributions are the world’s heritage.