broken hallelujahs

Shortly after my sister Polly passed away, I went through a brief, albeit tumultuous, period when I sensed that my prayers bounced off the church ceiling or my bedroom at night. Or if I was outside, perhaps they floated up a ways but then drifted down, like helium balloons when the buoyant gas leaked out.

It was as if all my prayers were just coming back to me as echoes of myself — no better, no higher, revealing nothing divine. At best, they might make me a better person, if I didn’t misguide myself in Jesus’ name.

But where was Jesus? Was it possible to reach Him at all? There was little point, I thought, in just bouncing prayers off ceilings.

At a retreat one summer night, we sang “Just As I Am.” Somehow, without any trigger whatsoever, I found myself careening over an abyss that can only be described as the absence of the Lord — certainly not a fear of hell or anything of that sort, just an incredible sense of a vast universe and all eternity and me alone in the silence and the dark.

I thought about that song that evening, and I prayed as I had never before done. I surrendered and I sought. I fell into that abyss of all alone. If there was a Lord at all, I would fall until He caught me up out of the emptiness, and I would not grab for anything to keep me from that end, not one straw of will or reason.

It was long after midnight when utter emptiness and deepest desire were displaced in a moment. This is where words fail. Completely. The spiritual presence which came to me was simply beyond anything I’d known or was capable of conjuring or can find language to explain, then or now. Light is an apt metaphor. Love was the essence. Tremendous reassurance. And revelation — of the essential goodness of being and all things. An untying of every twisted little knot of pain or sorrow or angst in my soul. A certain knowledge that the perceived necessity of our living as twisted, knotted creatures was indeed an illusion, a lie from the Enemy that comes from living in a world in which the Divine is partly (and sometimes almost completely) veiled. The knowledge that hate is superfluous and love is a divine gift to be shared without limit or end.

What I needed to know of Jesus to live a Godly life came to me that night, as palpable presence and revelation. I haven’t always fully lived up to that revelation, but there’s no question of me denying my Savior, not ever. I can’t disbelieve what I encountered. It’s helped to make me who I am.

Leonard Cohen’s haunting anthem Hallelujah always sounds like notes of truth for me. He writes,

There’s a blaze of light
in every word,
it doesn’t matter which you heard,
the holy or the broken Hallelujah

Mostly, we hear broken Hallelujahs. Our sermons, our songs, my words on this page — all these are broken Hallelujahs because we simply can’t piece together words that serve as adequate vessels to hold and pour out the divine. And whatever we do piece together is always, well, full of us.

In our time, Hallelujah has been corrupted for political campaign slogans by those who know how to harness religion for their own ends. Hallelujah has been enslaved to intolerance and injustice in the name of a righteousness that forgets the very nature of Jesus. Hallelujah has been co-opted to serve the rich and fleece the poor, in an inversion of the beatitudes.

And perhaps nowhere is this hijacking as evident at the moment as in our own backyards.

There’s violence that confronts us around every corner, from the misguided and broken young girl who picked up a gun and entered a church preschool in an evil attempt to quiet her personal demons to the physical assaults on a young collegiate swimmer who speaks undeniable truths regarding fairness and common human decency.

The Enemy creates a wall of noise and visual static in an attempt to silence our faith and there are times when it seems as though he’s winning the battle.

But we of faith know how this ends.

That night at the retreat, Jesus spoke to me very clearly and decisively: pay close attention. Listen. Learn. Witness, for them; for Me.

All around us are stories of unparalleled grace and compassion under the most extreme circumstances; stories of people in schools and theaters and offices who put their personal safety aside to reach out to the slightly injured and severely wounded, oblivious to the danger around them.

Oblivious to the evil around them.

What these people collectively did (and what they continue to do) is nothing short of astonishing. There are stories upon stories of ordinary men and women who performed extraordinary acts of courage and compassion for their fellow man. Day after day, more definitive lines are being drawn, and neither the deeds of Satan nor the shadow of death are plausible matches for these profoundly selfless acts of grace.

 My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.

— 1 John 3:18

And love one another in deed and in truth they did. They do.

It’s time, and perhaps this is perpetually so, for us to examine our broken Hallelujahs, to sort out our blazes of light from our flawed humanity. Let’s all make today a new chapter in our lives, and renew our promise to Jesus to do just that.