I’ve been listening to performances of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Listening and singing along, paying attention to the verses that vary from version to version. Today they struck a different tone for me and got me thinking, wondering, feeling into the depths of love, and how we say we love, but realizing that most of the time it is just a story, a fairy tale.

I’m not sure we really know how to love, or if it is even possible for an individuated being who believes they are separate to love. It seems to me that such a love would always be colored in survival, self-protection, fear.

“Well, baby, I’ve been here before; I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor. You know, I used to live alone before I knew ya. And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch and love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

… these words: ‘and love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah’. I fell into them, tears falling down my cheeks, total vulnerability, without need of ideas about love, without the shields we raise to protect ourselves from hurt. When hurt arrives, can I remain open or do I close down? Do I shut the door to love?

How often does that happen? Most of us seem to condition love and make it into something that is not love at all. Maybe you don’t or haven’t, but I cannot say the same. In the past I have made love into a transaction with my willingness to stay tied to acceptable behavior, but maybe that just speaks to staying, not loving. I wasn’t ready and willing to experience love’s fullness, the cold, the brokenness of love, unwilling to love as I am, as life is .. and I am broken, not smothered by original sin as sold by the Bible, but simply human.

We are taught to seek perfection, (didn’t call it that at the time), to ride the constant self-improvement machine, demanding it of ourselves, demanding it of those we allow ourselves to love and we love, or what we call love, until our brokenness gets to be too much, until the pain rubs us raw, until we run smack into our last f*ck.

But that last f*ck is love too. It just doesn’t fit with the neat profile we’ve tucked in our pocket, with the perfection we’ve been taught to seek, with the okayness we’ve been told we’re not.

What a glorious dance life is. It is filled with ideas and beliefs, assumptions and judgements, all designed to make us feel safe, like we know what’s going on. In reality we don’t really know anything. If life has taught me anything that is actually of value, it’s these three words: I don’t know. And funnily, I’m okay with that. It’s the most okay I’ve ever felt.

“You say I took the Name in vain; I don’t even know the name. But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you? There’s a blaze of light in every word; it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!”.

I have been known to say that I do not know God, that I am not certain God exists. In my world it is completely accurate. ‘I don’t even know the name.” I cannot separate the holy from the broken Hallelujah, so where is God, where am I? For there to be a God there would have to be a me, there would have to be a not God, which would make God small, impotent, a minor player in the song. It would make God, not God.

‘There’s a blaze of light in every word.’ Maybe that’s what God is. Maybe the blaze of light in you, in me, in our names, in our world, in the idea of God, in life, is a good place to stop. I don’t know and the more I look the more I realize that I really truly completely don’t know. When I stop, when I slow down and listen, when I listen to music that feeds me, I feel something immense, an energy that drops me to my knees, but I have no true name for it.

“Maybe there’s a God above but all I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. It’s no complaint you hear tonight; It’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light; it’s a cold and it’s a lonely(/broken )Hallelujah.”

That verse drops me. It’s the one that grabbed me and sent me down this rabbit hole. … these words: “All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.” Just wow! It resonated cause I was a damn good quick draw, especially after I’d been hurt decimated annihilated a few times.

Listening, humming, singing, I began wondering about the people I walked away from, the ones that rubbed me raw. I wasn’t looking for closure or a second chance. I had no complaints, no bright revelation, just recognition that love is at work in the midst of the pain, in the momentum to walk away, in the beginnings and endings of love’s infinite storylines, in the judgement and assumptions, in the ideas and concepts.

Life is a holy and a broken hallelujah. This human is broken … and holy. She is beautiful in her brokenness, in her humanness, in the messiness of this game of lost and found.

We cannot return to something we already are. We cannot remember what we never forgot. This sh*tshow, this perfection exactly as it is, is both heaven and hell. It is both holy and broken. It encompasses all experiences, the ups and downs. See that and love simply is, not something to be found or claimed, but what we are.