THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 21

The Hallelujah I Could Manage

I was watching Shrek⁵ when Leonard Cohen came looking for me, although I did not know it was Leonard Cohen at the time. An animated ogre did not seem the most obvious messenger for a song carrying a word normally reserved for churches, choirs and people with their arms raised toward something I had never been able to see. Yet there it was, Hallelujah¹, sitting among the fairy-tale characters, talking animals and the general disruption caused when somebody simply wants to be left alone in his swamp. I heard the song, recognised something within it and went searching to discover where it had come from.

The embarrassing part was that I already owned the album. Hallelujah had been sitting on Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions, apparently waiting for a green ogre to introduce us properly, which says something about either the mysteries of music or the organisation of my record collection. I had listened to Cohen for years, but I had not connected this particular song with him until the film placed it in a setting where I could hear it differently. Sometimes the words that form us do not enter at their point of origin. They wait until another voice, another arrangement or even an animated film removes the packaging we had failed to open.

Cohen’s music had long been given the dismissive description of music to slash your wrists by, which always struck me as the judgement of somebody who had heard the voice but not necessarily listened to what he was doing with it. There was darkness in the records, certainly, but darkness is not the same thing as depression, and recognising sadness is not the same as surrendering to it. So Long, Marianne² and Suzanne³ could almost lift me through their performance, provided I did not wander too deeply into every word and insist on conducting a forensic investigation into the emotional wreckage underneath. Cohen’s voice did not push me into a hole; it gave the hole furniture, lighting and perhaps a decent bookshelf.

That may sound flippant, but Cohen seemed to understand that despair and humour were not opposites. His voice could make almost any sentence sound as though it had been discovered on a stone tablet at the bottom of a monastery, yet there was often a glint beneath the solemnity. He did not sing as someone offering escape from the contradictions of being human. He appeared to settle among them, make himself reasonably comfortable and then report back on the accommodation.

That was why I never heard Hallelujah as a conventionally religious song, despite the title and all the biblical furniture scattered through it. The song borrows kings, faith, desire, betrayal, power and brokenness, but it does not arrange them into a sermon with a reliable conclusion. It takes a word of praise and places it in the mouths of people who have failed, loved badly, misunderstood one another and discovered that wanting something does not make it holy. The hallelujah that emerges is not the sound of somebody marching triumphantly into heaven; it is the noise a person makes while still standing in the rubble.

Religion has never been my natural language. I am not religious in the slightest, although I understand why faith can matter and why people reach for something larger than themselves when the available facts offer little comfort. There is a difference between understanding a need and accepting every structure built to satisfy it. I can recognise hunger without admiring every restaurant, and I can recognise faith without believing that the institutions serving it have always kept their kitchens clean.

My difficulty begins when faith becomes certainty and certainty acquires a committee. A private belief may provide strength, hope, discipline or a way of surviving what otherwise feels unbearable, and I have no desire to take that away from anybody. Religion, however, has a habit of collecting those beliefs, arranging them into approved sequences and then appointing people to explain what everybody else is required to think. Before long, the mystery that supposedly lies beyond human understanding has acquired office bearers, property, policies, uniforms and a surprisingly detailed list of people with whom the deity is apparently disappointed.

I explored this contradiction in How Did We Get Here, where the Logical Bystander watched a child speaking to an invisible companion and considered the adult response. We allow the conversation for a time, smile at the imagination and eventually expect the child to understand that the unseen friend was a creation of the mind. We may then take the same child to Sunday school or church and introduce another unseen presence, this one carrying authority, judgement and the possibility of eternal consequences. The first companion is something to be outgrown; the second is something the child may be warned never to question.

There is a logical inequality in that arrangement that I have never been able to dismiss. It does not prove there is no deity, because absence of proof is not proof of absence, and the analytical Jeff must be careful not to use logic as a crowbar where logic itself has limits. It does, however, raise a fair question about the standards we apply. We tell children that imagination must eventually surrender to reality, then place one inherited imagination beyond examination because enough adults have agreed upon it for long enough.

Ideas gather authority through repetition. What begins as an attempt to explain the unknown can become an account of the divine, and the divine can become unquestionable once the explanation has been refined, codified and protected. The original moment may have contained wonder, fear, coincidence, misunderstanding or something genuinely beyond the available knowledge of those who witnessed it. Generations later, the uncertainty has often disappeared, even though the evidence has not increased.

The absence of knowledge should produce humility, but it regularly produces doctrine instead. Human beings seem uncomfortable leaving an empty space on the page, so we write an answer into it and then become offended when somebody asks to see the workings. Once the answer has been repeated by parents, teachers, ministers and communities, questioning it can feel less like intellectual curiosity and more like betrayal. The belief becomes fused with belonging, and an examination of the claim is heard as an attack upon the person.

I spent significant time living in the home of Salvation Army officers, so religion was not something I observed only from the safe distance of an accountant examining somebody else’s unusual deductions. I saw enough to understand that belief could produce service, discipline, generosity and a genuine commitment to people who had been overlooked elsewhere. I also saw that good people could live within a religious structure without becoming foolish, cruel or incapable of thought. That experience made it impossible for me to dismiss believers as simple-minded, even while the larger structure continued to trouble the logical part of me.

The Salvation Army also complicated any convenient argument that religion was merely words spoken inside impressive buildings. Its best expression was practical, turning belief into food, shelter, assistance and presence, which is considerably harder to ridicule than a theological debate conducted from a comfortable chair. A person may tell me that God directed the service, while I may believe the human being made the decision, but the person receiving help is unlikely to care which interpretation wins. Faith that produces compassion deserves more consideration than certainty that merely produces another lecture.

That does not remove the problem of what happens when words are twisted toward an intended result. Sacred texts have passed through languages, cultures, rulers, scholars, committees and institutions, each carrying assumptions about what the words should be made to say. Particular passages are elevated while others are softened, ignored or explained away, depending upon the social position being defended. An interpretation is repeated until it becomes tradition, and tradition is then offered as evidence that the interpretation must have been right.

Cohen does something equally audacious in Hallelujah, although he makes no pretence that he is issuing an authorised edition. He draws upon the biblical stories of David and Bathsheba and then blends them with elements more closely associated with Samson and Delilah. The historical or scriptural boundaries become less important than the emotional truth he wants the combined image to carry. He twists the old words openly in order to reveal desire, defeat, power and humiliation, rather than twisting them quietly and claiming the resulting version has remained untouched.

Perhaps that is why the religious imagery does not repel me. Cohen is not standing at the front of a church insisting that his arrangement is the only one available. He uses the stories as a poet uses any inherited language, taking what has accumulated around them and asking what else they might expose. The result is not an instruction to believe; it is an invitation to recognise the sacred and the damaged occupying the same person.

That mixture feels closer to life than the polished version of praise. I have never trusted the kind of testimony in which every hardship arrives with a purpose, every prayer receives the correct answer and every painful detour is later revealed as part of a flawless plan. Some things happen because people make poor decisions, bodies fail, systems break or chance wanders through the door without knocking. To call every injury a lesson arranged by a benevolent power seems less like faith than an unwillingness to admit that life can be brutally untidy.

There are moments when the language of divine purpose can become almost offensive. It can ask somebody in pain to admire the architecture of the building that has collapsed on top of them. It can explain suffering from a distance while leaving the sufferer to carry the actual weight. I understand that the idea of purpose may help some people endure, but I cannot accept that comfort as evidence that the explanation is true.

My own position contains contradictions, and Laura Nyro’s And When I Die⁴ captures one of them with considerably more humour than most theological texts. The song dismisses the certainty of heaven while retaining a hope that hell does not exist, which makes me laugh because it is exactly the sort of bet the human mind tries to place when it claims not to be gambling. I do not believe there is a heaven waiting for me, but I remain quite happy for there to be no hell. It is a certainty expressed with one hand while the other quietly purchases insurance.

That contradiction may be closer to faith than many declarations made from pulpits. It acknowledges that we do not know, despite the elaborate confidence with which both believers and non-believers sometimes speak. The religious person may say there is something beyond death, while the atheist may insist there is nothing, but neither has returned with audited accounts. The accountant in me would normally request supporting documentation, although the difficulty of obtaining a signature from the deceased may affect the reliability of the engagement.

I understand faith because ordinary life requires versions of it. I have faith that the people I love will still be there tomorrow, although experience says every human relationship is vulnerable to change, accident and mortality. I have faith that writing another page has value, even when I cannot know whether the words will reach anybody or remain unheard. I have faith that getting out of bed is worth the effort on mornings when the Black Dog has presented a detailed opposing submission.

None of those beliefs requires a deity. They require a willingness to continue in the absence of certainty, which may be the most useful definition of faith I can manage. Religion often appears to reverse that process by offering certainty first and then demanding continuation as proof of belief. I am more comfortable moving without the guarantee and admitting that I do not know where the road ends.

That is where Shrek becomes more than an unlikely delivery mechanism for Cohen’s song. Shrek knows what he wants, or at least believes he does. He wants his swamp, his solitude and freedom from the stream of fairy-tale characters who have been pushed into his life by the decisions of somebody else. He is not searching for enlightenment; he is trying to reclaim his front yard.

There is something enviable in that certainty. Shrek can identify home, describe the intrusion and nominate the outcome required to put matters right. Many of us spend far more time searching for the place, role or moment that will finally feel like ours. We travel through careers, relationships, ambitions, communities and versions of ourselves hoping to hear some internal choir announce that we have arrived.

I have spent much of my life looking for that announcement. Achievement did not reliably produce it, because each completed task quickly became the platform from which the next requirement could be seen. Professional recognition did not produce it, because applause can confirm that a performance worked without proving that the performer belongs. Retirement has not automatically produced it either, because leaving one structure does not reveal what the next one is supposed to contain.

Perhaps I have been waiting for a hallelujah moment that does not exist. I imagined, without consciously admitting it, that there would be a point at which the contradictions resolved, the effort became justified and the different versions of Jeff finally agreed upon what they had been doing. The books would mean something, the advice would have landed, the family would understand the provision behind the absences and the accumulated life would form a recognisable pattern. Somewhere a light would come on, not necessarily from heaven, but at least from a switch whose location had previously escaped me.

The danger in searching for that moment is that everything before it begins to look provisional. Life becomes a waiting room, and the present is tolerated because the real appointment is expected to begin later. There is always another piece to repair, another answer to find or another level of understanding that might finally make the whole thing settle. The search for meaning can become another method of refusing to live inside the meaning already available.

Shrek’s swamp offers a simpler answer, although not necessarily a complete one. Home is not made important because somebody else considers it beautiful, respectable or spiritually significant. It matters because it is the place where he recognises himself, even if everybody passing by sees only mud, isolation and a property unlikely to perform strongly in the prestige market. He does not need a committee to declare the swamp sacred before he is entitled to defend it.

Yet even Shrek’s certainty is challenged by connection. Wanting to be left alone may be an honest desire, but it may also be armour built after enough encounters have taught a person that rejection hurts less when delivered in advance. The swamp can be home and hiding place at the same time. That is where the human Jeff begins asking questions that the analytical Jeff would prefer to settle through zoning regulations.

I have built swamps of my own, places where I could be useful, competent and protected by the role I performed. The office could become one, as could the professional identity that allowed me to translate difficult problems while avoiding some of my own. Writing can be a swamp as well, although it is a more dangerous one because the words sometimes remove the vegetation I had carefully planted around myself. A person can hide behind honesty almost as effectively as behind silence if the honesty is always directed at somebody else.

The Hallelujah heard in Shrek does not celebrate victory. It accompanies separation, loneliness and the recognition that wanting something does not guarantee the courage to accept it when it appears. That setting allowed me to hear the song without the weight of religious instruction. The word became less an announcement of divine glory than a sound released when language had reached its limit.

That is the hallelujah I can understand. It is not praise offered because the battle has been won, the depression cured or the damaged parts restored to factory condition. It is an acknowledgment that something remains, even when the remaining thing is uncertain, imperfect and considerably less impressive than the promised miracle. It is the word that may be spoken after an honest accounting rather than before the figures have been examined.

Coming after the calm darkness of Suicide Is Painless, this song occupies another narrow edge. One voice can make surrender sound reasonable, while the other allows continuation without requiring enthusiasm. Hallelujah does not need to deny the brokenness in order to move beyond it. It permits the possibility that a person can know the damage, refuse the polished explanation and still offer some small sign of participation in life.

On some mornings, rising may be the hallelujah I can manage. On others, it may be writing a page, answering a message, remaining in a conversation or refusing to let the Black Dog translate exhaustion into a final judgement upon my worth. None of those acts would trouble a cathedral choir, but they have the advantage of being real. They do not pretend everything has been repaired; they merely prevent the unrepaired parts from delivering the only verdict.

There is still a risk that I turn scepticism into a religion of its own. The analytical Jeff enjoys evidence, structure and the satisfying click of an argument closing around its conclusion. He can become as intolerant of uncertainty as the preacher he questions, particularly when logic appears to provide a cleaner answer than faith. The human Jeff has to remind him that people do not survive through logic alone and that a belief may carry someone across a distance that evidence cannot bridge.

That does not require me to accept the institution, only to respect the need from which it may have grown. Faith can be an act of courage when it admits uncertainty, while religion can become an act of control when it disguises interpretation as command. Scepticism can protect thought, but it can also become a shield against wonder, dependence and the possibility that another person has found meaning in a place I cannot enter. None of us is improved by replacing one rigid certainty with another.

Perhaps the real twisting of words occurs whenever we demand that they finish the argument for us. Believers have made Hallelujah into a hymn, lovers have made it into a declaration, television programs have used it as instant emotional lighting and performers have stretched it across almost every available human occasion. Cohen’s song survives because it refuses to remain obedient to any single use. It carries the sacred, the sexual, the defeated and the hopeful without requiring them to agree.

I am not searching for its official meaning. That would return me to the schoolroom, waiting for somebody to mark my interpretation against an answer the song has spent decades refusing to supply. I am interested in why it reached me through an ogre who wanted his swamp and why it remained after I discovered the voice behind it had been sitting in my collection all along. The song recognised the part of me that wanted praise without pretence, belief without submission and continuation without the compulsory smile of redemption.

I may never find the grand hallelujah moment I once imagined was waiting somewhere beyond the next achievement, answer or repair. That possibility no longer feels entirely like failure, because perhaps the search itself was built upon the wrong idea of arrival. A life may not resolve into one triumphant chord; it may continue through smaller acknowledgments, some confident, some doubtful and some barely audible above the noise. The holy version is not mine to claim, but the uncertain one remains available.

Some mornings, the hallelujah I can manage is not a word at all. It is feet on the floor, the computer switched on, one sentence following another and a refusal to let silence have the final say. I do not offer it upward because I do not know what is above, and I will not manufacture certainty merely because uncertainty makes the room uncomfortable. I offer it outward to Robyn, the children, the reader and whoever may hear an echo, and inward to the part of me still searching without knowing exactly what it hopes to find. It may never be the moment I thought I was seeking, but it is honest, and for now honesty is praise enough.

Notes

1. Hallelujah was written and recorded by Leonard Cohen and released in 1984 on the album Various Positions. John Cale recorded an influential interpretation for the 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan; Cale’s performance is heard in Shrek, while Rufus Wainwright’s recording appears on the film’s soundtrack album. ong, Marianne* was written and recorded by Leonard Cohen and released in 1967 on his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. nne* was written by Leonard Cohen. Judy Collins recorded the song before Cohen released his own version on the 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen; Cohen’s recording is the version referred to in this chapter. When I Die* was written by Laura Nyro and first recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. The version most familiar here was recorded by Blood, Sweat & Tears for their self-titled 1968 album and released as a single in 1969. k* is a 2001 DreamWorks animated film directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Its use of John Cale’s interpretation of Hallelujah helped bring the song to a much wider popular audience. chapter deliberately leaves the hallelujah unresolved: not religious conversion, triumph or recovery, but an honest act of continuing.