Dark Times & Broken Hallelujahs
A friend of mine recently remarked, “Well, you know, these are dark times.” She was making a joke about the short days here in the Pacific Northwest, which have many of us calculating how to get outside to hike, bike, or run in the short window of daylight we have, while also acknowledging the sense of impending doom she’s been managing following the recent election.
Of course, this time of year is also filled with celebrations— both secular and religious— many of which invoke images of light, hope, and possibility. In the Christian liturgical calendar, we are in the season of Advent, the period of expectant waiting before the birth of Jesus. This year, while the Christians are celebrating Christmas, the Jewish tradition of Hanukkah begins. Kwanzaa, the week-long African celebration of Unity also begins December 26. A few days before that, the Pagan traditions celebrate the winter solstice and Hindu tradition celebrates a five-day festival to Ganesh. So yeah, it would seem that darkness and light are wrapped up together, informing one another in the cycles of nature, in our communal celebrations, and in the process of personal growth and development.
Last week in our writing group, Mary Angelon offered a prompt regarding making peace with darkness and what that might look like, feel like, and offer us. Sometimes I wonder what making peace actually means. Is peace the absence of conflict? Or is peace a reference point that lives beyond conflict’s borders; that functions outside of conflict’s defining characteristics and consuming concerns? I remember my friend once told our guru that all she wanted was a little inner peace and he laughed.
So yeah, peace.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about “Making Peace with Your Body” so perhaps I am supposed to be some kind of expert about peace. At the time I penned that missive, I imagined peace as a conflict-free state and sincerely thought that I would grow into a state of peace that was evidenced by a high-minded equanimity sourced in an unshakable faith in God and characterized by a lack of worry, self-concern, and various neurotic expressions. Twenty years later, peace (if that is what I indeed have and, to be clear, I am not sure that it is) feels more like an acknowledgment and acceptance that my relationship with my body might have a Facebook status that reads “It’s complicated” rather than “It’s peaceful.” In truth, I prefer the word complex instead of complicated when referring to my inner life and the machinations of my mind related to internalized cultural imperatives, my lived experience, and the nuances of my emotional life.
I know now that peace is not the absence of these complexities. Instead, I think peace is wrapped in a sense of acceptance, of knowing that my value is sourced in something deeper than getting over my issues, and that self-love isn’t contingent on achievement, performance or competence, no matter how much I love those things. Peace also means not trying to be someone who is organized differently than I am. At some point, I got tired of continually shoving my uptight, Type-A personality into a box of “I should be more this or less that.” And even though I am most definitely post-menopausal, the promised “give no fucks” stage of my older age remains elusive to me. It would seem that I still have some left to give. The fire remains strong in this one, I just know how to wield it less violently.
I’m more interested these days in what Leonard Cohen wrote about as “the broken Hallelujah” and the many ways that my perceived shortcomings, struggles, and desperate attempts to prove myself worthy of Love were a thread that led me back to myself. The thread took me from self-loathing, addiction and its myriad of demoralizing accompanying behaviors, to a feeling of ever-deepening tenderness and compassion for myself and others. I traversed the terrain from fitness centers to yoga studios and back again to the gym with the hard won capacity to celebrate my body’s abilities, limitations, and to expand my options for movement rather than narrow them in the name of what I thought it was to be holy. I ran away from a narrow understanding of the Christianity of my childhood to ashrams near and far and back to the Christian tradition to find, in each and every exploration, meaningful names of God, glimpses of transcendence, and the abiding grace of good company. This is no longer a journey of trading one thing for another, of making one thing bad and wrong in order to explore something new or complimentary, but a path of integration that moves in ever-widening circles of inclusion and ever-deepening inquiries that have revealed more similarities between traditions than differences.
And, of course, I remain prone to pettiness, worry, and it would be really awesome if God could give me some patience quickly. I certainly do not always have compassion as my immediate response in moments of conflict and I fall prey to catastrophic thinking. Suffice it to say, that for all of the shards of Light I have collected along my way, I remain very much a work in progress. These tendencies (and more) remain despite my best efforts to eradicate them entirely, to hide them from myself and others, or to place the blame for their consequences on someone or some thing other than me. So, there is that.
In the last few lines of Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen sings, “That even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” This line caught my attention, revealing to me an important paradox about the game of growth. For years, I was in thrall to the idea that if I could eliminate everything I perceived as negative, the absence of flaws would enable me to praise with a pure heart and to receive and feel the warmth of Love in its many forms. I was convinced that the success of my efforts lived on the other side of these perceived flaws. Instead, it seems to me growth lives in the capacity to praise, to have a Lord of Song before which to stand, and to know that—broken or otherwise— Hallelujah might just be the point.
All right, that what I have for today.
Keep the faith.
More soon.
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