How the Light Gets In: A Sermon in Story and Song by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz with Bob Kline and Bob Griffith

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How the Light Gets In: A Sermon in Story and Song

by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganzwith Bob Kline and Bob Griffith, Aug. 30, 2009

Shortly before he resigned his Unitarian pulpit in frustration, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a famous sermon to divinity students at Harvard, most of whom were also headed for Unitarian pulpits, where Emerson apparently feared they would be putting their parishioners to death by boredom. He warned them against formalism in their preaching, encouraged them to convert life into truth, and told them these immortal words – that the role of the preacher is to “deal out to the people his life – life passed through the fire of thought.”

This is what a sermon is supposed to do – give the people “life, passed through the fire of thought.” Of course it must also deliver comfort to the grieving, hope to the hopeless, and prophetic words to purveyors of injustice. And, I believe a sermon should fire the imagination to reach beyond, reach for something not quite within the grasp of sense or reason. It’s good if a sermon can reach back in time also, not only to Unitarian history but also with a reference to a sacred text, though we UUs are fairly cavalier about that one. And it’s really good if it can have a laugh line or two.

A good preacher is on a quest – a quest for the perfect sermon. Like any quest, the goal is ultimately unreachable – that’s what keeps a preacher trying every Sunday.

But what if she discovers that the perfect sermon is not a sermon atall? What if it’s an anthem?

(piano and humming)… an anthem about loss, despair, and hope, about striving for perfection, and surrendering to the moment to celebrate what is?

I rediscovered Leonard Cohen about the time I entered seminary. I had listened to him, some, in my youth, but he faded from the public eye and from my memory for couple of decades. I didn’t know it then, but some of those years he was holed up in a Buddhist monastery, eventually getting himself ordained as a Zen priest and taking the name Jikan, meaning “silence.”

Of course if you follow these things you know that for the past several months he has not been silent at all, but is making a huge world tour. There was so much disappointment when his concert at the National Stadium near Tel Aviv sold out, that the Government of Israel has formally requested him to schedule a second one, at the Nazareth Amphitheater, which was built last year for the visit of the Pope. No word yet on whether Cohen will accept, but he is fond of Israel; he is an observant Jew as well as a Zen priest.

Leonard Cohen has created a prodigious output of songs and poems over 50-plus years of writing, and I’ve barely scratched the surface in my own listening. But I’m drawn to the mixture of dark and light, smoky blue-black depression mixed with lines that flare with playfulness, even joy. He says his songs are “muffled prayers,” and that is exactly how they sound to me – often speaking in a tongue that is unscannable by my linear mind but somehow hits me straight in the heart.

And – he’s theological! Jennifer Warnes, who recorded an album of Leonard Cohen covers, said the poet has investigated all the great religions and read all the sacred books, “trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself.” She added, “If he has one great love, it is his search for God.”

One theme that you hear again and again in those ancient, sacred books -- for as long as we have had history and poetry, even – is that people have tried to buy God’s favor with sacrifice. Job, in one of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, did extra on behalf of his children, even, just in case one of them might happen to get drunk one day and say a bad word. Well, look where it got him – all his children killed in a storm, and Job himself left penniless and covered with sores.

        Later on in that Bible, the prophet Amos says God doesn’t care about sacrifice, or any of that stuff – in fact, God hates being worshipped by people who are not taking care of the widows and orphans, people who are letting the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and not doing a thing about it. “I hate, I despise your festivals,” says Amos, claiming to be speaking for God. God doesn’t want your offerings, he said. This is what God wants: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

        It almost makes a person afraid to go to church, if their God would get ticked off at puny human attempts at worship, given that not a one of us is doing enough, in some ultimate sense of the word, to even out the economic inequities in our world.

Bob: Ring the bells that still can ring

        Forget your perfect offering

       What’s this you say? Don’t try for a perfect offering? It’s okay if we do what we can?

Bob: There is a crack, a crack in everything

        That's how the light gets in.

        That’s poetry, isn’t it – poetry -- a form of speech where disjunctiveness, where undecideability creates a place for imagination, a place to engage confusion also -- “a crack where life wells up, where death infiltrates,” in the words of poet Edmund Jabes. This makes poetry the “medium of ordinary life” in places like the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, where I once walked with homeless people as a street minister.

        There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. After a long, dark night, morning will come. Do you know what I love most about living here in Arlington? The way the birds sound outside my window in the morning.

Bob: The birds they sang

        at the break of day

        Start again

        Don’t dwell on what

        has passed away

        or what is yet to be.

        I first got the idea of doing “Anthem” as a sermon a couple of years ago, after I used some of the lines in a prayer, and Judy King told me afterward how much she loved the song. She pointed me toward a cover of it by Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla that is on You-Tube and has become one of my favorite renderings. Since then I have asked a few people whether they know it, and if so, what does it mean to them.

        You heard Judy King’s answer earlier. One of my friends wrote this in an email:

        “It sums up the various lives I've had to let go of in order to move on, in order to keep on, keep'in on, to get past the kind of despair that's waiting to rear its ugly head. And my resentment at the amount of energy it takes to keep the demons at bay.

        “…The identities that meant so much to me and the people who knew me and understood me then. The causes fought for, the passion. The places I lived and loved where chunks of me remain. The new hearts I've had to grow after leaving many behind -- but that they can't beat for the same reasons as before. Have I betrayed them? The realization I will never have those days, events or people again.

        “The first time I heard Leonard Cohen sing it,” my friend continued, “it felt as though some voice on the order of a parent or possibly a lover was trying to soothe me on some very deep level. And I just didn't, still often don't, believe that the light that comes through the cracks is enough to go on. It's getting harder.”

Bob: Ah the wars they will

        be fought again

        The holy dove

        She will be caught again

        bought and sold

        and bought again

        the dove is never free.

        For a Zen priest, Leonard Cohen’s songs and poetry are filled with the imagery of peace and war. Somebody asked him once about the military salutes with which he ends many of his songs. “"I sing serious songs, and I'm serious onstage because I couldn't do it any other way, “ he said. “I don't consider myself a civilian. I consider myself a soldier, and that's the way soldiers salute."

        One of those military-sounding songs is “Democracy.” Cohen is a Canadian, but he sings hope for his southern neighbor. Here are some of the words spoken behind the military tattoo:

        I'm stubborn as those garbage bags

        that Time cannot decay,

        I'm junk but I'm still holding up

        this little wild bouquet:

        Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

        His songs are also filled with sympathy for marginalized people, an acute awareness of the poet’s own place in the systems that oppress, and his own obligation to act:

Bob: I can't run no more

        with that lawless crowd

        while the killers in high places

        say their prayers out loud.

        But they've summoned, they've summoned up

        a thundercloud

        and they're going to hear from me.

        Amos? Yo, prophet? Is this the answer? I’m talking to you here, across the centuries since you wrote those words: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Can’t we just worship and celebrate as best we can, ring the bells even if they’re cracked, and let our voices thunder out too against the injustices of our time? Would that be enough?

        Maybe not quite enough:

Bob: You can add up the parts

        but you won't have the sum

        You can strike up the march,

        there is no drum.

        Every heart, every heart

        to love will come

        but like a refugee.

One of the meanings I draw from these particular lines is that even love, which is, as Cohen says, “the only engine of survival,” even so, love isn’t perfect. At some point in life, I realized with a start that that’s what I’d been waiting for, a perfect love, and I might well be looking for that till my life was over. So I offered my heart, like a refugee. It isn’t perfect, but it is good.

And maybe there isn’t a perfect sermon either. But it is my prayer, my muffled prayer, that you have found here a word of comfort, a flash of beauty, perhaps a yearning to match your own for something beyond the sense of the way the words line up as they fall on your ear. Life welling up, a flare of hope, even in the midst of the blue-black night.

Bob: Ring the bells that still will ring,

         Forget your perfect offering

         There is a crack, a crack in everything

         That’s how the light gets in

Amen, and amen.

• Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring by Judy King

Perla Batalla & Julie Christensen Sing Leonard Cohen's Anthem

Performed at the Leonard Cohen Event 2004, Knitting Factory, NYC, June 11.

Leonard Cohen Sings Anthem, 2008