Hallelujah, released in 1984, is perhaps the best-known song of the singer songwriter Leonard Cohen. But, unfortunately, we hardly think of him when we hear it. What most likely comes to mind is the animated movie Shrek as it helped popularise the song again in our time. Occasionally we hear this song’s refrain during Mass at the Gospel acclamation. This song is even sung in church during weddings, even though it is not a liturgical hymn. Worse than that, it is very difficult to reconcile the lyrics of this song in the context of the celebration of a Sacrament of Marriage. The first verse of this song mentions the adultery committed by David with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11: 1-27) weaved with details of the story of Samson and Delilah (Judges 16: 4-22).

The ability of this Canadian artist is revealed in the way he managed in his lyrics to intertwine the erotic with the sacred, the profane with that which is most holy, without any blasphemous intent or ridicule of the Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Although he was of Jewish faith, he admired and appreciated Christ, to the extent that you would think he acknowledged him as the awaited Messiah!

Apart from music, lyrics and poems, Cohen wrote also novels in a similar vein. Although fascinating within a poetic framework, when it comes to prose it is too graphic and controversial. In one of his novels, Beautiful Loser, he gives a limited but concrete description of what is a saint. It is limited because there is no reference to God—perhaps because he did not feel the need to specify it, since it was self-evident for him. It is truly concrete because it is very human to describe a saint—a person who has succeeded in attaining holiness by being genuinely human—in the context of our messy and disordered reality. As we begin the month of November with the Solemnity of All Saints, it would not be a bad idea to take a look at the description below of what a Saint is without further explanations …

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers