So how do we make meaning of live, if live always holds the possibility of pain? How do we make sense of suffering, if life ebbs from light to dark…dark to light…light to dark…? How do we keep the lights burning?

Leonard Cohen surely was a singer of darkness. He died at age 82 shortly after the release of his last album. Before that he wrote a last letter to his muse and former girlfriend Marianne Ihlen, who died in July 2016 – “Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

A song, You want it darker on his last album, imitates the lyrics of the kaddish, a prayer traditionally recited in the memory of the dead. Each chorus ends with the eerie chant “Hineni, hineni; I’m ready, my lord.” Hineni is Hebrew for “here I am”. The kaddish lyrics in this song reads:

 

Magnified, sanctified be thy holy name

Vilified, crucified in the human frame

A million candles burning for a help that never came

You want it darker, we kill the flame

 

But the same Leonard Cohen’s also wrote this stanza in 1992  – there is a crack, a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in…

Perhaps meaning making also has to do with the cracks.

Perhaps therapy and theology should pay more attention to what happens in the cracks, to let light in through the cracks of our vulnerability. Perhaps we should listen to the unsaid of the body and mind the gap between human experience and language.