“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”  Many of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics puzzle me, filled as they are with personal mythology and intuitive leaps.  They celebrate the secular and earthly at the same time they ponder the darkly, richly religious, making them complex.   Of course, it’s not really the words that speak most deeply to us, but the whole of the music, the melding of voice and note and spirit.

But this one image, this truth, I immediately understand heart and soul.    Everything in life can crack, break – bodies, relationships, minds, spirits, wills, and, of course, hearts.   If not for the need to deal with such brokenness, and to celebrate wholeness, human beings would never have created religion or art.  If you have ever felt the pain of loss or profound disappointment, if you have made mistakes in judgment or failed, if you have struggled with addictions or self -defeating behavior, if you have been other than you planned, then welcome to a congregation for all souls!  There are no perfect people here, no perfect lives, only people with wounds and scars and flaws aplenty, people who in our time have been left trying to pick up the pieces.   As a friend once told me, “When we’re young, our lives stretch out ahead of us like open space to be filled.  Why wouldn’t we think we can write the story the way we want to?” We come here, I trust because we can bring our full selves.

And, as Cohen says, that’s how the light gets in.  I understand that too. It does not mean that tragedies are “blessings in disguise;” it does not mean we would choose our brokenness.  It doesn’t mean we can dismiss anyone’s suffering or that making our way through the darkness ever proves easy.  It simply means that human as we are, it is when we stumble and fall, or endure suffering, that we grow a deeper understanding, the kind that allows us to live with more compassion and meaning.

At the age of 41, Don Snyder, a well-liked, successful Professor of English at Colgate, never expected the University to let him go.  After insisting that they got the wrong person, he experienced denial, anger, rationalization, and deep depression.   He had lost everything that promised a good life, he believed, from his income and his house to his work and his colleagues’ regard.  Even young people resented him, fearing he would take their low paying jobs at the mall.  In his own view, he had gone from being somebody to being nobody.

In the months to come, he and his family lived in a cold rented house in Maine, searching for coins, using food stamps at the Safeway, collecting stray golf balls to get enough cash to buy the groceries.  In his depression, he withdrew from most interaction, but every day he looked forward to the time in the evening when his entire family would pile into one big bed in a freezing cold room and listen to stories.  And here’s where the first light, in this case, starlight, came in:  One night he wandered outside in the middle of the night to look at the stars.   “How small we all are in the darkness of the night,” he thought, “and how ferocious our urge to light our way. Sometimes we don’t even know the weight of what we’re carrying in the need to reclaim our own lives.”  He realized that even without success, or teaching, without owning a home, he was a man who loved his partner and children, a person who had something inside to give that no university structure, no mistakes, no loss could ever take away.

That was the beginning of healing for Don Snyder though he may not have realized it then. Healing isn’t something we can bring about at our command; the light comes in its own time.  Yet we can open ourselves to it.  Rachel Naomi Remen, a therapist who works with seriously ill people and with medical professionals, says that “collaboration with this process” requires a “respect for the mystery which is at the heart of all growth.”  Mystery isn’t the easiest thing for us rational types to accept because the very term means it’s beyond understanding on any strictly intellectual level.   It simply is.

Opening to it means somehow accepting what has happened and eventually letting go of the bitterness that can come with terrible loss.   It means moving from asking, “Why me?” or “What if?”   to “What now?’ Remen worked once with a twenty-four-year-old man who had lost his leg up to the hip from cancer.  That was his physical problem; his spiritual problem was rage and a deep sense of injustice.  After two years, though, something changed profoundly.   It turned out he had visited a young woman who was extremely depressed about losing both of her breasts to cancer.  So deep was the crack in her spirit that he couldn’t even get her attention. Desperate just to get her to look at him, he removed his prosthetic leg and began to dance around the room on one leg.    Stunned, she stared at him, then broke out laughing, “If you can dance, I can sing,” she said.

The mystery, the grace, of that connection turned out to mark the beginning, for him, of learning what he had still to give.   Now, he took out a drawing from his file from an early session when Remen had asked him to draw his body.  What he had drawn was a vase with a deep black crack running through it.  In his rage, he had then traced over it again and again with a black crayon.  Now, he looked at it and said, “Oh, this isn’t finished.”   Picking up a yellow crayon, he pointed to the crack: “You see, here – where it is broken – this is where the light comes through.”  And he drew yellow light streaming through his body.

Who can predict when that moment of turning might come?  Who can explain it?  The mystery of this universe and our relatedness means we cannot.   But we can make it more likely that we will respond if we let go of the things that will not save us.  Resentment will not save us.  Denial won’t save us.  The insistence that we can return things to the way they were won’t save us.  Indeed, a variation of the serenity prayer might go like this, “Change what it is within your power to change; let go of that which is not; and try like heck to figure out the difference. “

And then reach for the things that can save us.  It’s acceptance, isn’t it?  It’s standing in the face of this wonderful but sometimes terrifying life and saying, “Here is what I am in my heart and soul, what it was given to me to be.  I will do it wholeheartedly.   I might in the end even do it dancing and singing.  I might believe in the wonder of the journey again.”

As Don Snyder negotiated living on the edges of a cracked life, he began to find a connection with others and to see their worth. He developed a friendship with a groundskeeper, Cal, who taught him the dignity of simple work   One day, in a daily ritual to try to mend his soul, he was walking by the ocean when he came to the construction site of a large and fancy house.  Its size and grandeur angered him.  Why should anyone have such a large and grand home, he wondered.  Later the same day, when the tip of his daughter’s finger was ripped off in the car door, a surgeon was able to restore it to wholeness, but Snyder had to money to pay him, which he desperately wanted to do. Quickly, he ran back to the house and asked for a construction job.  Larry, the supervisor, told him to show up the next day with his carpenter’s belt.  Snyder, who had never done a day of construction, rushed off to Kmart to buy one.  The next morning he stood on a ladder, a step below Larry, who was shouldering a heavy beam.  Only when Larry asked for nails, did Snyder realize he was supposed to have tools in his belt.

It was one of many mistakes, but it also brought the light.   He found out that Larry took home less pay than he might in cleaning up the construction site — the only thing he could do well, but he still paid Snyder the going rate.  His whole life, Snyder had been running from his working-class roots, but now he let his fear go.  In the end, he became a house painter, but so much more, “I’m a man who paints houses for a living.   and doesn’t judge others, who lays down his tax money willingly because he can afford to help people who can’t find their own way… .a man who is someday going to build his own house. . . And if I’m lucky, someday I’m going to spend more time with my friends.”

If you can dance, I can sing, and believe me, my friends, that would be something.  There is a crack in everything and a way in for the light.

 

Sources:

Remen, Rachel Raomi.  Kitchen Table Wisdom.  New York:  The Berkley Publishing Group, 1994.

 

Snyder, Don J. The Cliff Walk:  A Memoir of a Job Lost and A Life Found.  Boston:  Little Brown and Company, 1997.