What a Broken Hallelujah Sounds Like Now
Let the Choir Sing
Last weekend, during a Creativity Experience focused on the renowned poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, my writing mentor began the session by asking us to create two columns on our paper. “He asked us to jot down our ‘Holy Hallelujahs’ (the parts of our lives we think we can control) in one column, and our ‘Broken Hallelujahs’ (the parts we feel are outside our control) in the other. He used the chords and verses of this familiar refrain to lead us on a journey of excavating the meaning and purpose Cohen gave to grief, desire, radical acceptance, and his commitment to stay awake inside his discomfort.
I have always loved the way I could strike the familiar chords of any version of ‘Hallelujah’ on a piano, anywhere I traveled in the world, and have an instant choir of strangers and friends alike harmonizing along. But I never knew the depth from which it was born.
Leonard Cohen spent years writing "Hallelujah"—some say 80 verses, while others claim closer to 150.
They say he was broke, alone, and spiritually untethered. He revised constantly, not trying to perfect a song, but trying to wrestle meaning from rupture.
In his words:
“I remember being in the Royalton Hotel in New York down on my knees in my underwear, banging my head on the floor, saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’”
What he created wasn’t a victory hymn. It was a hymn to surviving without resolution.
“Love is not a victory march / it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”
Because until then, “hallelujah” was coded as:
Gratitude
Submission
Praise after resolution
But Cohen re-lit it as:
Radical acceptance
Sacred refusal to collapse under heartbreak
A form of devotion that keeps singing to the “Lord of Song” even when the story breaks down
It’s no accident that the song became beloved by people of all beliefs, including those burned by religion, relationships, and ruptures of all kinds.
I have thought of many metaphors for Still Coviding over the years.
But I realized in this quiet reflective space that a broken hallelujah might be the most fitting yet.
It is sung in masks, in grief, in exile, in fierce protection of our children. And the more reasons we have for refusing to “return to normal”, to acquiesce, the louder our hallelujahs become.
I recently reflected on the impact of friction on what I’ve called “Pandemic Math”. And the truth is, while we Still Coviders are the ones who recognize there is still a storm, we are not all in the same boat, just like we weren’t at the beginning when almost everyone acknowledged the pandemic. The truth is that the more “reasons for resistance” or “triggers to Empire” we carry, the more friction we encounter between values and systems, between body and environment, between members of our own family, which all leads to more broken hallelujahs. Indeed, the more layers of life we hold, the more friction we face—not because we’re failing, but because Empire wasn’t designed to accommodate non-binary, multidimensional care.
I’ve often said “we all have our flavor of the Still Coviding journey”, but as time progresses, I feel an increasing desire to name our “flavor” a little more definitively- both to express pride and acceptance in the reality of my own lived experience, but also to communicate up front with others in a more effective manner that reduces mental load and decision making fatigue.
How much easier would it have been if the new moms we just met at the playground could have had insight into our complex constellation of resistance? They would have known that even if our need for clean air were accommodated at their kids’ birthday party, the landscape of a birthday party would not be in the cards at this juncture for our PDAer. And it’s not just complicated in new relationships or communication with others —it’s difficult in the granular way that everyone’s needs bump up against each other day to day.
Sometimes kids can’t tolerate the mask.
Sometimes the sibling who needs social play triggers the other child’s anxiety/panic response.
Sometimes the co-parent holds radically different beliefs, and in so many moments we’re caught trying to harmonize a hymn across warring tempos and chords that don’t seem to “please the Lord” or anyone else.
For example, today, after extensive plotting, planning, and calling to ensure a low-risk recreational experience for our family, we tried to leave the house with three kids. But even as siblings who share so much, including being a part of a multiracial family with coparenting/custody conflict, they are not in the same boat. Each one carries a different “constellation of letters” behind them: in our case, SPD, PDA, ADHD, Long COVID, trauma, etc.
One needed shade. One needed social closeness. One couldn’t handle noise.
As it turned out, the air was safe enough for all, but too open and the sensory load too jagged for one.
The praxis demands were too much for another.
And then a grieving sibling said some hurtful things to the other two.
I stood still, holding snacks that were melting in my hand, and thought: This is what Dolby-level friction sounds like.
And it continued to go sideways, as things often do in our experience navigating the collision of everyone’s needs within a tightly constrained footprint of resources. But today, I had this song on my mind, and so I just crawled back into bed with our little one, cuddled up in the glow of his favorite show, and sang a hallelujah, as broken down as it could be. And I left the cracks alone —I didn’t try to repair them or make them look less jagged. I was just here, trusting that the light would still get in somehow, some way.
So let me sing some truths back to you about your masking, your mitigating, your “conscious coviding”:
It isn’t a frozen trauma response as you might have been told.
It’s a ritual act of resistance.
It is “Jesus-in-the-temple-flipping-the-tables-of-the money-changers-over” level of devotion to doing what’s right and the right to stay soft in a hardened world.
It names ruin without abandoning reverence for life.
It’s a song of survival, not performance.
It doesn’t gaslight or bypass with “Hallelujah, I’m fine.”
It says: “Every rupture is a potential for hallelujah.”
It’s what devotion looks like.
It’s what attention becomes in a collapsing world.
It’s what love as a verb demands.
It is intentionally singing dissonant notes.
It is not just saying “no” to risk —it is saying yes to a form of life that Empire has no language for.
I used to think we were building lives of care by staying masked.
But it turns out, we’ve also been building a new spiritual nervous system—
One that won’t tolerate the cruelty of the sanctioned world any longer.
One that experiences the cracks from isolation, grief, and friction, and trusts that those very places are where the light will one day flood in.
One that knows the value of Broken Hallelujahs.
Let the Choir Sing.
