Anthem
Adapted and performed by Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney
written by Leonard Cohen
Film by Robert Wyald featuring the photos of many artists, Plants,
Trees, Sunlight, Love, Birdsong, and a 3-string Banjo
Forget your Perfect Offering
Ring the Bells that still can Ring
There are Cracks in Everything
That’s how the Light gets in-Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney
via Leonard Cohen
Love the song, love the video, wonderfulness…
As a fan of Leonard Cohen too, as well as a second-generation deasnndcet of Glastonbury, where my father was born, I loved the connection made here. For me there’s a wonderful synergy between the words of this anthem, and a symbol that is associated with Chalice Well in Glastonbury the . In a mandorla’ the focus is that almond shape created where two circles intersect and it’s a space in which we are invited simply to sit and be still’ in the middle of seeming paradox. If we can do so quietly, and simply accept what is rather than try to resolve the difference or take sides’, a new understanding or paradigm will emerge.From my perspective, Cohen’s anthem offers a similar invitation. Often we can be tempted to reject or bemoan the cracks’ we encounter in life the faults, the broken pieces, or the pain. But if we can simply be still’, accept them and embrace them, they offer us the gift of light’, of new learning, new understanding and growth.Perhaps another way of expressing this can also be found in the words of another poet Kahlil Gibran: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. Thank you for sharing this and for inspiring me to reflection.