All Saints meditation revisited – by Ed Murray (music director)
I received a number of comments on this excerpt which was included as a preparation piece in the English bulletin for All Saints Day. Enormously well-known and influential Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen shows himself in a philosophical vein:
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 she 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 her glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. Her course is the 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 her so loves the world that she gives herself 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. Her house is dangerous and finite, but she is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men and women, such balancing monsters of love.
—from Beautiful Losers (1966) (edited for gender inclusivity)
These preparations come from a wide variety of sources. This one was found on a favorite, which I highly recommend to anyone with the time or inclination to spend some reflective time with the lectionary scriptures for the coming Sunday, called At the Edge of the Enclosure . Each week’s post includes “meditation prompts” from a wide variety of sources (including a good dose of mystical writers) and stunning images related to the week’s readings.
Stay tuned for more adventures in liturgy…
