by William Carter
Hallelujah is word that has become so overused it is almost meaningless.
We say it when something unexpected comes our way, like when dinner plans cancel at the last moment, “Hallelujah!”
Yeah, you really just wanted to eat ice-cream on the couch and fall asleep to Netflix anyway.
Or, we say it sarcastically, like when we come back to our car from the concert and see a parking ticket on our windshield, and sigh, “Hallelujah.”
Today, I was writing about waking up from my coma and the mix CD a mentor in my life made me that included Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
Truly, there was not a more perfect song for that moment in my life. Because, importantly, Hallelujah does not mean “great day” or “thank god,” regardless of how absentmindedly we’ve used it. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word that means, “Praise Yah,” Yah being the Hebrew name for God. Essentially, Hallelujah means, “Praise God.”
And as such, it is a word I need to use more frequently and more genuinely.
Hallelujah means “Praise God” without any stipulations, any qualifiers, not because of this thing or that thing because those tings can go; those things can be lost. People, jobs, homes, children, everything can go. Hallelujah has a deeper, better, more consistent praise to it.
Hallelujah is a praise for today and for all of the moments that brought you, bruised, scarred, missing teeth and hair, to today.
I don’t remember my coma; I don’t really remember being in the hospital. My memory of the first two years after my accident is like looking through a camera lens covered in Vaseline. Weird as it may sound, I remember feelings, and I know my coma, my accident, my injury were hard. I know that my parents and family were stretched almost to the point of breaking, but I also know that, when my eyes fluttered and then opened, when the sounds of Sufjan welcomed me back to life, the only word on their lips was “Hallelujah.”
Buckley’s version of Cohen’s song is hauntingly beautiful, and it brought me to something that has been on my mind as I write this memoir.
We think of our life as a collection of separate moments, disconnected from the others. We experience regret, because we think about changing one moment, one instance, one circumstance, if we could just one single solitary dot on our scatter plot of life, everything would make sense.
See, I’ve been listening to Buckley but reading the Apostle Paul, “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Phillipians 5:3-5). Through reading Paul, writing my story, and listening to Buckley, I am trying to take each of the disparate points of my life and string them into a straight line.
Now, it is easy to see that the sufferings of the past have brought me to the joy of today. That every decision of the past has brought me, blindfolded, to right now. As humans, we are story-tellers by nature, so finding the string of the past to the positives of today is easy. For me, if I did not move to Georgia, I would not have met my wife. Therefore, all of the disappointments that moved me back to Georgia are worth it.
The Apostle Paul can rejoice in his present sufferings, in the soars, blisters, and hunger pains of today, because he knows that his current sufferings will lead him somewhere great. He is beaten and rejoices, jailed and knows he will be free. He rejoices in his sufferings, because he knows the pains he suffers are dots, pointing the arrow of his life upward. He has joy because every day is part of his story. He knows that, no matter how many bruises, no matter how much his stomach claws and growls, that pain will be part of the glory of tomorrow.
This is easy to do for the past. True faith is to do it for today.
Right now, many people are struggling. Frankly, most of us are just tired of wiping down groceries, tired of not seeing friends, and would you look at that, they’ve run out of shows. And for me, my complaining is in a similar key.
But, some of have real cuts, real bruises.
Some of us have lost loved ones. Many have lost jobs.
That’s hard, and I won’t say that going through it is easy. I will not dismiss or undercut that pain. If that’s you, that sucks, and I’m sorry.
Yet, truly, the hardest part of it all is to believe that not only will this dot, the point of current suffering, pass but that it will lead you to place of greater joy.
Recently, my pastor preached on Psalm 23 and how God leads us from pasture to pasture though a valley, and many times, we wish there was another way. We scream at our Apple maps, “Siri, you idiot, why did you take me on this road? There is a valley here!”
And, we wonder if the pasture on the other side is worth the valley. The water is filling our shoes; we’re cold, and we can barely see. Sometimes, the pasture sounds good, but it’s not worth the pain of the moment. We hate the valley.
Or, we’ve just stepped out of the valley, and we snarl in bitterness, “Why did you send me there?”
We can’t see pasture yet, so it’s easy to complain.
But, think if we could only see the pasture before we got there. Not a picture on a travel website, but if we could know the experience of that next place we will be, we could just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I know. Trust me, I get it. It sounds crazy. It’s nuts to be beaten, battered, bruised, scraped, past the point of exhaustion, and not complain.
Trust me, I understand.
But, what if, instead of bitterness and resentment, instead of screaming, complaining, and balling our fists into the sky, throwing middle-fingers to God and everyone around us, what if we stopped, uncurled our fingers, closed our eyes, and sang, “Hallelujah”?
Praise Ya.
Praise God.
It’s crazy. It sounds stupid. And yeah, it’s one of the most insane things you could ever do.
But in this time of Corona, when you’re stuck at home, when you’re getting in fights with your spouse, when you’re looking at a dwindling bank account, when you wake up hurt, tired, and anxious, what if you just said, maybe even sang, “Hallelujah”?
John Piper writes about sin, saying the best way to stop a bad habit is not by trying with all of your might to quit that habit but by replacing it with a positive action.
What if our action was Hallelujah?
We can sing it because we’ve all had hard times before. We’ve all suffered. We’ve all felt the hopeless, desperate, and alone.
And sure, yeah, the mountainside is hard, and your hands are cut; they’re black, bleeding, calloused; with one, you can’t even move all of your fingers. But, look, you’ve found a crevice, and you’ve rested, and you’re sitting on the edge, legs dangling, looking out at the most beautiful sunrises from the place you only got to from a hard climb, and, breathless, you see the most glorious view of a luscious life you could only find by living it.
Hallelujah. Praise God for the treacherous climb.
Hallelujah. I will be a better me for going through this.
Hallelujah. My life is a line, and this point looks low from right here, but later, I will see that this point, these tears, this moment has taken my line higher than it has ever been before.
Hallelujah. Praise God.
Will Carter is a writer from Roswell, Georgia; he suffered a brain injury in 2007. Now, he teaches composition courses at Kennesaw State University. He writes about his disability and encourages others to live life to the fullest.