OK, this is a classic example of why you shouldn’t write about anything before you’ve given it some time to marinate. I wrote about Leonard Cohen’s remarkable song, “Hallelujah,” last week, and now I want to refine what I said (especially the parts that were, you know, wrong).

After listening to some more covers and doing extensive research on Wikipedia, I now think (I’m not sure) I probably made unwarranted assumptions about Cohen’s intentions with the song. I realize now that there are (at least) two different versions of the song—Cohen’s original and the very popular derivatives of Jeff Buckley’s cover, which I’m learning to appreciate:

I prefer the Buckley version, because it better suits my presuppositions. Cohen’s version is a a song of wounded defiance. It says, “Love wasn’t what I hoped it would be, but I’d make the same choices if I had to do it over again.” Buckley’s is sadder, and the verses he selected repeat twice the line, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

You’d have to seek far to find a better description of how Christians view unredeemed human sexuality than “a broken hallelujah.” The breaking is real, but the hallelujah is real too, and the tension between them constitutes much of our universal pickle.

As I keep repeating—because I consider it incredibly important—the Christian scriptures teach that we are created in the image of God, but fallen. We are wonderful in our gifts and potentialities, but helplessly frustrated through the corruption of our spirits and our flesh. The athlete who trains his body to the highest possible level of performance is glorifying God, even if he’s an animist, just through “doing business with his talents,” as Christ says in the parable (Matthew 25). The scientist who masters his field of study and is enabled to write a brilliant, convincing book claiming to prove there is no God, is nevertheless performing a kind of an act of worship, just through the exercise of the gifts God gave him. And the couple who come together in love and passion, even if it’s adulterous or perverted passion, are in a sense singing a hallelujah to the One who created love. The excellencies of all these persons are not saving excellencies. Such people are on their way to hell if they do not repent. But they nevertheless form a part of the universal choir that sings a perpetual chorale to its Creator, whether it likes it or not. A broken hallelujah.

The problem, for the unhappy person who has made romantic love his (or her) God, is a problem of proportion. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves:

It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp…. In Eros at times we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us we are really captive balloons. It is a continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats. It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke.

This is one of the tragedies of our time, that we treat something good as if it were the ultimate, thus placing a weight of reverence on it far beyond the Manufacturer’s recommendations.

But it can bear fruit in a beautiful song of hallelujah.