Burying Alleluia, part II

This Ash Wednesday, friends and colleagues are commenting on a Youtube i posted at the beginning of Lent 2010. I've been grateful to find that these lyrics, written by my friend and colleague, Rhonda VanDyke Colby, have been meaningful to some who hear it. It came from a conversation during a planning session last year.

Rhonda recalled fond memories of burying alleluia as a child in order to dig it up at Easter. She suggested that we take on this practice for the season of Lent 2010. True to form as a Questioner of All Rituals, Rites, and Regularities, i asked if we must do that this year. It had been a tremendously difficult winter with record-breaking blizzards in our area. Among loved ones, illness, natural disaster, and unemployment wreaked havoc. In some cases, students could not return to school and families lost their homes. Looking back on my personal life at that point, my own attitude at that time, frankly, sucked.

It felt as though "Alleluia" had long since been buried.

But we were reminded that praise, gratitude, and honor belong to God at all times, in all circumstances. Contextually, it did not seem appropriate to bury the alleluia. Rather, in these troubled times, it felt as though we should be the ones reminding others to sing it, scream it, live it.

In response to my description of this Youtube as "reverent" and "blasphemous," someone posted "I don't see the blasphemous part." I'm speaking to the present-day Pharisees who might view my refusal to bury alleluia as incorrect or even wrong. In any case, i am grateful that Rhonda called me with her lyric to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," asking if i thought the words were too "dorky " :). Those who know Rhonda's work know that it is consistently eloquent, lovely, artful, thoughtful, astute, and creative. She gifts us with the products of these qualities daily.

So, if you are too liturgically correct to sing or say it, live it anyway. In Cohen's compelling story that has been covered by hundreds of artists, it says:
"...There's a blaze of light in every word. It doesn't matter which you heard: the holy or the broken 'hallelujah.'... and even though it all went wrong, i'll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah."