A Thousand Hallelujahs

As most parents do, my wife and I often sing our son Alex to sleep at night. Of course there are plenty of renditions of the standards; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “Rock-a-bye Baby”, and so on. But in an effort to instill a sense of good musical taste we will often sing some non-traditional lullabies. Everything from “All I Want is You” to“Kingdom Come” soothed him to sleep. But it didn't take long until he had a favorite emerge, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, the Jeff Buckley version of course. I would sing this to him and try and explain why the Hallelujah was broken almost every night. But then I began working nights and the lullabying duties fell almost solely to my wife, Christy. Alex still requested “Hallelujah” of course, the only problem was that Christy didn't know the song well enough to sing it to him. So she came up with a fairly clever solution. She found the song on You Tube and would play it for him on her phone as they would sing along. Alex realized that there was something mommy was watching on her phone and he wanted to see it too. The only problem was this was the video my wife had been using to listen to the song.

The video features Jeff Buckley’s mournful rendition over video and pictures of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. This of course lead to some rather probing questions and deep conversation for a 2 year old. But essentially we boiled it down to some bad people broke those buildings and hurt a lot of people. This more or less satisfied his curiosity. But something strange emerged out of his watching the video. Not knowing the name of the World Trade Center, and probably struggling to pronounce it even if he did, he simply associated the song with the buildings so they became “The Hallelujah Buildings”

Such a cute and innocent name from a child. Obviously he has no idea what it means, one of the most tragic events my generation has ever witnessed. Hard to find much to “praise God” for on that day. But again do we need to be reminded of the faith of a child.

I've heard a thousand renditions of the song “Hallelujah”. Everyone form Leonard Cohen’s original to Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright to Damien Rice and many an awful version in-between. All of the versions worth listening to had one thing in common; mourning, heartbreak, you could feel the pain dripping all over the song. That was what this song was about, it was brokenness in C Major.

That was until one night Christy was making me the X Factor. And this happened.

When He started to sing my first thought was “oh no, another hackneyed job ruining a great song”. But then as it went on something different was happening. His “Hallelujah” was not mournful or broken. If was defiant. It was screaming “I may have been beaten, but I am not defeated.” This is far from the best version of the song but for the first time I saw the song in a new light and “The Hallelujah Buildings” seemed to make sense to me.

And this “New Hallelujah” seems to ring even truer in my own life. Praise God. Many times I have felt beaten, like my world has come crashing down around me and everything is lost. Praise God. But as beaten and lost as I may have felt I am never defeated. Praise God. He has already won the battle for me. Praise God. All I must do is claim the victory Jesus has won. Praise God.

My Hallelujah is not weeping. My Hallelujah is a battle cry.

Praise God.

This weekend I gathered with nearly 100 other Veterans at the site of the 9/11 memorial in New York. There we took an oath to continue our service to our communities as Fellows with The Mission Continues. That was our battle cry, that was our Hallelujah.