The cracks are how the light gets in … and out

From John Coltrane to Leonard Cohen and U2, the Psalms have an enduring influence over art that helps us confront the darkness.

On yesterday’s Daily Calm (a short meditation on the Calm app), mindfulness guru Tamara Levitt spoke about kintsugi, the Japanese art of making something unique and beautiful from cracked and broken things, by using gold to rejoin the broken pieces — which, of course, not only acknowledges the brokenness of the cup or the vase or whatever it is, but highlights them. The flaws are utilised to create something that’s one-of-a-kind.

It’s not something I’ve ever done well, embrace my flaws. Heck, I struggle even to acknowledge they’re there. But I’m reminded of them daily, from mental frailties through to physical limitations … and that’s just the hypochondria. I guess I’ve mastered the art of distraction — if not disassociation — instead of learning how to utilise my brokenness to become something unique and unrepeatable. That would take grace, something else I don’t easily accept.

Listening to Tamara, I was reminded of a chapel session at a college where I was lecturing a few years ago. I attended chapel sessions begrudgingly, but on this particular day a New Testament scholar, Evelyn Ashley, was giving the lesson. Some of my most profound teachable moments have happened sitting at the feet of learned women, whose tender wisdom cuts through the resistance of my innate objection to being taught anything by anybody, and reaches into the soul before I’ve worked out I need to put the barricades up. She was talking not about kintsugi, but about broken jars of clay, an image used by Paul in the second letter to the Corinthian church. Paul’s letter talks about people radiating light from the inside out, even from bodies that are wearied and broken down by the violence of this life. To illustrate her point she had props — large terracotta pithoi that you might see being carried by female extras in movies like Ben Hur, carting wine or grain across an ancient Near Eastern movie lot. Except these pots were each rendered useless by cracks and large holes, good for nothing … until Evelyn fired up the candles inside them, and they each became something totally extraordinary and beautiful, in a way that jolted me out of my malaise.

Anyone can be a broken vessel. Even me.

Winding up her Daily Calm session yesterday, Tamara Levitt quoted Leonard Cohen from his song Anthem: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

The cracks are also how the light gets out.

The New York Times the other day published an essay that resonated with the same themes, headed ‘The Nature of Joy’. It was a beautiful reflection on simply being … and being in the natural world, specifically.

“I can’t tell you how much delight I take in watching a young animal’s deep pleasure in existence, enjoying the power of its beautiful young body in a beautiful old world,” wrote the essayist.

Her point was that non-human creatures experience nature in an uncomplicated way that’s denied to most of us (over)thinking humans. Animals just enjoy the rain, enjoy basking in the sunlight, take simple pleasure in just being alive in the world around them. They also suffer in uncomplicated ways too, and it’s in the dialectic between the two that she sees the comradeship between the animal world and the human world … we each bear the scars of the world we inhabit:

I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

These are all themes that are present throughout the Psalms in the Old Testament scriptures — the idea that life is beautiful but violent, that we are broken and yet radiate light, that it’s our flaws that open us up to being receptive to a voice that’s greater and more gracious than us, the Almighty, whose pleasure in us we can’t even register without acknowledging first that if we live in this world, and if we are open to love, then we will suffer.

There was a period during my early theological studies, around the year 2000, when I endured a prolonged and heavy period of anxiety, and I would dip into the Psalms regularly, because that’s where I found words that expressed not only the despair I was feeling, but the thin cord of hope I was looking to grasp on to in my darkness.

A few weeks ago I was feeling a bit the same way, but I turned not to the biblical Psalms, but to Nick Cave’s recent album, Seven Psalms, on which he does little more than recite seven psalms that he’s written in the style of the Old Testament poems. His psalms resonate with the same themes as the OG Psalms of David … acknowledging the reality of God’s presence even in the darkest of human experiences … confessions of a violent and deceptive heart … the confronting nature of this world’s cruelty, as well as its capacity to bring us delight.

Cave, who has had two sons die young in recent years, says in his psalm titled Such things should never happen:

Such things should never happen but we die
The swallow finds an oak to nest her young
Defenseless between the earth and the sky
Uncounted beneath a vast, indifferent sun

Such things should never happen but they do
Beside a littlе box, a mother cries
The swallow seeks to build its nеst anew
The oak tree lifts its branches to its eyes

Concurrent with our most excruciating sorrow is a world of nature just going about its business.

A review of the album in The Guardian describes the songs as “lovesick prayers” to “a kinder God than often appears in Cave’s back catalogue”. It’s true. The article characterises him as pained, and yearning for mercy, grace and heavenly succour. This is also true.

Cave’s Seven Psalms also depict in their own way what I’ve been talking about above, the flaws and the cracks, along with the sense of wonder that it’s through our weakness that the light gets in and out, even when, and perhaps especially when, we confess that we have nothing to offer the Almighty — nothing at all.

This is how Cave expresses it in the psalm I come alone and to you:

I come alone and to you, Lord, in sorrow
Thirsty for your refuge, I cannot breathe
I kneel among your stars and in the morrow
I have nothing more to offer but to leave

The very most I can offer, God, is that I’m leaving … do with that what you will.

I’ve prayed that prayer many a time.

Don’t expect to find a lot of this sort of teaching, or even the acknowledgment of it, in the Church, which, in my experience, is too afraid to go there. It’s there in the scriptures, but the Sunday service is too sure of itself to dwell on those passages, or even to use them to help people face up to the brutal realities of life, even if it is the gateway to experiencing an inner radiance that only comes when we own up to the cracks.

You’re far more likely to hear this message resonate through the words and music of artists like John Coltrane, whose magnificent A Love Supreme (the best jazz album ever recorded) ends with a piece titled Psalm, in which Trane “speaks” through his saxophone the words of a psalm he has penned himself, and with which you can follow along in the liner notes. It’s a moment of genius that’s almost too good for this world, and yet it’s replete with the same plaited combination of joy, wonder and pain that are synonymous with the human experience. Coltrane was an artist who was very much in touch with his scars.

My personal favourite Psalm moment happened during a concert U2 gave in Boston in June 2001, and which was subsequently released as the live concert movie Elevation 2001: Live from Boston. It was a difficult gig for U2. Bono’s voice wasn’t doing great and you get the sense watching it that he’s washed up and strung out. His vulnerability is palpable. Not Lewis Capaldi at Glastonbury ’23 level vulnerability, but not far off. But U2 play on anyway, and Bono screeches with everything he’s got, which is particularly fraught during the song Bad, in which, try as he might, he cannot hit the notes.

But then … Bad ends and the transition to Where the Streets Have No Name begins, and that’s when it happens — the most powerful moment in any U2 concert I’ve ever seen. Bono recites (paraphrases) a Psalm, Psalm 116 from The Message translation, authored by his friend, Eugene Peterson.

What can I give back to GOD
for the blessings he’s poured out on me?
I’ll lift high the cup of salvation—a toast to GOD!
I’ll pray in the name of GOD;
I’ll complete what I promised GOD I’d do,
and I’ll do it together with his people.

It’s an extraordinary moment, a shameless act of petitionary prayer and praise from a failing pop star to a God most in the crowd wouldn’t even believe in. But Bono’s frailty is insignificant in light of the power of that moment. What should have gone down as one of U2’s worst performances was transformed into one of their very best. A genuine example of light emanating from broken jars of clay.

Speaking of Eugene Peterson, there’s a short documentary on YouTube of the time Bono visited Peterson at his lakeside property in Vancouver so that they could discuss the scriptures. At the 11-minute mark, Bono says of the Psalms: “They have this rawness, the brutal honesty, whether it’s David or not it doesn’t matter, the Psalmist is brutally honest about the explosive joy that he’s feeling and the deep sorrow or confusion, and it’s that that sets the Psalms apart for me.”

Earlier, around the 6min15sec mark, Peterson is talking about U2’s song 40, which is based on Psalm 40. He says of Bono:

“I think it’s one of his best ones. He sings it a lot … It’s one of the songs that reaches into the hurt and disappointment and difficulty of being a human being. It acknowledges that in a language that is immediately recognisable. There’s something that reaches into the heart of a person, the stuff we all feel but many of us don’t talk about.”

How do we get to the stage of being able to talk with transparency and vulnerability about the disappointment we have about this world and the shape our lives have taken?

According to the tender wisdom of the women who have taught me the most, we must first acknowledge the cracks, the flaws, the broken pieces of our own bodies, our minds, and our experiences.

And perhaps then, conversations, spirited and gracious, can follow.