Hallelujah ... there’s one heavenly voice that no churchman can reach

IN A thoughtful homily closing the Knock Youth Festival last weekend, Bishop Donal McKeown of Down and Connor said: “People are dying from a lack of love, a lack of identity and from a sense that the world is meaningless — or at least that their lives have no real meaning.”

No doubt mindful of the age and tastes of his congregation, the bishop went on to pronounce the name of Jesus in the same breath as those of Snow Patrol, Blur and the Killers.

He must also have been mindful of the fact that his congregation was measured in hundreds, while the audiences at the summer’s rock events are measured in tens of thousands.

Like Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam at Croagh Patrick a couple of days later, Bishop McKeown knows that Catholicism is very difficult to market in Ireland these days. Both men embedded their comments in expressions of contrition for the sins of the church and its clergy against its children.

One cannot help noting in passing that these expressions have come far too late for many victims. However well meant, they cannot compensate for the shameful energy so many senior clerics have put into attempting to protect the church from a scandal of its own making.

Nonetheless, there is a welcome sense that the enormity of what was perpetrated is finally being acknowledged.

As Archbishop Neary put it: “Children were left to carry crosses which they should never have been burdened with in the first place. Too many young people had their lives blighted by shame and fear and their trust in the church was shattered.”

In this harsh context, Bishop McKeown asked young people to give “radical gospel responses” to the legacy of Celtic Tiger culture, to hunger on our streets and obscene waste in our restaurants, to the destruction of our environment, to policies which penalise education and health services for the sins of bankers and developers, to our failure to nourish loving personal relationships.

“There is little progress in condemning clerical dominance and replacing it with a new high priesthood that claims omniscience or a bland philosophy that stands for nothing and falls for anything.”

Bishop McKeown warned that these issues would not be resolved by a “guru god who parachutes into Punchestown racecourse or Croke Park for three days and then vanishes”.

Fair enough. John Lennon’s once notorious statement that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus Christ” was more an expression of disgust at an increasingly superficial culture than of secularist triumphalism. Yet something did shift in the 1960s in that the faith young people had previously placed in church, nation or class, depending on their inclination, transferred in considerable measure to electronic troubadours like Lennon or Bob Dylan.

For a brief moment, sweet to those of us who suspect all centres of great power, this movement promised real change and new freedoms. It therefore caused equal anxiety in the Kremlin, the Vatican and the White House.

For the most part, though, this was a superficial revolution, as the few genuinely visionary rock stars were bought out by big business or found that their chosen roads of libertarian excess led only to a heroin overdose with no resurrection on offer.

Like the pied pipers they were, they led us away from the old securities and certainties, but most of them led us only to soulless megastores where their managers could dip deeper into our pockets. The more the world changed, the more it stayed the same.

There was at least one exceptional survivor, however, one man whose art had an integrity which gives him an extraordinarily special place in the hearts and minds of those who listen to him. Yet, for decades, the fans of Leonard Cohen seemed to be a small minority, dismissed as hopelessly self-indulgent melancholics.

Who, after all, wants to listen to songs about those hungers Bishop McKeown says we are dying from, about lack of love, lack of identity, lack of meaning? To a singer who stares at war and holocaust without blinking and can offer us only a Jesus who “sinks beneath [our] wisdom like stone”? Well, there are a lot more of us than most of us ever suspected. I doubt if Bishop McKeown deliberately omitted the 02 venue in Dublin from his list of false temples, but Cohen’s sellout concerts there last week gave many thousands of people something very close to a collective religious experience.

Now of course you may say Cohen is an entertainer first and foremost. For sure, he now puts on a damn good show, with superb musicians, cutting-edge video technology and a deliciously understated onstage flirtation with both of the delectable Webb sisters.

And then he has the supreme performer’s gift of intimacy, that uncanny ability to stand before a multitude in a huge and coldly impersonal arena and make each person present feel he is singing directly to their hearts.

But I’ll stick my neck out here and say it is what he is singing that makes the difference, that when you strip away all the razzamatazz of resurrected and reinvented rock stardom in his 70s, it is Cohen’s poetic integrity that makes his a voice that speaks to the soul of our very troubled times in a way that might be the envy of many a bishop.

It is the sense that this is a man who does not flinch from the worst that life (and death) can do to us, individually and collectively, and yet still finds a cracked bell to ring out in praise, a broken hallelujah to whisper, that lifts his work to a level quite removed from the general run of rock messiahs.

OF COURSE, a messiah is the last thing Cohen would want to be. In religious terms he is quite a heady cocktail. He is saturated in his Jewish cultural background and yet steeped in the imagery of Christianity. He finds some solace in the gentle wisdom of Buddhism, but seems free of the zealotry that many western converts bring to that tradition.

He seems to have spent most of his life alternating, often in the same verse, as it were, between the pursuit of some kind of sainthood and an ironic savouring of ephemeral erotic and sensual pleasures.

What is so remarkable about Cohen is that he offers us no obvious hope of any kind of salvation, yet listening to him can confer a sense of something very close to benediction.

That is, if you can imagine a blessing that comes with a wink, a wry warning that this is a moment not to be grasped but to be relinquished.

And so, though he tells us the wars will be fought again, that there is a crack in everything, that the deal is rotten, that the captain lied and the good guys lost, that even Jesus cannot save himself from what we do to him, we somehow emerge from the experience feeling purged and even elated.

Preaching is not Cohen’s style, but at the end of the night he gives us a small moral prescription: “Be kind,” he says, “though that is a hard one”.

How right he is. And what a difference it might make if we were.