A crack in everything
The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers reflects on the gifts of the fragile and vulnerable.
I HAVE a confession – I love the music of Leonard Cohen and I believe that the world become a poorer place when he died back in 2016. My favourite song and lyric is Anthem, which contains the lines:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect of ering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
These words remind me that in spite of the masks people wear and the images of coni dence and self-assurance that we like to project, we are all broken in some way. There’s a crack in everything, not one of us is perfect and, in any case, most ideas of perfection are just projections of the world the way we would like it to be. The message, however, of Leonard Cohen’s poem is that it is in the places where we are most vulnerable and at the times when we are most dependent on others that we can experience some of the deepest things in life, because it’s through the cracks that the light gets in.