Lent 2013, Day 43: The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah

When I was a teenager, my hometown was gifted with a copy of Michelangelo’s David. After much controversy, it was erected (no pun intended) without a fig leaf over his private parts. “Look at his eyes,” my father liked to say when we’d go by the statue, which was often since my grandmother lived nearby. “Michelangelo captured him at the exact moment he knew he could take Goliath.” But that wasn’t when I fell in love with David.

I thought of my father’s comment when in my thirties I was fortunate enough to see the original at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. But that wasn’t when I fell in love with David.

I started falling in love with David in 2005, when Psalm 51 was listed as a contemplation piece in the pamphlet distributed at my first reconciliation service as an adult. It reads in part, “A clean heart create for me, God; renew within me a steadfast spirit.”

I was so moved by the words that I studied the psalm, and was shocked to learn David had written it upon being called out for his affair with best friend’s wife and for sending his friend to certain death. The contrition in the words astounded me. The confidence of God’s forgiveness astounded me even more. What kind of Biblical figure was this?

The following year, I read the entire Bible, and lingered over the passages with his stories–his dancing and leaping before the Lord. His callous treatment of Michal. This was a man who lived life large and sometimes recklessly and carelessly, who lived it with an intimacy with God most of us only dream of. But his confidence at that stage of his life was different from that which Michelangelo captured. It was a more mature faith, of someone who’d battered around many souls and had his own knocked up around the edges and still believed God loved him.

It’s that David I have grown to love most, the one whose eyes contain some pain and sorrow along with that confidence, the one I see in the lyrics in Leonard Cohen’s inspired “Hallelujah”:

You say I took the name in vain/I don’t even know the name/But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?/There’s a blaze of light in every word/It doesn’t matter which you heard/The holy or the broken Hallelujah

For me, that’s the most valuable lesson in David’s life–the faith to offer up the hallelujah, holy or broken, with confidence it will be heard.