If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will
If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will
If it be your will
6 comments:
Yes, it's such a beautiful, amazing song. The lyrics in the last verse are just wonderful.
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will
I always feel like the thought that God has just got up and fucked off is worse than the actual pain itself, if that could be possible. And every time I'm on the mountaintop (like today, for instance) I tell my soul that he's everywhere, and I can see it. But when you're being rained on and you know God can stop it and he doesn't ... well, doesn't take much to start thinking he is a coldhearted fish or a non-existent one.
I guess that's THE question down through the ages, isn't it. It pisses me off the simplistic answers Christians give. "Just have faith in these times," dismissing the thoughts people have (and presuming to others that they don't have them themselves). And the way Christians are so snubby to people who claim atheism for this reason. I totally understand why that is a reasoned perspective for atheism. What do you do when landslides happen in the Philippines after earthquakes and tsunamis? And Christians can also patly say, "Well, we are his hands and his feet," and that is true. But what happens when it feels like he's not even speaking to the heart that has the hands and the feet?
I love this song, I love its lament.
That rags of light lyric has always struck me, sometimes for its poignancy, sometimes for its beauty. Oh this song is steeped in sadness and lament, it's always an emotional experience to listen to it. It's interesting, so Psalm-like, pleading, angry, confused yet still ultimately trusting.
Yes, it's a thought not worth thinking about. Funnily enough I haven't ever reached the point of believing that, to be honest maybe that would be easier than knowing (in a vague instinctive sense) that he is there, but distant for what ever reason.
The lyric that always gets me is let your mercy spill...etc It's such a plea of desperation, and one that often gets airtime in my head. I don't really know how best to articulate it, I think the lyric does it perfectly for me (sorry, lazy!).
So much talk and so little action, that is what frustrates me about so many christians I have known! It's like that footprints story, hearing someone say "Well God is carrying you, you just don't know it," as though it's down to you that you're feeling lonely and isolated. I know everyone gives them a hard time, but up until they opened their mouths I admire what Job's friends did in sitting in the dust with him. Just being with him in his time of grief, that action speaks so much more than any words. More of that please.
So many of his songs affect me like this for similar reasons. Totally a modern psalmist.
I was having my standard hourly acedia attack the other night and I did what Evagrrius, the fourth century monk who has got my attention lately, suggested, and that was to pray psalm 42.
I love the psalms, they are my favourite part of the Bible apart from Isaiah. I was reading 42 as if all of the parts of it were me, including the enemies knocking on my door and saying "Where is your God?"
And man, I was in the tears at the end of it. It was quite lovely, actually.
I bewail our modern Christian's inability to sit alongside one another. I really like what you say about Job's friends. They get the bad rap for sure but yeah, ur right. Just sitting with him amongst the pottery shards was good till they opened their mouths :)
(Please take anything stupid and Christiense I have said here and blow it away on the wind for me, will ya? :)
I think they're my favourite part of the Bible as well, more so in the last couple of years. I love the sense of freedom I felt when I realised I could wail and bemoan god and that he would welcome that more than my trite coverings-up of my true feelings. I had a teacher at my old college who said sometimes he would go outside with god and swear and yell like nobody's business. Very liberating. It's corny, but that's why I really still like U2, for their willingness to jump right into the hard, raw and contradictory places.
I heard an interesting sermon once on Job, the best I've heard so far. In a nutshell, they said that technically what the friends said when they opened their mouths wasn't heretical, it was their foolishness in trying to rationalise Job's grief instead of just being plain angry where they missed the point. I think for me the whole of Job speaks to the fact that sometimes words just aren't enough.
And don't worry, I am sure I am still ridding myself of christianese - it's like having to re-learn the english language!
I agree. Sometimes words aren't enough and when they're said they're always too much.
I have had Until the End of the World go through my head constantly lately. I played it four times yesterday and then once this morning, haha. I love that song so much :)
Fiona and Sue, I love this back and forth about Cohen and this song in particular which he himself considers among his very best. I resonate with your worry about how to speak in ways that escape Christian platitudes and your attraction to the Psalms, one reason why I like Cohen (and U2) so much. They get psalms, and especially lament. Even praise, for Cohen, is broken. I'm working on a new book, Broken Hallelujah, and the first chapter is on Cohen. Here's the section on this song:
Another important center of Cohen’s art as it intersects with spirituality is his self-understanding of being chosen for this work. It is, in the end, not his own voice, no matter the difficulty of his labors over the words. In the closing song on Various Positions, one of his most profound and haunting songs, “If It Be Your Will,” Cohen lays down his own voice at the feet of the Voice upon whom he waits. “If it be your will,” Cohen prays, “that I speak no more / and my voice be still / as it was before /I will speak no more / I shall abide until / I am spoken for / if it be your will.” This beautiful song, according to Cohen biographer Ira Nadel, was borrowed from the Kol Nidre service closing Yom Kippur. Just before a recounting of one’s sins, the cantor cries out “May it therefore be Your will, Lord our God, and God of our Fathers, to forgive us all our sins, to pardon all our iniquities, to grant us atonement for all our transgressions.” The slow somber melody is also derived from the ancient form of synagogue song for this service.
Cohen’s voice is always working to be open to the Voice, the one who speaks through him and calls him out of silence into speech. In Book of Mercy (10) he gives thanks that “You have sweetened your word on my lips.” He goes on: “You placed me in this mystery and you let me sing, though only from this curious corner.” His humility is not false; it reflects his understanding of humanity in relation to God. Cohen describes his will as a ‘little will’, working in its ‘curious corner’. To really do his work, though, a kind of surrender must take place in which his “tiny will is annihilated, and thrown back into a kind of silence until you can make contact with another authentic thrust of your being. And we call that prayer when we can affirm it.” He continues, “I think that in writing, when you’re cooking as a writer, it is a destruction of the little will—you are operating on some other fuel.”
He reaches for the song, the poem, and yet knows the words come from elsewhere. Book of Mercy (26) puts it this way:
Sit in a chair and keep still. Let the dancer’s shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer’s chest from your chest, the dancer’s loins from your loins, the dancer’s hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves, and let him serve God in beauty.
With regard to his vocation, Cohen exhibits a profound humility, founded in gratitude at times and exasperation at others. As I noted above, Cohen wrote in 2006’s Book of Longing finds him wondering that the Lord of his life has leaned him against the table in the middle of the night trying to write something beautiful. Yet in the end, Cohen confesses with a faithful awe, “You let me sing, you lifted me up… O beloved speaking” (Book of Mercy (19). He cries out in hopeful expectation, “Do not let these words be mine, but change them into truth” (Book of Mercy (49).
Hope you like it! Peace, Chris
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