Leonard Cohen’s appeal was ‘the spiritual search he shared with us’

The late performer Leonard Cohen touched so many people with his music due to his search for spiritual fulfilment through the medium, broadcaster Fr Brian D’Arcy has said.

Speaking to The Irish Catholic this week about the impact of Leonard Cohen’s life, apparent in the global outpouring of grief and tributes that followed his November 7 passing, Fr D’Arcy, who followed the artist’s career, said that people could not help but identify with the search for meaning he laid bare in his songs, most notably his best known composition Hallelujah.

“Leonard Cohen himself didn’t know what that song was truly about,” Fr D’Arcy said, pointing out that the artist originally wrote some 80 verses in attempting to complete its meaning. 

“He began to think the beauty of the song was in his inability to understand life, so it was his ‘Hallelujah’ to life, regardless of how uncertain life can be.”

And it was this search for meaning in his own life that led him on a very real spiritual search, Fr D’Arcy explains further, referencing the Jewish-born Cohen’s period in a Buddhist monastery. Crucially, in this time, Cohen lost his entire fortune to theft.

“His re-invention after that was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to him,” Fr D’Arcy said. “He was so down, so broken that his own brokenness led him to search for things that last.

“People saw that in him and heard that in his music. He overcame all, and through faith, so do we – Hallelujah.”

In an interview in October, dealing with song lyrics from his last album, which declare, “I’m ready, my Lord”, Cohen explained that the “declaration of readiness, no matter what the outcome, that’s a part of everyone’s soul. We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are hoping to serve. So this is just a part of my nature and I think everybody else’s nature to offer oneself at the critical moment”.

Among the multitude of tributes paid to Cohen when news of his death emerged on November 7 was one from Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, who tweeted a lyric from Hallelujah: “I’ll stand before the Lord of Song/With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”