Hallelujah

This is a fallen tree that rests in my park where I run. When I see such awesome scenes from nature, I sometimes startle myself as I utter things that usually don't come out of my mouth. Like "hallelujah."

We probably have all uttered that word, especially when singing along with the song, Hallelujah, written by Leonard Cohen, and covered by countless musicians. I am currently reading a book about this very song titled The Holy or the Broken by Alan Light, after listening to Malcolm Gladwell's outstanding Revisionist History podcast about the song.

Says Cohen: "I wanted to push Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world ... I wanted to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion."

Says Nick Baines, the Bishop of Croydon: "We're broken human beings, all of us, so stop pretending, and we can all use the word hallelujah because what it comes from is being open and transparent before God and the world and saying, 'This is how it is, mate.'"

Transparent before God. Is there a God?

So shifting gears, I am also reading a book titled From Eternity to Here by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll (after listening to another outstanding TED Radio podcast episode titled Shifting Time). One of the most mind-blowing concepts that Carroll explains is how through entropy (disorder), our universe continues to expand. We have more disorder today than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow. That's how the universe has been and will continue to be as it continues to expand ... as trees continue to fall, eggs crack, rooms messied up, lives lived. In other words, fallen tress cannot become unfallen. Cracked eggs cannot become uncracked. Tears shed cannot be unshed.

So then this truth about entropy leads us to ponder that a long long long time ago, there was less entropy and more order. Physicists agrees with that. And that begs the question ... what is the origin of such order?

Isn't order evidence of God? To that question, Carroll says "I don't know." Nobody knows. Maybe we will know some day. But today, when I ponder all of that ... all that I know and don't know yet ... what I find myself saying and frequently singing and dancing and painting and expressing is the singular word that has become my anthem, my battle cry.

Hallelujah.