Buddhist and Jewish musician and sage Leonard Cohen asks the question: What is a saint?*
He answers his question this way in his 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers:
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance.
Far from flying with the angels he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and infinite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
Allow me to attempt an exegesis of Leonard Cohen’s rich effort to define a saint. Others are invited to create their exegesis as well.
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. So a saint takes us to the edge of what it is to be human; a saint does not live safely in a box. There is something edgy, or “remote,” or wild, or different, or extreme about saintliness.
The edge has something to do with possibility, potential or greatness. Aquinas says hope is about the possible, despair about the impossible. Saints bring hope, bear hope, carry hope and possibility. They stretch the boundaries of what it is to be human, for it is a “remote human possibility.” Saints speak to humanity’s capacity to grow.
It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. There is a mystery, something beyond words, impossible to articulate what that possibility or hope is. We can only walk around it and observe it, but not nail it or name it or own it. There is mystery involved.
But we can surmise that “it has something to do with the energy” we call love. Love is at its center; love inspires it and energizes it and keeps it going in good times and bad. In the streets of Minnesota and beyond.
To be continued.
* Thanks to Maria Popova, “The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on the Saints Among Us,” on The Marginalian.
Banner Image: “Catholic Worker Soup – Emmaus House, Troy, NY.” Photo by Jim Forest on Flickr.
Correction: In the 2/6/2025 DM, an endnote incorrectly provided only a placeholder, [Title], for the quotes given. The book cited was Matthew Fox’s Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God.
Queries for Contemplation
What are you learning from Leonard Cohen about saintliness or holiness? Is he speaking to you about yourself and others whom you know?
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Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
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7 thoughts on “Leonard Cohen on Saintliness”
Thank you for the two Master classes in “being real” by Leonard Cohen.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit.
Prayers for GG.
Leonard Cohen seems to have been a singer/poet of Love who inspired many people!
Thank you Matthew:
Leonard Cohen was and remains Canada’s Jewish poet/prophet musician. In his song THE FUTURE he describes himself as “I/m the little Jew who wrote the Bible….I have seen the nations rise and fall, I’ve heard their stories, heard them all but love is the only engine of survival…”
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858541162/
The way Leonard wrote about the world in The Future back in the 90s was prescient. The song touched on many characteristics of our ever changing world that are more apparent now then. Leonard is one of the prophets of liquid modernity. Constant change and uncertainty and violence. Love, he sings, is the engine of survival. A comforting thought in our world of forever wars, climate crisis, deracination, migration, and AI. From the song The Future.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
When they said repent repent
I wonder what they meant
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Only love has the power to change hearts.
Leonard Cohen was a true mystic. Even if all he had ever written was that chorus from Anthem. it would have been enough.
What is a Saint? I am a eighty-year old woman, with an abundance of melanin in my outer skin. I have been a searcher of the Truth of myself all of my life. A saint for me is one who has come to the realization, that all of humanity and other living beings have “worth” just because they are…it is what it is. And those who can illustrate this in their lives, and give it to others, is saintly. So, being “saintly,” is being all you can be, and helping others to do likewise. That is what a Saint is to me.