Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is out on tour again. He is a wise, wise, dude--and I love his music. It's all profoundly impacted by diligent quest for God.

In fact, Mr. Cohen appears to see performance and prayer as aspects of the same larger divine enterprise. That may not be surprising, coming from an artist whose best-known songs mingle sacred concerns with the secular and the sexual and sound like “collaborations between Jacques Brel and Thomas Merton,” as the novelist Pico Iyer put it.

“There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life” on the road and in the monastery, Mr. Cohen said. “There’s just a sense of purpose” in which “a lot of extraneous material is naturally and necessarily discarded,” and what is left is a “rigorous and severe” routine in which “the capacity to focus becomes much easier.” (source)

Dude that is so true! Check out some of Bede's recent reflections for proof. The monastic life is all about a life style deliberately designed to enable spiritual growth.

That reminds me, I should see whether we could do some Cohen at COTM. I bet there is a lot there that would work extremely well as worship music...

-t