Happy New Year! Leonard Cohen - The Future - the Dark Night of the Soul - from Despair and Darkness toward Hope -
2021 to 2022
Part I: 2021
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it's overturned
The order of the soul
Leonard Cohen, like the best creative minds, opened his to the collective unconscious and foresaw the future and noted,
It is murder… Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing (won't be) Nothing you can measure anymore.
I saw Cohen in concert at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis on May 3, 2009. He was 75 at the time. He performed his magic for three hours, and three encores, holding all of us spellbound with his kinetic energy and the seduction of his lyrics. I was introduced to Cohen years earlier by one of my students and his music has carried me along for these many years.
The prescience of this song captured the end times of 2021. In a real way 2021 has been our collective dark night of the soul. In an earlier post I briefly summarized the collapse that has been ongoing in the this country since the 1970’s. Just today another essay was published from a different slant asserting the same. Economic injustice, ecological disaster, greed and avarice, war, and an indifference to others marked by a self-absorption fueled by social media and in our own “mirrored room” gawking endlessly at our own inadequacies.
In addition to the collapsing economic, educational, political, and environmental systems et al., this year revealed what has been true for a long time that the medical system is bankrupt. Iatrogenic treatmentis now the third leading cause of death, prescription drugs the four leading cause, and I would add medical indifference as the first. Now run by private equity firms and corporations’ doctors have become handmaidens to the medical empire which has turned the dictum “First do no Harm,” upside down. Nowhere has cowardice been more evident than the doctors who have, without protest, participated in a mass inoculation program forced on people at the threat of loss of their livelihoods and civil liberties. And perhaps the most sinful has been the unnecessary, and yet for profit, injection of children.
The above system failures were pre-conditions that were ripe for exploitation and the pandemic provided the fertile ground in which the seeds of fear were planted and watered by a cadre of officials who exploited others for personal gain. The result has been a sort of mass trance or mass formation that has swept over most of the world.
The Quaker Parker Palmer, elaborates further, in words I wish I was capable of writing.
Today we live in a blizzard of another sort … It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference … We all know stories of people who have wandered off into the madness and been separated from their own souls, losing their moral bearings and even their mortal lives: they make headlines because they take so many innocents down with them.
The lost ones come from every walk of life: clergy and corporate executives, politicians and people on the street, celebrities, and schoolchildren. Some of us fear that we, or those we love, will become lost in the storm. Some are lost at this moment and are trying to find the way home. Some are lost without knowing it. And some are using the blizzard as a cover while cynically exploiting its chaos for private gain (p. 1).
This passage was taken from Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness, oddly published in 2009, the same year I saw Cohen perform in Minneapolis.
In this passing year we have lost our way collectively and individually fearing our own mortality or as Ernest Becker noted the vital lie of our refusal to acknowledge our own mortality, and trying to outrun it by every means possible. Deluded and grasping for any meaning that would assure our continued existence, no matter how hollow that existence might be, we are left standing at the edge of an abyss peering down into a vast darkness. On the precipice of hopelessness and despair we can seek guidance from those who have courageously navigated the Dark Night of the Soul, and JUMP!
Part II 2022
While Cohen asserts that events have “overturned the order of the soul,” the dark night suggests otherwise that we can find our way back renewed and reborn into a larger identity connected to something greater than ourselves. Palmer who sees the soul as ‘”that life giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness…” agrees. He continues, asserting that the soul’s order cannot be destroyed. It may be forgotten or lost, but we are never disconnected from its mooring.
But do we have the courage and commitment to stay the course through what feels like unending darkness? Others, like St. John of the Cross and St Theresa have written beautifully about their own sense of being lost and then found on a spiritual journey of recovery and reconnection with their own soul. The journey is itself the purgation of the hollow identity that we cling too and must relinquish to find our way back to a deeper, more grounded and spiritually fulfilling life. It is the gift of the dark journey that through the chaos and uncertainty we can again find hope and personal meaning in a world gone mad. And with that personal meaning, one person at a time, we can recover a sense of humanity born of respect for all human beings.
Finally for those of you undergoing your own dark night of the soul here is some music by Loreena Mckennitt to guide you on your way.
Happy New Year!
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One of the most underappreciated musicians of his time. I came to appreciate LC about 30 years ago. I never tire of his thoughtful, prescient music. Thanks for this.