The Crack in My Heart

Lorna and I attended the Easter Vigil service on Saturday at Trivitt Memorial Church in Exeter.  It was a truly wonderful service of new light.  I was particularly moved when the wonderful bells rang out after the Exsultet which was beautifully wonderfully sung by the cantor. 

That experience brought to life great line of poetry from Lenard Cohen (or Saint Lenny as I have come to call him):

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Those bells certainly still can and do ring.  The light of Christ was brought into the church in a very moving procession at the beginning of the service with the Deacon proclaiming “The light of Christ” and the congregation singing in response “Thank be to God”.  

The question that was focused for me in that moment was, what is the crack in our lives that lets the light of Christ in?   We often think of a crack as something negative.  There is a crack in the foundation of our house or another building that needs to be repaired.  If we have a crack in a dish it will probably have to be discarded.  If we fall and crack some bone in our body it will have to be put in a cast until it heals.  So what crack can let the light in?

I first heard this phrase many years ago when I first heard St. Lenny’s song Anthem on his album The Future which was released in 1992.  It was probably in that year as I have always bought Leonard’s albums (or received them as gifts) as soon as they are released.  That phase resonated with me immediately and I understood it as an expression of the reality that it is through our humanness and imperfections that we receive the blessing of life from God; that is how we become more fully the people God created us to be.  We will make mistakes and better yet mistakes are inevitable as we are created to live and love and learn and discover who we are and who God made us to be.  That does not happen without living our lives as fully as possible and we cannot do that without making mistakes.  It is through our mistakes and cracks that we are made whole.

I still believe that and it has become truer for me the longer I live.  However, the new realization that came to me during the Easter Vigil is that the crack needs to be in the protective armour that we build around ourselves and particularly around our hearts.  We spend so much of our lives creating protective walls and barricades and cocoons.  We encase our hearts in iron cocoons again the hurts that others have inflicted on us.  The crack in that protective armour will let the light on Christ—the love of Christ in to our hearts.  However, there is no guarantee that this will happen.  Even if a crack in that armour opens it, we may let fear close it up again. 

We are called to let the light of Christ into our hearts.  We are called to share that love with others; with the world. So let us all:Easter Vigil

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.