The Lights Festival
The field was blanketed with thousands of people from all walks of life. As the sun sank behind the horizon, the torches between these strangers came alive. Every person there was holding a sky lantern in their hands, a paper lantern they had decorated themselves. The decorations varied from person to person—some had quotes shining guidance on how to live their best life, landscapes they miss were drawn on others, mandala-like doodles that give their artists’ peace were scrawled across certain lanterns, but more than anything else, people had written their hopes for the future on these vessels of light.
A single lantern went off first. And as music began, that one person’s lantern was followed by thousands of others, lighting up the dark and cloudy sky. One by one, the mass of people took their hopes, their dreams, their passions, their peace, their inspiration, their visions, the fires inside their earthbound souls and they put them into the heavens.
Moments ago they had put their lanterns to their laps and to the solid ground of that hill so they could scribble their wishes and paint their images of happiness. Then they set them ablaze and watched where the wind might take them. Each person watched what their hands could do when given a blank canvas. Then each person watched the beauty of a heaven that was full of light, a heaven that was full of mankind’s varied lives.
Amidst song and laughter, awe and sobered respect, we let go of those candles and the lives they illuminated, acknowledging that they never belonged in our hands to begin with. We watched them lift like heartfelt prayers to a heaven that would receive them. We watched those messages burn out, as if God took the fire from the lanterns, received them into himself, then cast the shells which carried them back down to the hard earth we’re left walking on.
A Song of Falling at a Time for Lifting
When that first sky lantern went off, it was the event crew’s cue to begin the “Launch Playlist.” For a reason that is completely beyond my understanding, the person in charge of these festivals decided the best way to launch sky lanterns would be to do so while listening to Hallelujah, a.k.a. the most frequently covered song in history. It’s a song that, unless you know the meaning of the word “hallelujah,” has nothing to do with lanterns or with light. It is a song that, unless you know the meaning of the title, has nothing to do with festivities or with dreams. Without knowing the meaning of the word, Hallelujah is an entirely different song, one about broken relationships and the pain of mistakes. It is one that brings me to tears anytime I dare to think about Cassie while hearing it—partly because she sang it so much and partly because it is a song that invokes grief over our most loving mistakes.
The word hallelujah is a combination of two Hebrew words: הַלְלוּ (halal) and יָהּ (Yahh). Halal carries a couple of different meanings, depending on context. The root literally means, “shine forth light.” Because human beings have always been beautifully creative people, the term adopted metaphorical meaning and was used to describe praise. (Which also gives insight into what “praise” can mean for us, as a way of shining light on someone’s character.) However, halal also adopted the secondary meaning of “boasting” in the sense of “shining a light on yourself in a foolish way,” which goes hand-in-hand with another meaning of the word, “to act like a madman.” Yahh means “The Lord,” being a contraction of the holy name of God given to Moses on Mt. Horeb.
So, yes, even though halal kinda technically means all those things, in the term hallelujah, it traditionally only means “praise.” However… for the song Hallelujah, you can easily see the Jewish/Buddhist songwriter, Leonard Cohen, exploring alternative meanings of the word.
The song assumes the third-person biblical narrative of King David, ties it into the narrative of the Israeli judge, Sampson, then turns the song over to the first-person in order to make it a personal expression of broken love and broken praise.
Singing Hallelujah
Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
Well it goes like this:
The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
The song begins with David’s first way of expressing the phrase. As the Prophet Samuel records, David was “a man after God’s own heart.” He was not only a warrior, but he was gifted at singing and playing the harp. So the song verses here still describe a kind of “praise hallelujah,” the hallelujah that we are most familiar with, albeit one that reflects a version of David who doesn’t track with the other kinds of hallelujahs. It’s a David who is lost and trying to come to grips with how to praise God despite all the darkness external to his life. It’s a hallelujah we all want to sing. It’s a hallelujah that’s perfect, but sung by someone who doesn’t realize how imperfect he is.
Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to her kitchen chair
And she broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Now we watch the hero fall apart without knowing it. We feel David’s lust, we feel his helplessness as he gives in to passion. We feel the pain of guilt, the feeling of those morning-afters. We feel the ecstasy of being blinded by a rosy romance—the kind that makes us breathe out a prayer of praise, a praise we don’t realize until after was directed at our self, not at all towards a true God. That the heavy hallelujah here isn’t just a misattributed “praise the Lord,” it also means “Lord, make a fool out of me.” So we sing our mistakes and our shame.
But baby I’ve been here before
I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor
You know, I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
The song becomes personal. This hallelujah isn’t reverent and composed. It isn’t impassioned and heaving. It is defeated. This hallelujah falls out of our mouth the way tears fall from our eyes. It embraces our mistakes, encompasses the pain of realizing our stupidity, and asks God to shine a light on those things. Why do we ask that? Because until we become clear, until we see what kind of evils we expose when we shine a light only on ourselves, we don’t see with perspective how beautiful God is when we lift our little lights only to him. We try to hold a candle to who we think God is as we experience the pain of regret in our relationships that are far from perfect, but the hallelujah (“holding light to God”) often comes out like holding a smoldering candlewick. It is cold. And it is dark. And it is broken.
Cassie’s Hallelujah
Cassie sang this a lot. I remember her singing it throughout the time we dated in high school. I remember her singing it as we started college together. She sang it while we were engaged. Cassie never stopped singing it after we became married.
She saw the song for the beauty behind the words. She saw that a person’s praise could be made of more than just joy and gratitude, it could hold a person’s regret and feelings of inadequacy too. Though that probably came from all the time Cassie spent trying to lead others into genuine, whole-hearted worship. She knew those singing “hallelujah” with her might be singing an entirely different song, despite mouthing the same words.
She wanted to lift a light during a lantern festival. It was a dream of hers. Unfortunately, she never got to. But I put a fire in the sky on her behalf, with a lantern just for her. It only seemed right, as I sang a cold and broken hallelujah. After all, she was my first hallelujah. So I sing it still, colored by regret and mistakes, baffled by the darkness. I shine a light still, cold and broken.
And it’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
P.S.
So there were a lot of ways I wanted to take this post. I wanted to speak to Cassie’s love of the movie Tangled, maybe touching on the song I See The Light, when the princess finally gets to see the lantern festival. I wanted to speak to how amazing it was to do this with such amazing friends, new and old. I wanted to write more about the association between sending up lanterns and sending up prayers. I wanted to write about the feeling of letting go of Cassie’s sky lantern, watching it ascend towards heaven then disappear out of sight. And I really wanted to write more just about all the things that Cassie’s lantern meant to me. But for whatever reason, this is what came out. Hopefully at least one person still finds it helpful, even if it touches less on loss and more on what it means to look for God through feelings of personal failure or through broken relationships.
Also, I indulged in my tendency to ramble, as you can see by the giant blocks of text in this post without pictures to break them up. I promise future posts will be shorter…
