September 21

Today is a feast day, in the Roman Catholic Church, for Saint Ephigenia of Ethiopia, the king’s daughter and an important convert of Matthew the Apostle, according to legend. 

Today is the birthday, in 1898, of Frances Mary Albrier, a civil rights activist who fought discrimination as a nurse, political candidate, and welder. 

Today is the birthday, in 1931, of Leonard Cohen, musician, author, and poet. Both his Jewish faith and his Buddhist philosophy are often reflected in his lyrics, which are full of sorrow, joy, and bittersweet reflections. He died in 2016. 

Reflection: 

Appropriate for this devotional, I’d like to share this quote from Leonard Cohen’s book Beautiful Losers: 

“What is a saint? 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 finite, 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.”

Leonard Cohen

In an interview, Cohen said:

“‘You have loved enough, now let me be the lover.’ You could say that God is speaking to you or the cosmos, or your lover. It just means, like, Forget it. Lean back and be loved by all that is already loving you. It is your effort at love that is preventing you from experiencing it. It is like if you ever taught kids how to swim. The most difficult thing is Goddam to understand that they will float, if they relax, if they hold their breath and relax, they will actually float. For most kids it is difficult to swim. They feel they are going to sink like a stone to the bottom of the lake.”

Leonard Cohen

Prayer: God, let us relax into your love, instead of fighting for our share. Amen.