To me this song is about how love and faith works in the same way. Love is represented by Suzanne and faith by Jesus. They both make you want to:
And you want to travel with him/her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust /himher
For he`s/she's touched your perfect body
with his/her mind
Which basically means that both love and faith are irrational, but that does not mean that they are not real, it is just the nature of love and faith to be irrational.
@Lurtz I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason....
@Lurtz I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason.
Since it's early days, Christianity has had a strong emphasis on having a balance of both faith and reason. The founders of the majority of the fields of science were priests and monks. The arena of philosophy, which has a strong emphasis on reason, was for its first 1,700 years made up mostly of Christians, Jews and a small number of Greeks who attained high spiritual heights and believed in God. Many atheists try to attack people who believe in God or who believe in Jesus for having "blind faith" and they try to claim that it's without reason. However, Cohen in this song points out at least one good reason to believe in and follow Jesus: if he has affected you in a positive way.
Another reason is that his teachings are brilliant and were 3,000 years ahead of their time. Most people on both the right and the left in the US today still haven’t caught up with what he taught. For example, most people on the left mostly only want to help people who are located in the US, nearly all of whom are already in the richest third of people in the world. Yet Jesus said the neighbors that we must love are foreignors who are in great physical need, and who we don’t identify with at all and we don’t feel like helping. The Jews and the Samaritans were in different countries and disliked each other. Dozens of other times he said the key criteria for helping people was their being highly poor. He said loving meant helping them in material ways: giving them a coat, feeding them, etc.
Yet 95% of donations made by Americans go to other Americans, almost all of whom are in the richest third (and who have about 700% more than the poorest third). Most donations go to the richest 10% (everyone making over $10k a year), who have about 10,000% more than the poorest 10%. Most people on the both the left and the right are guilty of this.
In the future, people will look back and think it was barbaric and massive discrimination that the poorest third were almost completely ignored and got less than 5% of the donations made. Yet 2,050 years ago, a guy who did physical labor in a tiny fishing village in a rural area of the Middle East was ahead of where we are even at today after 2,000 years of signficant progress in the directions of the things he said we should do. Plus that was when he was only 30 years old. His radical teachings were shared with only a fairly small number of people at a time when books weren’t widely available and most people could read and write. Yet his teachings massively changed the world. While that’s not guaranteed proof that he was divine, it’s a reason to believe he was, especially if you’ve also had a positive personal experience of him.
Another reason is that there is historical proof that his original followers said that they saw him after he was crucified by Rome, and they were willing to be brutally killed just for admitting this. Non-Christian historians of the time wrote about this. Another reason is that anyone who has lived for more than 40 years knows that we humans are messed up and off track in numerous ways and are really in need of help. So it’s reasonably logical that God would enter the world in human form to help.
Thus there is more than one reason to believe in Jesus, and even more reasons to believe in God in general. Indeed, it’s more rational to believe that this incredibly complex, intricate and beautiful world was created by a creator via the incredible big bang and the ensuing process of evolution than “believing” it occured only by total chance. So faith and reason work together. Faith is different from yet related to reason, and many times faith can be more powerful or more important than reason.
@Lurtz [[ This site doesn't allow paragraph returns, so this is now one paragraph ]]: I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will...
@Lurtz [[ This site doesn't allow paragraph returns, so this is now one paragraph ]]: I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason.
Since it's early days, Christianity has had a strong emphasis on having a balance of both faith and reason. The founders of the majority of the fields of science were priests and monks. The arena of philosophy, which has a strong emphasis on reason, was for its first 1,700 years made up mostly of Christians, Jews and a small number of Greeks who attained high spiritual heights and believed in God. Many atheists try to attack people who believe in God or who believe in Jesus for having "blind faith" and they try to claim that it's without reason. However, Cohen in this song points out at least one good reason to believe in and follow Jesus: if he has affected you in a positive way.
Another reason is that his teachings are brilliant and were 3,000 years ahead of their time. Most people on both the right and the left in the US today still haven’t caught up with what he taught. For example, most people on the left mostly only want to help people who are located in the US, nearly all of whom are already in the richest third of people in the world. Yet Jesus said the neighbors that we must love are foreignors who are in great physical need, and who we don’t identify with at all and we don’t feel like helping. The Jews and the Samaritans were in different countries and disliked each other. Dozens of other times he said the key criteria for helping people was their being highly poor. He said loving meant helping them in material ways: giving them a coat, feeding them, etc.
Yet 95% of donations made by Americans go to other Americans, almost all of whom are in the richest third (and who have about 700% more than the poorest third). Most donations go to the richest 10% (everyone making over $10k a year), who have about 10,000% more than the poorest 10%. Most people on the both the left and the right are guilty of this.
In the future, people will look back and think it was barbaric and massive discrimination that the poorest third were almost completely ignored and got less than 5% of the donations made. Yet 2,050 years ago, a guy who did physical labor in a tiny fishing village in a rural area of the Middle East was ahead of where we are even at today after 2,000 years of signficant progress in the directions of the things he said we should do. Plus that was when he was only 30 years old. His radical teachings were shared with only a fairly small number of people at a time when books weren’t widely available and most people could read and write. Yet his teachings massively changed the world. While that’s not guaranteed proof that he was divine, it’s a reason to believe he was, especially if you’ve also had a positive personal experience of him.
Another reason is that there is historical proof that his original followers said that they saw him after he was crucified by Rome, and they were willing to be brutally killed just for admitting this. Non-Christian historians of the time wrote about this. Another reason is that anyone who has lived for more than 40 years knows that we humans are messed up and off track in numerous ways and are really in need of help. So it’s reasonably logical that God would enter the world in human form to help.
Thus there is more than one reason to believe in Jesus, and even more reasons to believe in God in general. Indeed, it’s more rational to believe that this incredibly complex, intricate and beautiful world was created by a creator via the incredible big bang and the ensuing process of evolution than “believing” it occured only by total chance. So faith and reason work together. Faith is different from yet related to reason, and many times faith can be more powerful or more important than reason.
Several other things about faith in this song are in these verses:
Several other things about faith in this song are in these verses:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water ////
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower ////
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him ////
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them ////
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open ////
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone //// //// The other points are: 1) Only people who are really suffering will open their minds enough to see Jesus. So he says that people will be stuck in the small confines of a sailboat and the grueling efforts of operating a sailboat on the sea ... until the sea capsizes or sinks it, resulting in enough suffering to cause them to be open to seeing Jesus. If they’re not suffering enough, Jesus cannot even help free them. So suffering plays a key role. This is partly why Jesus said it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven. Because rich people have enough resources to stave off the amount of suffering that is needed to be open to seeing Jesus ... and also have enough resources to keep themselves distracted during suffering. It may help to explain why belief in Jesus has skyrocketed in Africa during the past 50 years, while it's plummeted in rich countries like the US and Europe. At any rate, Cohen’s verse also fits with the famous saying of “there are no atheists in foxholes.” 2) By saying that Jesus was “"forsaken, almost human” Cohen conveys that Jesus is fully divine. And that during the time in which he was forsaken, he was almost human and experienced human emotions. A portion of early Christians thought Jesus was only divine and not really human, but the consensus was that he was both God/divine and also human. Elsewhere in the song, Cohen achieves this balance by saying that even when Jesus was doing divine, miraculous things like walking on water and even though he was so divine that he was only “almost human”, he was at the same time still a human (a sailor, which is the metaphor that Cohen uses for humans in the song). 3) Before the sky would open is likely a reference to Jesus’s ascendance into heaven through the sky. While the Bible says there were clouds in the sky during the ascension, some famous paintings of the ascension show him ascending into an open sky like this Rembrandt painting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_of_Jesus. It might also refer to the book of revelation’s description of the second coming which says: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True …” and goes on to describe Jesus returning. But a second coming hasn’t occurred, so I think Cohen is referring to the ascension. 4) The verse about “He spent a long time waiting” refers to Jesus spending the first 30 years of his life watching people, before he began his teaching and ministry at the age 30. Working as a carpenter in a tiny village in a remote, rural area like Gallilee in an era long before telephones, radio, TV, post offices or other forms of communication is akin to being in a lonely wooden tower. 5) Jesus was broken and sunk by weak human wisdom that thought he was dangerous (for advocating things like giving most of our possessions to the poor, loving our enemies, forgiving the people who hurt us) and thus he must be eliminated.
To me this song is about how love and faith works in the same way. Love is represented by Suzanne and faith by Jesus. They both make you want to:
And you want to travel with him/her And you want to travel blind And you know that you can trust /himher For he`s/she's touched your perfect body with his/her mind
Which basically means that both love and faith are irrational, but that does not mean that they are not real, it is just the nature of love and faith to be irrational.
@Lurtz I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason....
@Lurtz I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason.
Since it's early days, Christianity has had a strong emphasis on having a balance of both faith and reason. The founders of the majority of the fields of science were priests and monks. The arena of philosophy, which has a strong emphasis on reason, was for its first 1,700 years made up mostly of Christians, Jews and a small number of Greeks who attained high spiritual heights and believed in God. Many atheists try to attack people who believe in God or who believe in Jesus for having "blind faith" and they try to claim that it's without reason. However, Cohen in this song points out at least one good reason to believe in and follow Jesus: if he has affected you in a positive way.
Another reason is that his teachings are brilliant and were 3,000 years ahead of their time. Most people on both the right and the left in the US today still haven’t caught up with what he taught. For example, most people on the left mostly only want to help people who are located in the US, nearly all of whom are already in the richest third of people in the world. Yet Jesus said the neighbors that we must love are foreignors who are in great physical need, and who we don’t identify with at all and we don’t feel like helping. The Jews and the Samaritans were in different countries and disliked each other. Dozens of other times he said the key criteria for helping people was their being highly poor. He said loving meant helping them in material ways: giving them a coat, feeding them, etc.
Yet 95% of donations made by Americans go to other Americans, almost all of whom are in the richest third (and who have about 700% more than the poorest third). Most donations go to the richest 10% (everyone making over $10k a year), who have about 10,000% more than the poorest 10%. Most people on the both the left and the right are guilty of this.
In the future, people will look back and think it was barbaric and massive discrimination that the poorest third were almost completely ignored and got less than 5% of the donations made. Yet 2,050 years ago, a guy who did physical labor in a tiny fishing village in a rural area of the Middle East was ahead of where we are even at today after 2,000 years of signficant progress in the directions of the things he said we should do. Plus that was when he was only 30 years old. His radical teachings were shared with only a fairly small number of people at a time when books weren’t widely available and most people could read and write. Yet his teachings massively changed the world. While that’s not guaranteed proof that he was divine, it’s a reason to believe he was, especially if you’ve also had a positive personal experience of him.
Another reason is that there is historical proof that his original followers said that they saw him after he was crucified by Rome, and they were willing to be brutally killed just for admitting this. Non-Christian historians of the time wrote about this. Another reason is that anyone who has lived for more than 40 years knows that we humans are messed up and off track in numerous ways and are really in need of help. So it’s reasonably logical that God would enter the world in human form to help.
Thus there is more than one reason to believe in Jesus, and even more reasons to believe in God in general. Indeed, it’s more rational to believe that this incredibly complex, intricate and beautiful world was created by a creator via the incredible big bang and the ensuing process of evolution than “believing” it occured only by total chance. So faith and reason work together. Faith is different from yet related to reason, and many times faith can be more powerful or more important than reason.
@Lurtz [[ This site doesn't allow paragraph returns, so this is now one paragraph ]]: I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will...
@Lurtz [[ This site doesn't allow paragraph returns, so this is now one paragraph ]]: I largely agree with you, though I'd clarify one thing: love and faith often have a power that is stronger than rationality, yet are not irrational. Cohen explains the rationality of love and faith throughout the song. For example, if Jesus touches us with his mind, that is a good reason to trust him and go with him even though you don't know where it will take you. It's impossible to know or have foresight on where a life of following Jesus will take you, so you are in effect traveling blind, but it is not without reason.
Since it's early days, Christianity has had a strong emphasis on having a balance of both faith and reason. The founders of the majority of the fields of science were priests and monks. The arena of philosophy, which has a strong emphasis on reason, was for its first 1,700 years made up mostly of Christians, Jews and a small number of Greeks who attained high spiritual heights and believed in God. Many atheists try to attack people who believe in God or who believe in Jesus for having "blind faith" and they try to claim that it's without reason. However, Cohen in this song points out at least one good reason to believe in and follow Jesus: if he has affected you in a positive way.
Another reason is that his teachings are brilliant and were 3,000 years ahead of their time. Most people on both the right and the left in the US today still haven’t caught up with what he taught. For example, most people on the left mostly only want to help people who are located in the US, nearly all of whom are already in the richest third of people in the world. Yet Jesus said the neighbors that we must love are foreignors who are in great physical need, and who we don’t identify with at all and we don’t feel like helping. The Jews and the Samaritans were in different countries and disliked each other. Dozens of other times he said the key criteria for helping people was their being highly poor. He said loving meant helping them in material ways: giving them a coat, feeding them, etc.
Yet 95% of donations made by Americans go to other Americans, almost all of whom are in the richest third (and who have about 700% more than the poorest third). Most donations go to the richest 10% (everyone making over $10k a year), who have about 10,000% more than the poorest 10%. Most people on the both the left and the right are guilty of this.
In the future, people will look back and think it was barbaric and massive discrimination that the poorest third were almost completely ignored and got less than 5% of the donations made. Yet 2,050 years ago, a guy who did physical labor in a tiny fishing village in a rural area of the Middle East was ahead of where we are even at today after 2,000 years of signficant progress in the directions of the things he said we should do. Plus that was when he was only 30 years old. His radical teachings were shared with only a fairly small number of people at a time when books weren’t widely available and most people could read and write. Yet his teachings massively changed the world. While that’s not guaranteed proof that he was divine, it’s a reason to believe he was, especially if you’ve also had a positive personal experience of him.
Another reason is that there is historical proof that his original followers said that they saw him after he was crucified by Rome, and they were willing to be brutally killed just for admitting this. Non-Christian historians of the time wrote about this. Another reason is that anyone who has lived for more than 40 years knows that we humans are messed up and off track in numerous ways and are really in need of help. So it’s reasonably logical that God would enter the world in human form to help.
Thus there is more than one reason to believe in Jesus, and even more reasons to believe in God in general. Indeed, it’s more rational to believe that this incredibly complex, intricate and beautiful world was created by a creator via the incredible big bang and the ensuing process of evolution than “believing” it occured only by total chance. So faith and reason work together. Faith is different from yet related to reason, and many times faith can be more powerful or more important than reason.
Several other things about faith in this song are in these verses:
Several other things about faith in this song are in these verses:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water ////
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower ////
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him ////
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them ////
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open ////
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone //// //// The other points are: 1) Only people who are really suffering will open their minds enough to see Jesus. So he says that people will be stuck in the small confines of a sailboat and the grueling efforts of operating a sailboat on the sea ... until the sea capsizes or sinks it, resulting in enough suffering to cause them to be open to seeing Jesus. If they’re not suffering enough, Jesus cannot even help free them. So suffering plays a key role. This is partly why Jesus said it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven. Because rich people have enough resources to stave off the amount of suffering that is needed to be open to seeing Jesus ... and also have enough resources to keep themselves distracted during suffering. It may help to explain why belief in Jesus has skyrocketed in Africa during the past 50 years, while it's plummeted in rich countries like the US and Europe. At any rate, Cohen’s verse also fits with the famous saying of “there are no atheists in foxholes.” 2) By saying that Jesus was “"forsaken, almost human” Cohen conveys that Jesus is fully divine. And that during the time in which he was forsaken, he was almost human and experienced human emotions. A portion of early Christians thought Jesus was only divine and not really human, but the consensus was that he was both God/divine and also human. Elsewhere in the song, Cohen achieves this balance by saying that even when Jesus was doing divine, miraculous things like walking on water and even though he was so divine that he was only “almost human”, he was at the same time still a human (a sailor, which is the metaphor that Cohen uses for humans in the song). 3) Before the sky would open is likely a reference to Jesus’s ascendance into heaven through the sky. While the Bible says there were clouds in the sky during the ascension, some famous paintings of the ascension show him ascending into an open sky like this Rembrandt painting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_of_Jesus. It might also refer to the book of revelation’s description of the second coming which says: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True …” and goes on to describe Jesus returning. But a second coming hasn’t occurred, so I think Cohen is referring to the ascension. 4) The verse about “He spent a long time waiting” refers to Jesus spending the first 30 years of his life watching people, before he began his teaching and ministry at the age 30. Working as a carpenter in a tiny village in a remote, rural area like Gallilee in an era long before telephones, radio, TV, post offices or other forms of communication is akin to being in a lonely wooden tower. 5) Jesus was broken and sunk by weak human wisdom that thought he was dangerous (for advocating things like giving most of our possessions to the poor, loving our enemies, forgiving the people who hurt us) and thus he must be eliminated.