By Claire B. Crawford, PhD, Columnist
Blessed are the patient, the long suffering. Blessed are the “someday our freedom will come” believers, the prayer warrior of one hundred generations. Blessed are the prayers in the still and small early mornings of our grandmothers. Their hums and murmurs lifted toward a merciful and hearing Lord. Blessed are the seekers of the Long Hallelujah.
Hallelujah is not always a shout. Sometimes it is hum that carries us through the endless day. Hallelujah, as a word of sonic healing, Hallelujah as the insistence of life itself. I can hear from the pews of my father’s church in Lithonia, Georgia, a member rising with thunder and speaking those spirit-sticking words eons deep within all of us,” Hallelujah!” she expressed. “I thank the Good Lord I am still here. That I woke up to his mercies and in my right mind.” The Long Hallelujah: The ecological arc of our miraculous and spectacularly short spans on this Earth, the Long Hallelujah, the quiet proclamation of life bigger than any death, of a longer journey of the spirit, of a hope eternal, of something better and brighter we may not see now, but we can march forward in the meaning. And in the meantime, we lift the long hallelujah not because the struggle is over but because we are still here, still living. The well continues to go deeper, the long Hallelujah, striking fresh and pure waters from the river of life. We must condition ourselves for a longer journey through the wilderness.
The very possibility of life is blaringly under assault. The (de)construction of an American republic, an experiment working, failing, incomplete, and rooted in systems that conspire to choke the breath out of our lives, is not an abstraction. But we have always been under assault. Whether it be policies stripping our living beings of the potential to continue, institutions deconstructed to push our minds backwards, language digging at our dignity, or politicians standing mute to the people. We’ve been here before.
Any yet, the long hallelujah rises, a refusal to render our lives as being purely responsive to governing interactions but instead see our lives as intricately woven within and inside a living politic of care and gentleness to ourselves and one another. As we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I ask if you will join me and sing Hallelujah with me, with our living life here, now, within our weary, stunning Earth.
We sing hallelujah because we must live. The long hallelujah is communal. It is lived beyond the pews, not reserved for worship, but our declarations as they float between belief in promises of liberation and the realities of oppression. In a nation where civil religion sanctifies injustice, the long hallelujah unmasks false innocence and insists that we live a divinely guided life of justice.
The long hallelujah is lived in streets and demonstrated through care for one another. To live in this political moment requires more than endurance; it requires our active resistance. It’s not an expression of compliance but a refusal to accept what is. I sing Hallelujah with you as an assertion that our freedoms are tied together. Our heartbeats make music together, yearning for a more just world and building it now. The long hallelujah, a defiance we are called to choose life more abundantly—the music of God’s sovereign timing toward justice and freedom.
Until then, we sing on. And when you get tired, and you find your voice faltering, there is a chorus singing with you. Hallelujah is our tune to live against despair, greed, and violence. In a world that profits from our silence, I cling to a long hallelujah.
