The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on What Makes a Saint

On loving the world enough to surrender to the laws of gravity and chance.

In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.”

Saints still walk our world, though now we ...