Leonard Cohen: Show Me the Place Meaning

Song Released: 2011

Show Me the Place Lyrics

Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I've forgotten, I don't know
Show me the place for my head is bending low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

Show me the place, help me roll away the...

1. anonymous

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   Feb 2nd 2023 !⃝

   Most, knowing Cohen's body of work and previous songs about love and sex, read this song as a song to his lover and is about her body and oral sex. Also-as Cohen was Jewish he did not write about Jesus (even though Jesus WAS a Middle Eastern Jewish Rabbi)
2. anonymous

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   Jan 15th 2023 !⃝

   This is a prayer. Show me the place where I can serve others. Where I can bring forth the God within me. For I don't know we to go. We get lost, we give into temptations/troubles and we lose our way. To roll away the stone is to move away the stone in our lives that prevent us from freeing up our spirit to be more Christlike, to be in unison with God. He is humbled that he can't do this alone. None of us can. we need each other, we need the spiritual. The chains, like th stone, are our limitations that we put on ourselves. Being in unison with God perhaps we live with the chains and they are part of us. Our limitations. We can be all things to all people and perhaps we are needed where life calls us. We can not predict that, the universe, God will tell us where he wants us to be. If we listened. The suffering and the word became a man is to know that life is suffering. It is in acceptance of our suffering that we can connect with our higher being. Christ suffered and accepted his suffering and was risen to be with God
3. anonymous

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   May 24th 2019 !⃝

   This is about creation. But also the reference to “The Troubles” is intriguing. I wonder if the narrator is talking about Ireland.
4. anonymous

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   Dec 20th 2017 !⃝

   Or maybe it's not only about live to God or other religion, maybe lyrical ego compares his love of woman to love of God? "The place where Word became a man" can be an gentle yet controversial paraphrase of woman womb? He sings that by loving a woman, by getting intimate with her, his enslavement, 'suffering' started, and he wanted to forget he ever became a lover, when he sings that he forgot that he didn't know a place.
5. anonymous

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   Oct 23rd 2016 !⃝

   I don't know but I was reading this and it got gradually lighter. I did not touch anything. The light just got brighter. God, Jesus, I'm listening...
6. anonymous

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   Jun 2nd 2015 !⃝

   I only know what it meant to me for a moment. How did I ever miss this song? Some songs you hear and know immediately that it's special. These are bold words in this song. A song of surrender or a reaching out or maybe "thou shalt stretch for thy hands and another shall gird thee".
7. anonymous

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   Dec 24th 2013 !⃝

   The suffering began with the death of Jesus Christ and so with the birth of Christianity. Given the suffering, not only of the Jews, but also of so many other groups, initiated by this "loving" religion, Leonard seeks orientation in the world - "show me the place", I've forgotten, I don't know". He is seeking both understanding of what on earth this life we have is all about, as well as guidance on how he should now proceed, given the suffering caused by organised religion. Should he simply continue to be religion's (God's) slave, keeping commandments, doing what religion tells him to, or is there some other way to live a good, morally meaningful human life? Paradoxically, he appeals to God to show him the place where he might receive the enlightenment he is seeking. I think he is looking in the wrong place for this.
8. anonymous

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   Jan 30th 2012 !⃝

   Lyrics are asking your God to show where/what He wants you to go/do. You once knew, but need to be told again. The "troubles" temptations came. You were a slave to your God. Chains were the "rules" to adhere to as a slave, aka "believer". The stone at Jesus' tomb. A heavy load. The cross, where the suffering began, Jesus' suffering for all. Show Me The Place, asking where do I begin?

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