“Imagine there’s no countriesIt isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
And I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I’m a dreamer
And I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will live as one
John Lennon, Imagine, 1971
John Lennon’s most famous song is an anthem, almost a lament, for the fading dream of the Sixties Counterculture.
John Lennon and The Beatles remain iconic almost fifty years after their break-up. Sir Paul McCartney remains a superstar in his own right, the only one of the “Fab Four” to have aged gracefully and remained a credible voice in the culture. The cultural legacy of this legendary band is probably impossible to compute. Their creative genius inspired many in everything from hair styles, clothing, musical innovation, to aspirations to make the world a better place. At times, they provoked great controversy. Many tales were spun of their supposed nefarious schemes to drag youth into drugs and eastern religion and promiscuity. None of these ravings proved real.
For many “back in the day,” John Lennon was the real group rebel, the ‘bad boy.’ After all, was it not Lennon who brought about the end of what many have considered the greatest popular music combo of all time? Didn’t he forsake his first wife and childhood sweetheart and take up with Yoko Ono, a wailing Oriental anarchist-poet, thus sowing bad feelings among his fellow Beatles, who much disliked Ms. Ono and sympathized with his abandoned first love? Didn’t he want to take the group down a road of ‘countercultural radicalism’ and activism, which he modelled by his peripatetic “naked bed-in for peace” crusade?
The Beatles were the most salient symbol of the flux and turmoil of the Boomer Generation. They were the master minstrels of the age. Their early idealism and optimism was followed by a search for deeper meaning. They playfully explored alternatives to the Establishment formula of ‘good job/career/get married and have a nice life, and do religion in the traditional way.’ It was a time to question, to challenge norms, to seek greater meaning and make love and peace. The old ways had produced two world wars and brought no peace. They had generated crass materialism as an answer. Ironically, the Beatles as icons of challenge and change were multi-millionaires many times over, fêted, celebrated, and knighted, but, somehow, they symbolized the search for a new way of ‘being real.’
John decided he would actually take up that challenge and seek the missing deeper meaning. Yoko was his guide and mentor. George had found it in Krishna and attached himself to Guru Mahesh Yogi. In contrast, Paul was no mystic or great idealist. He was a professional entertainer who saw his mission in offering people relief from their stresses and burdens. Ringo wanted to find his own way, and not just live in the shadow of John and Paul. The band broke up like a bitter divorce, citing ‘irreconcilable differences.’
John’s answer was to shuck all mysticism and spiritual ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ Reality is this world as we have it, the only one we can know, and we are destroying it and threatening to kill ourselves with our hatred. He wanted to be an apostle of peace. When The Beatles were at the peak of their popularity he had once cheekily said, “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ.” Half-believing his own propaganda, he would travel the world as a living demonstration of the gospel of ‘Make love, not war.’ The anthem was “All You Need Is Love.” In this, his diagnosis was partially right.
In seeking the true ‘point of departure’ for finding a better way forward than the dead-ends of moribund Christendom and illusory, evolutionary, materialist Progressivism, love is indeed an essential element. It is also the oft-professed core of Christianity, which declares that the Creator’s most essential characteristic is ‘love’. (“God is love.”)
Other religions, theologies, and philosophies speak of love, and even of God’s love. We cannot here engage in an extensive philosophical, ideological, and theological comparative analysis of all these worldviews. Neither would it be helpful to resort to a polemical tirade about the superiority of one system over another. As a writer, and in fairness to the readers of this little effort at dialogue amid the factional shouting of our time, I openly confess my own position as a long-time follower of Jesus. I am not an especially good disciple of ‘the Master.’ I am simply striving to achieve more clarity about who we are, where we are, why we are in a mess, and what we can do about it. I invite others to likewise seek clarity. Maybe then we will have better “eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Back to John Lennon and what he represents as an icon of our age. We know that ‘Sir John’ was murdered by a deranged man seeking his Andy Warhol moment of notoriety. He was much lamented and mourned by millions of fans and the cultural glitterati of the sixties and seventies. His death was also symbolic—the end of a sort of Don Quixote quest to idealistically set the world to rights by symbolic windmill tilting. Lennon did not, as the poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) put it, “Go gentle into that good night.”[i]
But the world has not changed. War rolls on; dictatorship, avarice, and leaderly deceit still crush and suborn. The wealthy manipulate and coerce and control, and revolutionaries find power intoxicating and become oppressors in their turn. The human heart remains a fickle and slippery thing. Good impulses are overcome by subtle selfishness masquerading as altruistic motives. Unless …
A prophet of olden times once said, speaking for the living Creator who named Himself I AM, “In that day I will put a new spirit among you. I will remove from [your] bodies the hearts of stone and give them hearts of flesh … as for those whose hearts go after the heart of their loathsome things and disgusting practices, I will bring the consequences of their ways on their own heads …. make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit …. I take no pleasure in the death of anyone …” (Ezekiel 11:19, 18: 31. 32a, The Complete Jewish Bible )
In every age and nation and among every people group, we have walked for millennia under the mastery of the old ‘heart and spirit of stone.’ The modern and postmodern West’s solution to this is completely illogical, despite its arrogant claim that it is the polar opposite. The West has taken to denying that the heart and spirit even exist and saying that only stone exists. We are told that somehow the stone can and will ‘evolve itself’ into a new sort of substance that will overcome the perpetually overpowering urges of the old.
John Lennon was once the icon of the West’s errant fancy, saying that, somehow, love is the answer and we just need to love, and that we have the power to love this way within ourselves. The Icon John Lennon, a tragic figure of quasi-martyr status, was succeeded by others, among whom is Stephen Hawking. Hawking was no sentimental dreamer, but a man absolutely dedicated to the primacy of reason, logic, and the scientific method.
Like everyone else, Hawking found it much more difficult to live by his convictions than to promulgate them. In the conclusion of A Brief History of Time, Dr.Hawking stated, with extreme reluctance, that the best answer, the simplest answer, the most efficient and logical answer to the evidence of the origin and nature of the cosmos and that very mysterious phenomenon called time, is GOD! But, unable to digest his own conclusion, he declared that “we no longer have need of that hypothesis.” He went on to make a very religious creedal statement that he had absolute faith in science that some time, someone would find the missing pieces in the puzzle and the “God-hypothesis” would lapse into its rightful place—a curious relic of an earlier age of credulity.
These examples reconfirm that, as we have seen demonstrated over and over now, the current path of our society is a dead-end. Neither can we return to the old ‘Christendom’ model which finally expired in the 1960s. Nor can we reasonably expect that by mere wishful thinking and a more determined effort we can progressively ‘fix this.’ We need a new way to move out of our morass.
We must go (return) to the departure point we have finally begun to glimpse through the fog of malaise and despair. “Remember your Creator,” as Solomon said. We must finally turn our faces to the Creator and become humble, admitting we desperately need a new heart and a new spirit, both individually and collectively.
Our next questions are, “How do we get there, and what do we do when we do?”
To be
continued …
[i] Dylan Thomas’ famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”:
First stanza: Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rage at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
World.V.You 