Let it Be

“The Love and peace generation of the sixties wasn’t wrong in trying to imagine something better than a world filled with hate and war – it was wrong in not finding a better Messiah than the Beatles.”

I’m part of the generation that grew up with the Beatles from the time they were a teeny bopper boy band to transcendental gurus, so this quote by Brian Zahnd brings up all sorts of memories.

I was in fifth grade sitting on a pink chenille bedspread when I first heard, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” My best friend and I were looking at her older sister’s very first Beatles album, the one with John, Paul, George, and Ringo wearing black turtlenecks and unprecedented shaggy hair. Who was the cutest? My vote, Paul with his dark arched eyebrows and down sloped eyes. I think my best friend picked George, and her older sister said Ringo was ugly, which made me feel sorry for him.

Then the day after Christmas 1963, The Beatles entered my living room via the Ed Sullivan Show. Sitting on our gray carpet, I stared at a boxy TV set and felt slightly embarrassed as Paul sang, “All my loving I will give to you,” while my parents looked on from the sofa.

My next Beatle memory was taking the bus downtown to Proctor’s Theatre with my friends to see A Hard Day’s Night, a feature length music video/ documentary before there were such things. On a hot summer afternoon, high in the balcony, beneath a gilded ceiling, we watched four zany boys chased by screaming, swooning girls they couldn’t escape.

By the time I was in high school, the Beatles had produced: Rubber Soul, Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, and Abbey Road, and as vanguards of globalization, brought home pot, LSD, eastern religions, Transcendental Meditation, batik fabric, Nehru jackets, and sitar music after befriending Ravi Shankar, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

My sophomore summer was the Summer of Love, when teenagers ran away to San Francisco, put flowers in their hair, and John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance” became a counterculture anthem.

The following spring, my best friend’s mother died of cancer, and as rain speckled my bedroom windows, I listened to Paul’s haunting “In my Life.”

The next summer was Woodstock, the legendary concert that created mantras like Do Your Own Thing, Free Love, and Question Authority. It was as if the Beatles had opened Pandora’s box containing death, shame, and an anxious freedom.

I graduated high school as the Beatles fell apart, yet the year before I graduated college, I studied in London, and one night, my roommate and I, stumbled upon their recording studio on Abbey Road. In the dark, leaning over a waist high wall, we lifted the lid of a garbage can on the other side, and grabbed fists full of trash as if we were back to being fangirls from A Hard Day’s Night. Amongst our finds was an envelope addressed to Paul McCartney. I don’t remember what happened to it. It hardly seems real I ever held it in my hand.

What I remember for sure is that a few months after my first child was born, John Lennon was shot and killed. Sitting on my living room carpet, alone with an infant sleeping upstairs, the same eyes that watched John’s meteoric rise on the Ed Sullivan show, spilled hot tears. Tears for John, for Yoko, for their own baby, who would grow up without a father. For all John Lennon had imagined that never came true. For Peace and love to have a chance in a world everyone was desperately trying to escape. I mourned him as someone, maybe something, I grew up with that died too young, my innocence.

Brian Zahn was right. John, Paul, George, and Ringo made lousy Messiahs. But they were seekers like me, young and effervescent, looking for love, looking for the transcendent mysteries of life that music endeavors to express. 

Almost fifty years ago, I stumbled upon the true Messiah, Jesus, who alone paid the price for us to be back in harmony with God and mankind.

And fifty years ago, last week, The Beatles’ final album, Let it Be was released.

Looking back, maybe, Paul was my favorite not just because he was my teenage heart throb, but because his songs express something true: the struggles of this world although global are as local as the human heart.

None of our yesterdays can be altered by looking back. We have to let it be with the Lord and be happy.

“Oh-bla-di Oh-bla-da life goes on bra! La-la how the life goes on.” Paul McCartney

Cover photo by Fedor on Unsplash