First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

I was a junior in college when life got grim.  In the year 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas.  It is difficult to express the complexity of emotions that his becoming president had for Americans.  Many of us took pride in his intellectual abilities; persons following intellectual pursuits were OK at last.  He and his celebrated wife filled the White House with the best musicians and poets—Pablo Casals played the cello and Robert Frost recited a poem for the Inauguration—and a sense of aesthetics and good humor prevailed in a way it never had before.

But it wasn’t all parties and high fashion.  The major American domestic issue was racial discrimination.  Citizens of color had second class citizenship and Martin Luther King, Jr. found himself propelled to the front of an energized civil rights movement.  Kennedy had the brains and the self-confidence not to react defensively; he saw that King’s nonviolence was a gift to the nation, infinitely preferable to violence.

Then came Kennedy’s thrilling idea of The Peace Corps!  This was exactly the sort of challenge young Americans—and later older ones—eagerly embraced:  to go abroad and teach something of value.  There was a feeling that we Americans could mobilize ourselves to bring about the global equivalent of Periclean Athens.

When Kennedy was killed we had to live with the ugly fact that there were some Americans who cheered.  We had to live with new information about the handsome president’s shadowy side, his sexual activity, his chronic illness, his drug use, and the machinations of his father in financing his election.  We learned about the American schemes to use our secret police around the world.  And though it was subtle, I say we had to learn to live with our guilt in being critical of the dead man.  We then had to live with the good and the bad of Lyndon Johnson.  He had the astounding power to bring into being Kennedy’s agenda and he had the inability to see the limits of our power in Asia.  That brought him down and it brought great suffering to the nation.  Families had terrible fights at the dinner table about Vietnam.

Martin Luther King developed the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience.  Today it is hard to believe that in many states in the South, black Americans could not register to vote; hard to believe only because today there are tens of thousands of elected black officials throughout the South, and of course black mayors, and most amazing and unexpected, black police chiefs!  In 1965 we were only trying to get the right to register and vote when I and thousands of other Americans joined Dr. King’s march from Selma to Montgomery.  Most Americans were beginning to understand the connection between racial discrimination and poverty, and some were seeing the costs of war and the price that must be paid at home.  (The more things change the more they remain the same.)  The worst that could happen happened in April 1968 when Dr. King was shot dead.  People who had been desperately poor but hopeful became despondent.  Some, with nothing more to lose, actually set fire to their own homes in the slums of America.  It was ghastly.

Then Senator Robert Kennedy began a campaign for the presidency.  He was seen as an opportunist, but he advocated popular political positions.  Before we had time to make up our minds about him, he was shot dead in Los Angeles.  Again the nation was wrenched.  No matter what one’s politics were, political assassinations were killing more than their targets; the soul of America was dying; the spirit was dead; we feared for the life of democracy.  It was unbelievable, and this incredulity coupled with tremendous national polarity and the increasing revelations about the FBI and the CIA spying on Americans nurtured many conspiracy theories, some of which continue to this day.

The aspirations of the sixties and the altruism made our disillusionment sickening.

Isn’t this supposed to be a sermon about the Beatles?  Oh yes!  And this is the context in which they appeared; this is the setting.  Into our homes and into our lives came a new celebration of common human life.  They brought balance and they counteracted the alienation young people, especially, felt toward government and universities.  They even bridged a sociological phenomenon identified as “the generation gap.”

One writer, Robert Hemenway, says the Beatles brought the Holy Spirit back into our lives.  A liberal German 19^th century theologian named Schlieremacher is the first to note that there are religious elements in culture that make ancient religious ideas fresh.  Unitarian Universalists in particular have seized on novel expressions as a way of keeping our values alive in our hearts and minds.

In 1974, Hemenway won an award for writing in The New Yorker magazine about “The Girl Who Sang with the Beatles.”  You probably didn’t know there ever was a girl who sang with the Beatles.  Her name was Cynthia, and she lived with Larry, her husband, in a very small apartment in New York.  They married in 1961, both for the second time, no children.  To put it gently, their noise level needs differed, so he bought her headphones and he got a pair, too.  They seemed to be drifting apart, living in two separate worlds.  After President Kennedy’s assassination Cynthia read nothing but articles about it, and finally Larry hoped to distract her by bringing home the Beatles first album.  They watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show (along with 73 million other people) and she became a fan.  Larry got her an electric guitar for her birthday, and she would plug in her guitar and sing with the Beatles.  Why not start your career with the best band you can find?!

And here is the passage in which Robert Hemenway presents his thesis that the Beatles are bearers of the Holy Spirit.  “One night Larry said, ‘Listen Cynthia.  The Beatles are filled with the Holy Spirit.  Did you know that?  They came to bring us back to life!  Out of the old nightmare.  Dallas, Ruby, Oswald, all of it, cops, thruways, lies, crises, missiles, heroes, cameras, fears, all that mishmash, and all of it dead.  Look at you.  They brought you back to life.  I couldn’t—not after November.  Nothing could.’”

And this is how that story ends.  And then one day “Larry got up, unplugged his headphones, and walked across the room to her.  He plugged his headphones in next to Cynthia’s and stood before her almost smiling.  She smiled and then, in silence, not quite touching her in that silent room, with the sound of the Beatles loud in his ears, Larry entered into her dance.”  And there the story ends, a slender story with a lovely insight. 

The Holy Spirit is one part of the trinity.  God as Father is one part, and Jesus is the third part.  For decades the Unitarian and Universalist God was God the Father, sometimes altered to an understanding of God as feminine.  But many UU theists would say they understand God as the Holy Spirit, and that may make better sense to you, too.

In the Bible the word spirit means breath or wind.  It means understanding God as invisible but as real as wind and as intimate as breath.  The Holy Spirit is empowering and, as it brings us to the Divine, it fulfills us.  The Holy Spirit brings fulfillment to human experience.  Music often conveys this and I have always been touched by the sound of a bugler playing taps at the cemetery—an experience I have had several times as a minister—and I attribute that rush of emotion to the Holy Spirit; it’s also true for me in some symphonic music.

Some of the Beatles songs could be described as hymns of love and peace, such as Give Peace a Chance, Imagine, All You Need is Love, Let it Be, and My Sweet Lord.  The Beatles’ songs energize us by showing energy and humor.  They evoke the Holy Spirit by broadening the context of our lives in a time that was disheartening and dispiriting.

My second point is that their creativity is a wonderful model.  “Without producing anything new they have never grown old,” said one biographer.  I think he means that they tap the obvious; a young man faces so many choices and so many duties, but he and his girlfriend still want to dance wildly, and they want to sing happily as they dance to the profound idea, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”  At the British Museum are cases showing the manuscripts of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, John Keats and the Beatles.  They produced almost 200 songs, and as the opening notes are played most people can identify what will follow.  They tap the unconscious feelings, such as the thrilling discovery that will make us silly, “She Loves You (yeah, yeah, yeah),” and set it to music that amplifies it in more ways than one.

More reflectively love and lust intermingle—as they do in life, ideally—with the words: “Something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover; something in the way she moves me….” Followed by the doubts and concerns all lovers have: “Will my love grow?  I don’t know, I don’t know.”

I was flat broke living in Berkeley in the mid-1960s saving for grad school.  (That sounds more romantic than it actually was at that time!)  The album came out with the song, When I’m 64.  I couldn’t afford to buy it.  I was in a record shop listening to that song with a complete stranger.  With amazement in his voice, yet crumpling emotionally, he said, “Oh wow, what a strange love song.”  That song, When I’m 64, has been sung or played at about a dozen weddings where I’ve officiated; one optimistic couple insisted on adapting the lyrics to be, When I’m 94!

And then there is so much fun.  “I’d like to be, under the sea, in an octopus’s garden, in the shade.”  Their language is just right.  You may remember the song, Eleanor Rigby “who picks up the rice in the church where the wedding has been.”  Eleanor Rigby’s name in the early drafts was Daisy Hawkins.  It doesn’t work, does it?

Dawn comes everyday but it took the Beatles to turn it into a charming announcement, Here Comes the Sun, “and everything’s gonna be all right.”  Here we have hope, optimism, and a reassurance that makes me want to sing along whenever I hear it.

The song, Mr. Kite, puts each of us back into being a young child with the prospect of a wonderful show.  John Lennon wrote this about that song: “I went into this store and bought an old poster advertising a variety show starring Mr. Kite.  It said the Hendersons would all be there … there would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogshead of real fire….  The Band would start at ten to six.  All at Bishopsgate.  I hardly made up a word.  I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for Sergeant Pepper at that moment.”

And of course, submarines should be yellow!

I think the lesson for we who want to be creative is to find childlike delight in the everyday; the elements our creativity needs are right before us.  This method holds for them when John Lennon hits a dry spell, writer’s block.  Not knowing what to write about, he writes, “I read the news today, oh boy.”  And that’s right on.  The song is titled A Day in the Life and relates to how the news affects me, how my job affects me, what my emotional needs are.  Another time, feeling empty, John Lennon said he wrote a description of himself with these words, “He’s a real nowhere man, living in a nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”  Lennon said one of his favorite songs was Help! “Because that was me at the time, that’s exactly what I meant.”  Some of an artist’s works reach us by overcoming the artist’s isolation because the artist shares that isolation.

How popular were they?  There was a moment in 1964 when the top five songs in America were all by The Beatles.  And the next year they had the fourth, fifth, and sixth best-selling albums.  (In those days they were called albums and they were made of vinyl.)

My last point is about their spiritual growth.  The money, the drugs, fame and the groupies and orgies stopped working for them.  John Lennon acknowledged more than 1,000 LSD trips and suddenly the drugs weren’t working.  He said, “We took heroin because of what The Beatles were and were doing to us.  The dream is over.  I no longer believe in myth and the Beatles is another myth.”  They began to practice Transcendental Meditation.  John met Yoko Ono and with her at his side began an intense schedule of therapy.  He wanted to end the Beatles yet felt he was on a moving train that no one wanted to stop.  John was killed in 1980—yes, as long ago as that.  There was still talk about a Beatles reunion—even the Secretary General of the United Nations proposed it as a fundraiser—to which George Harrison said, “As far as I’m concerned there won’t be a reunion as long as John remains dead.”  He added, “The Beatles will just go on and on because it’s become its own thing now.  The Beatles, I think, exist without us.”

George died.  His contributions deserve special note.  He was the first to use the sitar in a rock song.  His study of meditation led to Within You and Without You, and All Things Must Pass, rock songs based on Hinduism.  George had the adventurousness to use Hare Krishna singers in place of a gospel choir in the song My Sweet Lord.  A rock critic said George was the conscience of the group.  George produced the Concert for Bangladesh, a charity benefit for a beleaguered nation.  He stood by his values to the end.

When George Harrison died, The New York Times published several obituaries, one by the composer Phillip Glass, another by the sitar player Ravi Shankar, who said that after his own son died, George was like a son to him.  “What touched me so much was his worry about my health and well-being.  He would fly to be with me whenever my heart problems put me in the hospital.  His love and concern touched me deeply.  Though he is gone physically, he will always be alive and vibrant in my heart.”

For many of us so will the Beatles be alive and vibrant in our hearts.  For some of us they brought us to life by articulating our feelings.  They brought the Holy Spirit by revitalizing our sense of joy and wonder in the commonplace.  They restored balance to a time when heavy despair threatened to tip us over.

When we are grateful for people we keep them alive in our hearts.  And that is where the Beatles are holding their reunion, aren’t they?

PRAYER

We give thanks for the ongoing dynamic of creativity throughout creation,

grateful for touches of lightheartedness

when life’s seriousness threatens our buoyancy. 

Keep us open to inspiration wherever we may find it.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly.  All rights reserved.