The Beatles, "Hamilton" and God

Carl Jung once observed that true loneliness doesn't come from being physically alone, but from feeling unable to communicate to others the things that matter most to us.

So begins Faith Current in one of her remarkable posts on The Abbey: The Beatles Reimagined.

One of the consolations of a Personal God is that we mutually communicate with Him “the things that matter most to us”.  By this I do not mean that God is our BFF or that He thinks the way we think and (God forbid) affirms our own petty and selfish desires (this is the trap my Christofascist former friends have fallen into), but that the things that matter most to us are not just “things” and they don’t just “matter” “to us”.  They are somehow transcendent, tied into the Divine Ground of our Being.

This was a phrase (“Divine Ground of our Being”) that resonated with Faith Current, who left a comment on one of my recent posts - which is how I discovered her wonderful Substack on the Beatles.  It’s a phrase that’s often used by my favorite writer Eric Voegelin and it serves to disarm our tendency to “reify” the Divine, to make God a thing like any other thing, to put God into our pocket and take Him out when He comes in handy.

But such a god leaves us “out of pocket”, lost while smugly certain that we’re found.  

As a corrective to this bourgeois and self-satisfied religiosity, Faith Current writes a stunning piece about encountering something Divine that cannot be put in our pockets when she writes about visiting the Cavern in Liverpool.  I am hesitant even to quote from that article, which she says will serve as a chapter in an upcoming book, as the rawness of the encounter is almost sacrosanct.

Or, to some, silly.  

After all, she’s writing about the Beatles - a pop band.  But Faith Current somehow captures in prose a hint of the rawness of that sound, the sound of their early, sweaty music.  And more than that.  She is talking about a religious experience, a spiritual encounter.

***

The first time I saw Hamilton on stage was in a small theater in Chicago, along with my wife and my son and daughter.  My son Colin has seen the show eleven times, including once on Broadway with the original cast.  He had encouraged us to go. “I’m just warning you,” Colin had said a day or two prior, “I might go into a trance during the show.  I might sit there silently weeping.”

As I later wrote …

When the show began and the actor playing Hamilton walked on stage (and we saw the alternate, Joseph Morales, who - though the “understudy” - was nevertheless spectacular) - when Hamilton walked on stage, two young women sitting to the left of my daughter, Kerry, gasped audibly in excitement.  Kerry told me these young ladies sat crying throughout all of Act One, shaking with emotion.  Still … “That’s the quietest reaction I’ve seen at the beginning of this show,” Colin later noted.  “On Broadway, when Lin Manuel Miranda (who played Hamilton in the original run) entered for the first time, they literally had to stop the performance until the cheering died down.”

In Chicago, at the Private Bank Theater, it was almost a subdued version of Beatlemania. … By the end of Act Two, my wife Karen sat sobbing and hugging me.  “The first time I saw the show,” said Colin, “I sat next to a middle aged dad, who had reluctantly brought his teenaged daughters - and yet through most of it, he was broken down in tears.”

But who was sitting two rows ahead of us the whole time?  And who was definitely not “broken down in tears”?  A bishop!  I noticed him at intermission, wearing his black clericals, and I noted the chain of his pectoral cross, I noticed his ring.  I Googled for pictures of Chicago bishops.  It turns out he was an auxiliary bishop from Milwaukee.

And (naturally), of all the people in the audience, he seemed the least affected by the performance.

“There is no way he will mention this show in his homily,” I said to Colin.  “This is too much of a religious experience.”  I could not hear what the bishop was saying to the people he came with, but from the bland expression on his face, it could have been something about his golf game, his doctor friend, his lawyer friend, the snacks in the lobby.

I will take the chance of quoting Faith Current about the current that passed through the Cavern in Liverpool as she watched a Beatles tribute band play when she was there during her pilgrimage …

They're not a copy, they're a conduit, summoning the spirit of Them through music in exactly — not almost, not sort of — but exactly the same way ancient shamans gathered in caves (caverns!) and cloaked themselves in animal skins and howled at the moon to ward off the demons and petition the gods for fertility and successful hunts.

In the moment, I'm not thinking much past that, which is of course the point of ecstatic religious experience like it’s the point of orgasm — to lift us temporarily out of our heads and into something greater than ourselves. Later, when I do think back on all of this, I recognise what happens at the Cavern as being rooted in the (often literal) underground mystery religions of ancient Greece — a modern incarnation of the Dionysian Mysteries or the Bacchanalia or the Rites of Orpheus in which maenads tore the flesh from the pipers as their music drove them into lustful frenzy.

This experience is, you might say, “Dionysian” - but of course, especially for fans of Euripides’ play The Bacchae, a Dionysian experience is not exactly suitable for a suburban Mass.  Or, as CS Lewis has one of the children say, after encountering Bacchus / Dionysus in Narnia … “I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” (Aslan being the Jesus of Narnia, a moderating presence, constraining Bacchus to behave with at least some propriety; by contrast, his followers in The Bacchae, without Jesus or Aslan involved, tear an onlooker to pieces, literally limb from limb - though I don’t know how they staged that).

Such a Bacchanal as the Cavern’s cover-band and physical setting facilitated is no doubt powerful - and evocative of the early raw energy that made Them - the Beatles - what they were.  

But the Beatles were not just “Dionysian”.  The opposite of the orgiastic thunder of a Dionysian experience is an intellectual “Apollonian” one.  Dionysus was the god of wine, inebriation - and theater! - while Apollo stood for the kind of rational thought that required distancing and cool deliberation.

The Beatles were both.  

You can hear both elements throughout their musical career, but what most fascinates me about the Beatles music is how intelligent it is.  From the middle of their career onwards, the songs have a structure to them that you can almost ponder.  The songs manage to be both moving and “curious”, so that when listening you are both moved emotionally and engaged at some sort of intellectual level, encountering them both immediately and at a distance at the same time.

Maybe this is what the Faith should be: both the raw emotional encounter that the evangelicals emphasize as well as the unfolding revelation that addresses our understanding, which the Catholics traditionally emphasize; both Dionysian and Apollonian.

But our current faith has little currency, and the current of faith is often feckless.

And so Faith Current addresses this: she attempts to overcome the “standard narrative” about the Beatles, which is one that caricatures them and turns them into the poorly animated cartoon Beatles, who (as in the Beatles cartoons) don’t even have the voices of the actual band.

But this is not an easy task, to “communicate to others the things that matter most to us” (as Jung wrote).  I’m sorry to say I’ve fallen quite shy of it myself - for I’ve written on the Beatles, both on my old blog (which I’ve since taken down), and in an article about John Lennon for Faith and Culture, entitled “The Beatles, Shakespeare and God”.

My excuse could be that I sold out when writing that piece, except I wasn’t paid for it.  But in those days - 2019, right before COVID and the Great Unmasking - I was eager to parrot the Party Line.

And here’s one of the things you were required to do as an aspiring writer in the Revivalist / Super Catholic world: you had to criticize the song “Imagine”.

That was almost a ritual of initiation.  I had been active in the Super Catholic world of media and publishing for over a decade at the time, but one thing remained to be done before I could get my wings: criticize the song “Imagine”.

And this is easy, both because the song has a few insipid lyrics that are easy to pick on; and also because your audience completely agrees with you and wants their existing beliefs to be reinforced, not challenged (much like the people who showed up to hear whatever pablum the bishop poured forth in his homily after he saw Hamilton - without, I’m certain, referring to the play).  You are preaching to the choir - except it’s a choir with no musical taste.  Or common sense.

Because (though I do not admit this in my 2019 article) “Imagine” is maybe the most beautiful melody Lennon ever wrote.  And common sense can look beyond the sometimes inane lyrics and see (or hear) the spirit of them.  The spirit of the song is simple and hopeful and sweet.  If it is foolishly utopian, it is the foolish utopianism of a kind of innocence or childish faith in the face of turmoil, not unlike “Happy Christmas / War is Over”.  And people respond not only to the haunting and subliminally transcendent chords and the melody, but to the spirit of the song, this spirit of simple hope, a hope that we’ll someday cut the crap of a “reified” heaven and hell (weapons we keep in our pockets and take out to throw at other people), a hope that someday even that god-damned religion will finally quit causing so much pain.

But it’s so much easier to mock this hope than it is to be moved by it.

In a similar manner, when I Googled to find the above quote about Bacchus from the Chronicles of Narnia, it came from a website whose Protestant author was quick to follow up Lucy, the child’s, observation about Bacchus and Aslan with this …

In our world, we have Bacchus without God. We have that wickedness and sinfulness that a life without God brings.

In other words, stay out of the Cavern!  Don’t play rock and roll!  For that matter avoid …

Ragtime!  Shameless music, that will drive your son, your daughter

To the arms of a jungle animal instinct,

Mass ‘steria!

Friends, the idle brain is the devil’s playground.  Trouble!

Oh, we got trouble!  Right here in River City!  Right here in River City!

(… taken from a great American musical, written sixty years before Hamilton, a song from which the Beatles covered in their early days.)

The woman blogger above who complains about “the wickedness and sinfulness that a life without God brings” due to Dionysian revelry is wrong.  In our world we do not have Bacchus without God.  If anything, we have God without Bacchus - and without Apollo.

So any art that can evoke a little of either god - of either aspect of the Divine Ground of our Being - any art that can both move us and make us think, any art that can open up the real heaven above us, the real hell below us, showing us the true beauty even of “above us only sky”, any encounter that is both Dionysian and Apollonian, as good art always is, is not to be feared, not to be avoided, but to be understood, enjoyed, unpacked and celebrated - as Faith Current is currently (and I hope for a long time to come) doing.