All my life, I have heard about John Lennon. In fact, my husband is a huge Beatles fan. However, it wasn’t until I wrote my post yesterday and questioned what if there wasn’t a heaven or a hell that I started to truly understand that John Lennon was a great philosopher trying to understand his world and share a message of peace with the world.
Today, I went back and re-read some of his lyrics and I realized that he was trying to share a message that was very similar to my own. The life we are given is right here and right now. We shouldn’t be concerned with the end result; we should live for the moment. We need to embrace life as it is. Everyone was upset about his lyrics because he was trying to suggest there was no heaven. I thought that was the idea as well. Then, I realized today that wasn’t what he was saying at all. He wasn’t being anti-religious. He was trying to talk about God beyond the duality of this physical world, where people don’t live for a reward or punishment in the afterlife, but instead live in gratitude for the gift of life that God has given us. In other words, he was saying forget about Heaven, Hell, religion and all the rest of it, and instead just realize life before it ends all too soon.
It reminds me of a conversation I had once with a Jewish man. I told him and I didn’t know very much about the Jewish religion. He told me that above all else he held life as being important. I thought he was talking about life in the way Catholics talk about the gospel of life in a way of not taking life, but the more that I grow in my faith, I realize now he meant that living is the most important thing. Life is this amazing gift from God, and I am so grateful to have had all these experiences, messages, and signs telling me so.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
