Is the Dream Over?

Perhaps when one dream dies, another one simply arises.

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” — John Lennon

It was my college girlfriend’s 20th birthday; we had left campus to grab dinner to celebrate, and on our way back stopped by the local record shop to grab a copy of Yesshows, the latest album by one of my favorite bands. Back at my girlfriend’s room, the phone rang and it was her mom calling to wish her a happy birthday. She also said, “Did you hear one of the Beatles got shot?” We turned on the radio to learn that John Lennon was dead.

That was December 8, 1980.

In addition to being a member of the most successful band of the rock and roll era and a cultural icon in his own right, John Lennon wrote two of the most profoundly spiritual — but uncompromisingly agnostic — songs of our time: “Imagine,” his 1971 hit which became his signature tune, and the much lesser known but searingly dark “God,” released the year before. It’s a song where Lennon processes the end of his band with the loss of faith. Noting that God is an instrument for knowing our pain, he goes on to mournfully announce “the dream is over”; referencing one of his quirkier Beatles tunes: “I was the walrus, but now I’m John.” At the end of an almost litany-like recitation of all that he doesn’t believe in (from the I Ching and Tarot to Jesus and Buddha), Lennon finally admits, invoking his wife: “I just believe in me, Yoko and me, that’s reality.”

It would be far too easy for me, as a writer steeped in Christianity and other mystical traditions, to dismiss this song as the confused lament of a young man (not yet 30 when he wrote it) who was shattered by drug abuse and the implosion of a band he had started a decade earlier. But mysticism, ironically, gives me a different perspective on this song. Just as mystics do not fear the dark or unknowing, so we need not be scandalized by Lennon’s rejection of faith. For starters, Lennon was right: God really is a concept by which so many of us measure pain, or suffering, or even despair.

Troubled teenagers cut themselves so that they might feel something. How many of us outsource our hope and dreams to a two-dimensional God in the sky, just so we can find some way to make it through the day? I’m afraid the answer would trouble most of us.

The next reality: when we are wracked by suffering, or grief, it’s way too easy to declare our dreams dead, our faith shattered, our hope meaningless. But even in his anguish, Lennon still finds something to believe in: his marriage. In the years that followed, their bond would be tested (largely by his alcohol abuse and philandering), but before he died, Lennon’s final album practically served as a vindication of his one tiny thread of faith: Double Fantasy, released just works before his murder, documents how happy Lennon was — as a husband and father.

I don’t believe in hell or a vindictive God, but even I did accept such things, I’d trust that John Lennon’s love for Yoko would be enough to get him into heaven. God, after all, is not just a tool for assessing our suffering: God is Love. On the same album that included “God,” Lennnon sang a lovely song called “Love.” Meister Eckhart once said that truth is such a noble thing that if God ever abandoned truth, Eckhart would cling to it and let God go. Somehow, it seems to me that John Lennon embodied that choice: the “God” who has no relation to truth but seems to be a kind of supernatural crutch for people does, indeed, need to be abandoned, sooner or later. But that is only because the true God, who is one with Love, must in the end be our only faithful choice.