the long and winding road...

I am thinking of another Southern summer that found cooler air blowing on August 15th.This is not such a summer.The mornings are cooler but the heat at noon is oppressive.I watch the trees for the first sign of leaves loosening their hold on branches.All is green and still.

When I was in much cooler Liverpool at the Beatles museum, I paid little attention to the John Lennon information.He was never my favorite of that astoundingly successful group but I caught something on TV last night that grabbed my attention.The show described the hard childhood that Lennon had, an absent father and a partying mother who was killed by an automobile when John was a teen-ager.The narrator said that the absent father haunted Lennon's life and when his first child was born he repeated the pattern and disappeared.

Several pictures of the boy Lennon were shown and what a sweet face.Such innocence.I see him as a teen in his room filled with anger at his mother's inattention and his father's sea sailing absence.And then the stuffing of it deep down with, "I don't care."But the hole is there and he tried many things to fill it.

I think of my favorite Beatle song,the "The Long and Winding Road...."You left me standing here a long, long time ago.... lead me to your door...." I once remarked to a friend that perhaps this was a spiritual song.He laughed but I made it a hymn that speaks to me of being here, when one's heart was made for There.The longing for the Other that is just out of reach.McCartney said it came to him in Scotland and spoke of the unattainable, the door you can never quite reach.That is a deeply spiritual place to me.

Back to the sad childhood.Who can not identify with the loneliness and loss of childhood?Who does not bear the Swiss cheese holes of loss, humiliation, fear left from childhood?And now let's bring Simone Weil into our meditation.She says:"One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today is that looking is what saves us.The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking at it."

What am I looking at? The painful holes or the road that leads me to the Door.And this line makes me misty..."The road will never disappear".Allelulia.