Imagine...

It’s hard to believe almost 30 years have come and gone since John Lennon’s death. Throngs of people gathered in New York City’s Central Park today to remember him on what would have been his 70th birthday.

Life, John wrote in a song for his son Sean, is what happen to you while you’re busy making other plans. Life is what happened to John that night 30 years ago in front of the Dakota Hotel where he lived. All these years later I wonder what plans he was making the day he died. The music he might have written, the millions more he might have touched…

Today’s headlines about teenagers who are literally bullied to death scream out in stark contrast to his music. It’s hard to imagine the Mentor High School girls in suburban Cleveland who badgered and harassed a classmate until she finally hung herself. It’s even harder to imagine how those same girls could go to their dead classmate’s wake and poke fun and laugh about how she looked in her casket.

Or what of the Rutgers University students who publicly humiliated a fellow student on the Internet? That student, a promising young musician, subsequently jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

Imagine a world in which a person's manner of dress or learning disability doesn’t subject him or her to constant taunts and derision. Imagine a world where a person’s sexual preference doesn’t signal open season for those whose own sense of inadequacy drives them to commit thoughtless acts that can have tragic outcomes. Imagine a world where all parents teach their kids to live and let live, and to respect other people’s right to be different.

Of all his songs, I most remember one John wrote in 1968 that received both positive and negative reaction from the music critics. The song, which John referred to as the best lyrics he ever wrote, has always struck a chord in me. I’m not sure why. Perhaps that is part of the magic of “Across the Universe.”

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

I imagine a world in which we all have an opened mind, a world where we don’t feel the need to humiliate and demean others for who they are, and where we celebrate the things that join us together rather than waste precious time and energy fixating on the things that make us different.

Sounds of laughter, shades of earth are ringing through my open views
Inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

Happily, we are all called across the universe. We need only open our minds in order to make the journey. Imagine…

Jai Guru Deva Om - rest in peace, John