Music governs my choice of coffee shops, for hanging out, reading, meditating, talking with friends and strangers. The closest and most pleasant coffee shop, the one within walking distance of my house with the open patio area covered by a ceiling of glassed panes that let in light and stop the rain, does not have the best coffee, but I prefer to go there anyway because of its other amenities — so long as the music is right. I used to go there nearly every Saturday morning to read the Bible or study, but it became too much of a hassle always to ask the staff to change over the music from the late-night rock-blues-jazz that livens the late Friday night open-band, open-mike festivities to a more appropriate early Saturday listening fare. So, I stopped going there for about a year, until recently I dropped in again on a Saturday to meet someone and discovered that the music had turned to classical. Nice. Very conducive to thought, introspection and thinking things through (or thinking them out, whichever idiom is better; I am not sure of the difference). So, I’ll probably go back again to test the melodic standards of the background noise again and give the place another test listen. Coffee’s still the same it seems.
Meanwhile, however, I have two other local coffee shops that get my patronage (how’s “patronage” for a culturally outdated holdover word?) — which brings me to the topic of “Coffee Shop Theology.” The last coffee shop I went to, a few days ago, was playing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” When I sat down in the coffee shop I am in right now writing this the musical offering was Bette Midler’s “God Is Watching Us (From a Distance).”
Which of these pop-culture icons’ expressions of coffee shop theology has the wiser offering for those whose meditations on God and the meaning of life are more likely to be inspired by random broadcasts than, say, sermons or main-lining the Bible itself?
Personally, as regular readers of my articles know, my preference turns toward the songs of David (aka the “psalms,” but in the original lyrics rather than their modern rewritten re-arrangements. That’s another topic, but I tell you so that you can get some insight into my analysis of the Lennon and Midler offerings (below). Here goes.
Lennon first. After all, he’s dead and therefore now knows how right or wrong his theology was, only he’s not writing any more songs to tell us the real story. What we are left with is what he “imagined” the real, hidden world to be when he was alive here.
“Imagine.” John Lennon.
“Imagine there’s no heaven/ It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us/ Above us only sky
Imagine all the people/ Living for today…”
Yes, it is easy to imagine that this life is all there is or ever will be and that death ends it all for each of us. Few people, however, do in fact imagine this as their final end. Most seem to imagine that there is indeed a heaven and that it is a heaven tailored to their fondest desires, in which they are honored residents, indulging themselves eternally in something-or-other they find pleasant. How could God do anything less for me and still be an acceptable god to me? Which explains why people also willingly imagine along with Lennon that there is no hell. Their idea seems to be to let everyone into heaven and to believe that heaven will be a better place than earth, despite the fact that everyone is there and unchanged from their earthly behavior. Sounds like hell to me.
Lennon’s initial flaw here, however, and the very dangerous premise his lyrics try to sell us, is the implication that his (or our) imagination somehow expresses something about reality, rather than his (or our) own wishes or fantasies. Perhaps it’s a danger that pop icons encounter, that people act as though everything they say is wise and true, so that they begin to believe that they actually do have special insights about life and ultimate values.
So the first evil and deception in Lennon’s world is religion, specifically belief in life after death, and reward or punishment in that life based upon our lives here and now. Lennon once said that he was greater than Jesus Christ, who explained both heaven and hell in no uncertain terms, so our choice here for reliable authorities is (a) John Lennon, (b) Jesus Christ, (c)ourselves, (d) none of the above, or (e) “It doesn’t matter because God, if there is a God, grades on a curve (as everyone knows) and I’m a better person than a lot of other people who think they’re getting into heaven.”
“Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too/ Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace…”
The second evil in the world is politics, political systems. If there were “no countries” and “no religion” there would be no wars. Lennon is espousing the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the belief in the “noble savage,” the innate goodness of man until corrupted by religion and political organizations. You know the theory: If there were no police there would be no criminals. Brilliant!
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