Baby You’re A Rich Man
I am constantly in awe of the Beatles. You may or may not like their music. It isn't for everyone. But what amazes me is what we might now call their "cheat code."
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison knew one another as teenagers in Liverpool. Ringo Starr joined them later, and somehow these four British kids changed the landscape of popular music forever. And they did almost all of it in less than ten years.
Toward the second half of that decade, things started getting weird. The music became more experimental. The lyrics became stranger. The questions became bigger. And yes, drugs were involved. But something else was happening too. The Beatles were becoming increasingly interested in consciousness, Eastern philosophy, Indian spirituality, meditation, and enlightenment.
Which is how we eventually arrive at a question tucked inside "Baby, You're a Rich Man":
How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?
That's an easy lyric to dismiss, maybe because most of us don't think of ourselves as "the beautiful people." The phrase sounds like it belongs to celebrities, wealthy people, important people, people with access and privilege.
But I was out walking recently when that lyric came through my headphones, and for whatever reason, I heard it differently.
I heard it as an invitation. Maybe even a permission slip from God.
What if beauty is not something you achieve but something you inherit? What if this isn't about celebrity or status at all? What if the invitation is to consider that there is a goodness within you that existed before all the things you learned you needed to do to become worthy?
There is another question in the song that makes this even more interesting: Now that you know who you are, what do you want to be?
That order matters to me. First, know who you are. Then, what do you want to become?
So much of our lives reverse those questions. Become something, and then perhaps you will be worthy. Accomplish something, and then perhaps you will matter. Make yourself useful, attractive, successful, spiritual, healed, enlightened, productive, and then perhaps you can finally believe that you are good.
Lately I've been wondering if the spiritual life offers us another way. Not another project of self-improvement, but a practice of returning. I've been calling it becoming re-sourced, a literal movement back toward the Source from which our life and goodness came in the first place.
And surprisingly, a 13th-century Franciscan mystic named Bonaventure has been helping me think about how we might find our way back.