{"id":690,"date":"2021-05-04T08:25:47","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T12:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=690"},"modified":"2021-05-04T08:25:47","modified_gmt":"2021-05-04T12:25:47","slug":"imagine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/04\/imagine\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Critics called it the most expensive home movie ever made.

In order to promote the release of his new album, John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono collaborated in 1971 on the filming of an 81-minute \u201crockumentary.\u201d 

The film opens with John and Yoko strolling through a bank of fog enveloping their wooded estate in Tittenhurst Park, an hour\u2019s drive west of London.  They enter the front door of their mansion as the first chords of the album\u2019s title song, Imagine<\/em>, begin to play.  John sits down at a white grand piano in a large, dimly lit room.  Yoko walks slowly from window to window, opening shutters that progressively flood the all-white room with light.  Then she joins him at the piano.  

In the days before MTV, this was heady stuff.

Imagine<\/em>, Lennon\u2019s first major hit after his departure from the Beatles the previous year, catapulted him to stardom as a solo artist.  The song has since become known as the \u201cinternational anthem of atheism.\u201d  Lennon asks his listeners to imagine a world in which there is peace, harmony, and equality \u2013 all without the restrictions of class, religion, and political ideology:

Imagine there\u2019s no heaven, it\u2019s easy if you try<\/em>
No hell below us, above us only sky<\/em>
Imagine all the people living for today\u2026Aha-ah\u2026<\/em>

Imagine there\u2019s no countries, it isn\u2019t hard to do<\/em>
Northing to kill or die for, and no religion, too<\/em>
Imagine all the people living life in peace\u2026 You\u2026<\/em>

You may say I\u2019m a dreamer, but I\u2019m not the only one<\/em>
I hope someday you\u2019ll join us, and the world will be as one<\/em>

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can<\/em>
No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man<\/em>
Imagine all the people sharing all the world\u2026<\/em>

You may say I\u2019m a dreamer, but I\u2019m not the only one<\/em>
I hope someday you\u2019ll join us, and the world will be as one<\/em>

The song has been covered by hundreds of other artists around the world.  For the last decade and a half it has been played just before the New Year\u2019s Eve Times Square Ball descends in New York City, beckoning the gathered masses to yearn for a new year that will bring us closer to Lennon\u2019s dream.  If only we can get rid of the soul-crushing modern social order \u2013 including walls and barbed wire between nations, Haves vs. Have Nots, and the mindless dogma of religious hypocrites. 

Growing up, Lennon had been disillusioned by the Church of England.  In a 1966 interview, during the heyday of the Beatles, he openly rejected Christianity:

\u201cIt will vanish and shrink.  I needn\u2019t argue about that, I know I\u2019m right, and I will be proved right.  We\u2019re more popular than Jesus now.  I don\u2019t know which will go first \u2013 rock \u2018n\u2019 roll or Christianity.  Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.  It\u2019s them twisting it that ruins it for me.\u201d 

In between the breakup of the Beatles and the release of Imagine<\/em>, Lennon recorded an album that included a song called God<\/em>.  After reciting a long list of things he doesn\u2019t believe in, he shouts, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in Beatles!\u201d 

Then he whispers, \u201cI just believe in me.  Yoko and me.  And that\u2019s reality.\u201d 

Despite the gentle tones and hopeful spirit of Imagine<\/em>, critics quickly pointed out something rather obvious:  John Lennon\u2019s \u201chome movie\u201d was stunningly hypocritical. 

The songwriter who lives in a luxury mansion on a secluded, 72-acre estate calls for the end of private property \u2013 but apparently not just yet.  The guy who asks us to \u201cimagine there\u2019s no possessions\u201d has a private swimming pool and is driven around in a Rolls-Royce \u2013 but he\u2019s not rushing to hand over the keys. 

In his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World<\/em>, historian Tom Holland points out that Lennon\u2019s most famous song is fundamentally Christian in spirit and origin. 

Holland is not a person of faith, so he doesn\u2019t have an axe to grind.  But he notes that the longing for a better world and a better humanity is not a pagan idea.  Nor is it the legacy of Eastern religions.  Nor is it one of the doctrines of Darwinists \u2013 for whom the world is a win\/lose battle for survival \u2013 or of atheist philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Holland believes would \u201cturn over in his grave\u201d if he heard Lennon\u2019s warm invitation to imagine everyone living in peace.

Historically, the vision of a new world \u2013 where human dignity and equal rights are extended to both great and small \u2013 did not originate with the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, or the Declaration of Independence.  It is the dream of those who follow Jesus \u2013 a dream that goes all the way back to their sourcebook, the Bible. 

Lennon was right: Jesus\u2019 followers tend to be \u201cthick and ordinary.\u201d  We get so many things wrong.

Whenever progressives rail against bigotry, injustice, and resistance to change, Christians appear to be roadblocks to societal transformation.  But as Holland points out, the very idea of societal transformation comes from the Jesus Movement.  The hopefulness of a song like Imagine<\/em>, in other words, doesn\u2019t spring from a no-God view of the universe, but from the deep well of Christian tradition.

It\u2019s no surprise that Lennon\u2019s 1966 interview stirred up a tornado of protest.  But in all the furor, people tended to forget that the Beatles\u2019 lead guitarist had spoken these four words:  \u201cJesus was all right\u2026\u201d

That\u2019s actually the conviction of many Christians.  Jesus is all right\u2026but boy, his followers can sure be disappointing.

Is there something in this world worth imagining? 

Of course.

Imagine what things would be like if we earnestly believed that God is committed to transforming everything<\/em>.

And that if we didn\u2019t settle for being thick and ordinary, he could do amazing things through us even today.
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Critics called it the most expensive home movie ever made. In order to promote the release of his new album, John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono collaborated in 1971 on the filming of an 81-minute \u201crockumentary.\u201d  The film opens with John and Yoko strolling through a bank of fog enveloping their wooded estate in Tittenhurst Park, an hour\u2019s drive west… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[228],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-societal-transformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}