“All you need is love” I am sure even if you are or were not a Beatles fan you have heard this song. Some people say it was the anthem of a generation. Somewhere around the late 1960’s there was a movement called ‘Love Power’. You might be known as a flower child and spent your days singing about love and peace. On the surface it all sounded pretty good. I was there and participated in it and can tell you it was not all it was cracked up to be.
During my high school years, especially my junior and senior years, I spent a lot of time on the north side of Chicago. There is an area there known as Rogers Park. I guess it is part of the city now, but back in the 60’s it was a lot like the Hait Asbury of San Francisco fame. It was a hot bed of the hippie movement and even more important to me the center of the free love movement. After all I was a hormonal teenager who thought that love was all about the physical. The problem was so did a lot of people who were older and should have known better.
In this neighborhood I got to know a lot of people. It was nothing if not varied. You could go to one place and it would be all about Viet Nam. Most of these would center around protesting against the war. These were serious people and I did not often hang out. In the same building there might be a group studying and practicing I Ching, an ancient Chinese history and divination manual that could predict the future or, so I was told, I wasn’t into it either. I, like so many others, was seeking sex, drugs and rock and roll. There was plenty of each one, even for a youngster like me.
For me it was a weekend thing. And even at that it could only be one weekend a month, if that. After all my regular gig was attending a Catholic seminary at which I was a full-time boarder. But seeing by this time my parents had moved to Upper Michigan, when I had our monthly weekend off, I made the party scene as often as I could. I guess you could say I was living a double life, full time straight, Catholic seminarian and part time hippie. But I bought into the hippie thing so much more than the Catholic. I thought it was all about love and again, like so many, I was seduced into believing the ‘just do it’ lifestyle had no consequences. We were all wrong.
I think the major problem with what happened is we all took that attitude about ‘love’ into our lives and more detrimentally into our marriages. It was the idea of that generation to tear down the old stodgy institutions and live this brave new life. But what happened is we became addicts of our own devices. For some it was the drugs and others it was the sex and for some of us it was both and more. In this baseness we did succeed in tearing down the sacred but what was it replaced with? I think any reasonable being can see the results in the torn and conflicted society we live in today.
If the story ended there, there would be no hope. But, of course, it doesn’t. What I missed back then is still available to me now. Even with all my misconceptions and failures. Even though I believed Satan’s lies about ‘free love’ as spoken in so many lyrics of so many songs. Even though I, in the addictions which were rooted in those party days, laid a path of destruction. Even with all this and more, God still wants to show me what real love is, simply stated, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8) And love so personified on the cross of Jesus Christ, if you can believe, changes everything “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) Once you can see this love and through the Holy Spirit make it the center of your life, nothing compares.
After high school, I never went on to live the ‘hippie’ lifestyle. But I did allow those early influences to guide the path of my life for so many years. With distorted pictures of love, with the idea that neither alcohol nor drugs were destructive. With self becoming my all and all. I lived the spirit of those misconceptions for years. I am sure some of my old comrades would think I have just become old and conservative, but they would be wrong. I am still very much an activist. But now I am spreading the message of truth as spoken in these words, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death- even death on a cross! (Philippians 2: 5-8) This is what I know about love today. It is the song I now sing.
Blessings and Happy Sabbath,
John
5/3/19
