By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I am learning, somewhat reluctantly, that there is tremendous value in the next best thing, especially if it helps me live in the now moment.
As a child and young man, I felt deprived, like I was missing something. I grew up in a small town and a small state. I knew little or nothing about my Irish-American heritage. I never travelled or left the country. I never met (or even saw) an American president. I never had the chance to hear Abraham Lincoln speak or to watch the Beatles sing. I was a small fish in a big pond, but sometimes feared I was not even in the pond.
Of course, some of that has changed with time and age (and income). I went away to college at Notre Dame (South Bend is nice, but hardly a glittering metropolis). I travelled to Europe and saw, along with thousands of my closest friends, two popes. I even went to the auld sod of Ireland and tested my skills against the great Irish writers (see: https://theboymonk.com/how-a-proud-son-of-utah-won-a-limerick-writing-contest-in-ireland/).
I shook hands with Gerald Ford after he left office and with Ronald Reagan before he took it. I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s cat, chatted with John F. Kennedy’s brother and Harry Truman’s daughter, met Barack Obama’s receptionist, and my wife helped (from a distance) George W. Bush open the 2002 Olympics.
Of course, I never met a president or got close to hearing Lincoln or the Beatles. Unhappy circumstances like those, however, helped me see the value in the next best thing. I wrote a little about this notion regarding Lincoln already (see: https://theboymonk.com/great-obrien-moments-with-mr-lincoln/), but my relationship with the Beatles illustrates it quite well.
My dear two older sisters were teens in the 1960s. They loved the Beatles and some of my best childhood memories are listening to the radio with them. I discovered the Abbey Road album, produced in 1969, ten years later while in college. I played the cassette tape hundreds of times, especially softly at night when insomnia struck. During my sophomore year of college, I mourned the December 1980 death of John Lennon, realizing with fatal certainty that I would never hear the Fab Four live.
My love for the Beatles infected my children. Exposing their high school peers to a “new sound,” one daughter choreographed a dance to “Come Together” and another to “Eleanor Rigby.” The whole family eagerly signed on to my proposed road trip to Las Vegas to watch the Cirque du Soleil Love show at the Mirage resort. We saw it shortly after the one-year anniversary event, attended by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and widows Olivia Harrison (representing George Harrison) and Yoko Ono (representing Lennon).
During a 2018 trip to England, my wife and I rode the London tube halfway across town to visit the Beatles store. The store attendant gave us a map to Abbey Road, a couple of miles away. We strolled over there and, while dodging cars and dozens of folks much younger than us, recreated the famous album cover crosswalk photo. The place is so popular that they moved the corner street sign to the high side of a nearby building because people kept stealing it. It seems odd that a crosswalk visit can be a European trip highlight, but it was.
And then, in 2019, I heard a band called Rain during the Salt Lake City stop on their tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road. It would have been wonderful to see the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan theatre in February 1964, or watch them during their final rooftop concert in January 1969, but for a variety of reasons it was not meant to be. Walking their steps on Abbey Road, and watching their music performed at the Mirage or even in downtown Salt Lake City by a tribute band was a worthy substitute.
I am trying to value the next best thing, to enjoy life as it is without envy or regrets. My Trappist monk friend Fr. Patrick Boyle lived at a monastery that had its own Abbey Road (see: https://theboymonk.com/the-bells-of-brother-nicholas/). He always says, “I believe in the sacrament of the now moment.” His is a philosophy based on a 300-year-old Catholic classic book called The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751).
Father de Caussade wrote that each day is sacred, each moment an opportunity to hear the voice of the Almighty. To illustrate, he told the story of his older contemporary Brother Lawrence (1614-1691), a poor, uneducated monastery cook who found the presence of God “in the noise and clatter” of the kitchen. (I have not yet reached that level of enlightenment when I do the dishes.)
Father de Caussade also could have illustrated his point with Father Patrick, who after 60 years had to leave his beloved monastery and move into what he calls “an old folks home” forty miles away. He lives there now as delighted as when he was in his lovely Huntsville Abbey.
The Beatles never met Fr. Patrick, and I doubt they ever read de Caussade, but perhaps they too understood the sacrament of the now moment. I am not sure anything else could have inspired Paul McCartney to tell the whole world to “Let it be.”
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
