Finding Sacred Spaces in Unexpected Places

BY HARV BISHOP

The Abbey Road Studios that my wife Diane and I visited last week are as much a place of pilgrimage as Fatima or Assisi where we visited last spring. Abbey Road is the recording studio in suburban London where the Fab Four recorded one trailblazing album after another from 1963-1969.

Yes, I’m putting this site on an equal footing with a 20th century Marian apparition in Portugal and a 13th Italian saint who lived a contemplative life in beautiful Assisi. St. Francis ecstatically worshipped Jesus and John Lennon said his band was more popular than Jesus, in a much misunderstood and misrepresented remark.

Why would I make this comparison between these very different sacred sites?

Fatima, Assisi, Abbey Road, and Strawberry Fields in New York’s Central Park, a memorial to John Lennon, are all places where collective human consciousness can be felt. People’s full range of emotions– hopes, dreams, sorrows– and lives are on display and intertwined with deified others who represent humanity’s better angels. Those hopes, fears, sorrows and angels are given voice through graffiti at Abbey Road and candles and prayers at Fatima and Assisi.

I realized that Abbey Road Studios, and the famed zebra crosswalk from the Abbey Road album cover, as well as Strawberry Fields, are secular shrines serving many of the purposes of overtly religious shrines.  I would also say Abbey Road and Strawberry Fields are more than secular. The Beatles individually  and collectively produced great music, yes, but also represented something much more.

They evangelized the values of love and peace and helped to mainstream alternative and eastern spirituality. I meditated for the first time as a 13-year-old on my parent’s Naugahyde couch after reading a magazine piece about the Beatles at the Maharishi’s ashram. Naugahyde was a hideous faux plastic leather that made you sweat and was uncomfortable. Still I mediated. Then I put on my headphones and listened to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a song on The Beatles’ Revolver album inspired by eastern chants and spirituality. I bought a Ravi Shankar sitar album and started to explore another culture for the first time in my life. I was the first to show up in a Nehru collar shirt in my suburban Colorado junior high. The ridicule from my classmates didn’t matter. My mind and consciousness was bigger than it had been. Others, older, including many well-known spiritual  teachers today, journeyed to India inspired by the doors opened by the Beatles.

Abbey Road is a place of pilgrimage.

As we travel in London I’m experiencing serious 60s flashbacks. Muswell Hill, the small town where we are staying in North London, is the birthplace of The Kinks founders Ray and Dave Davies. The brilliant comedic actor Peter Sellers spent much of his childhood in a home near our tube station. In some parts of London you trip over rock history in every block: the offices over the pub where The Rolling Stones organized, the gallery where John met Yoko and the bar where Paul met Linda, are a five minute walk apart.

And where there is British rock there also are the seeds of my lifelong exploration of alternative spirituality and New Thought.

London and the spirit of that time are forcing me to reflect. Where would I be without it?

Having reconnected with my high school girlfriend on Facebook I learned that her father would say throughout his life, “Thank God you didn’t marry that hairy hippie Harvey!”

Despite the retrospective discovery of the derisive alliteration, I had  liked Mr. Blanks, a conservative Texan, and, of course, I liked his daughter.  That he even let me near his daughter  spoke volumes about his character. I had to be his worst nightmare suitor. I sported long-locks, wire granny glasses, faded jeans, a denim shirt with patches supporting social causes, and John Lennon-style American flag tennis shoes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s of my adolescence and teen years I had a reputation because everybody knew what hippies were about: sex, drugs, rock and roll and revolution. And dressing weird.