“And when the night is cloudy,
there is still a light that shines on me.
Shine until tomorrow,
Let It Be, Let It Be.”
In the autumn of 1968, Paul McCartney, the author of those lyrics, slipped into a deep depression. The cause of his despair was the imminent break-up of the Beetles, an event, in part, brought on by John Lennon’s decision to take his career in a different direction. And while Lennon’s might have been the loudest voice pushing the group to disband, the Beetle’s other two members – George Harrison and Ringo Starr—were largely in agreement with Lennon’s desire.
As a result, McCartney later acknowledged, he felt both alienated and isolated from the three people with whom he had shared the most momentous time of his life. Indeed, given the phenomenally creative collaboration he had enjoyed with Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, McCartney had a hard time contemplating even the possibility of a successful solo musical career.
Sensing the demise of the band and having little power to stop it from happening, McCartney had turned to a frenetic lifestyle of drinking, drugs, and clubbing leaving him both physically exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed. Then one night, in the midst of his tossing and turning, he experienced a dream in which he mother, Mary, came to him offering both comfort and guidance. She had died 12 years earlier of complications related to breast cancer, when McCartney was only 14. Describing her as “a very comforting presence” in his life, in many ways McCartney had never recovered from her losing her at such a young and formative age.
To cope with the loss of his mother, McCartney threw himself into mastering the guitar. That passion for the guitar had led McCartney to meet and quickly bond with Lennon, another budding teenage rock-and-roll musician who had also lost his mother at roughly the same age. That personal bonding and friendship soon led to a creative and then a professional collaboration that had helped both young men cope with their common experience of loss. Now, facing the end of his partnership with Lennon and questioning his ability to launch a solo career, McCartney deeply needed guidance to help him get on with his life, guidance which would come to him in the form of this dream of his mother.
In describing the experience of the dream, McCartney later told an interviewer:
In this dream, my mother appeared, and there was her face, completely clear, particularly her eyes, and she said to me very gently, very reassuringly: “Let it be.” It was lovely. It was really like she had visited me at this very difficult point in my life and gave me this message: Be gentle, don’t fight things, just try and go with the flow of your life and it will all work out.
Waking the next morning feeling restored, McCartney sat down at the piano and put pen to paper for a new song that would recall this life-altering experience. He has said that he wrote most of the song in one go on the morning after his dream. Adding a poignant footnote to this experience, not long after his dream McCartney met Linda Eastman, the woman who would become the great love of his life. Speaking of his marriage to Linda as the “saving of him,” McCartney went on to add “It was as if my mum had sent her.”
While the song is technically credited to both McCartney and Lennon, in fact, Lennon had little to do with the song and periodically dismissed it as both too religious and overly sentimental. Lennon’s distaste for the song, however, has never affected its immense popularly in the cannon of the Beetle’s music. Indeed, like My Sweet Lord, The Fool on the Hill, Blackbird, The Long and Winding Road, and other spiritually-inspired Beetle’s songs, Let it Be has become a kind of modern-day hymn.
In another poignant turn of events, thirty years after writing Let It Be McCartney chose to sing it at the memorial for Linda after her death in 1998 from breast cancer, the same disease that had killed his mother. Shortly afterward, in 2001, McCartney helped organize the “Concert For New York,” to benefit victims of the attack on the World Trade Center. He closed that show with Let It Be, inviting the other acts as well as New York cops and firefighters on stage to sing with him.
Commenting in an interview he gave in 2008, McCartney offered these observations on the song he had written half a century earlier:
“Let It Be”… those words are really very special to me, because not only did my mum come to me in a dream and reassure me with them at a very difficult time in my life – and sure enough, things did get better after that – but also, in putting them into a song, and recording it with the Beatles, it became a comforting, healing statement for other people too.
Though I’ve always loved and found comfort in this song, it turned out to play a particularly important role in my life when my partner, Bill, was diagnosed with late-stage, incurable cancer six and half years ago. Unbidden by any conscious awareness on my part, during that time I began frequently hearing Let It Be in my mind, like a consoling sort of earworm encouraging me to find the courage and faith to care for Bill till his passing and then to freely and actively grieve his death for nearly two years afterward.
For me, the meaning of Let It Be is not about passively being resigned to what cannot be changed. Rather than resignation, I believe this song encourages us to more actively embrace the great mysteries of life and death, of love and loss, in the face of life’s inevitable tragedies. What McCartney’s song is saying is that accepting what is, and having faith in what yet can be, does bring a profound and abiding measure of inner peace amidst the loss and the grief.
As I listened to Let it Be playing and replaying in my mind like a kind of mantra, I found myself contemplating some of spiritual gifts suggested by this song. The gifts of fortitude and resilience in face of the life’s sometimes terrible and terrifying challenges. The gifts of solace and consolation in the face of otherwise unbearable sorrow. The gifts of grace and serenity in allowing the present, no matter how painful, to unfold without despair. And, finally and above all, the gift of faith in the possibility of deep and abiding joy in the days and years to come.