As an atheist in good standing, I am generally not in the position of proving or otherwise rationalizing the existence of God.
However, if asked to present the most compelling case the universe is, in fact, being overseen by some benevolent, omniscient force of one sort or another, I would probably offer how on July 6, 1957 in the English seaside town of Liverpool, a 15-year-old budding musician named Paul McCartney happened upon a skiffle band called the Quarrymen outside St. Peter’s Church and struck up a conversation with the group’s 17-year-old guitarist, John Lennon, thereby forging a creative partnership that, in a few short years, would blossom into the single greatest and most culturally resonant musical act in the history of Western civilization.
In a godless universe, there would be no particular reason for the Beatles to have ever existed. Indeed, the idea that three guitarists and a drummer in a relatively small and insignificant municipality in the north of England in the middle of the 20th century would randomly, organically join forces into a unit that would alter the face of an artform (as Pauline Kael once wrote about Marlon Brando) is enough to test the faithlessness of any honest person.
Einstein is reported to have said the great miracle of physics is there are no miracles. In other words, the presumption that the world around us is the product of a random, unplanned, undesigned cosmos is itself a miraculous prospect for which we should have bottomless gratitude.
Such is my view of the Beatles: Whether their formation and oeuvre were divinely ordained or the result of blind chance, their very being was (and is) a gift for all humanity and indicative of the presence of grace on Earth. Whether God or some comparable supreme being enters into the equation becomes almost a technicality.
In any case, you’ll forgive me for employing such florid, over-the-top language to describe a rock-n-roll band that broke up three years before Joe Biden first took his seat in the U.S. Senate, for I recently spent some 36 hours in Liverpool as part of my dad’s 70th birthday extravaganza and have had the Fab Four in the forefront of my mind ever since.
For any Beatles lifer—as every good American should be—a sojourn to the group’s ancestral homeland is no less essential than a trip to Mecca would be for any devout Muslim. While our family embarked upon a Beatles-themed walking tour during a trip to London in 2006—featuring stops at the old Apple recording studio and, of course, the legendary Abbey Road crosswalk—there is an entirely different level of meaning in retracing the steps of John, Paul, George and Ringo in the years before they became immortal—to imbibe the geographic and atmospheric milieu in which rock-n-roll’s most enduring quartet grew up and swiftly groped their way toward success.
Yes, of course our Liverpudlian “Magical Mystery Tour” included sightings of Penny Lane and Strawberry Field (singular, not plural), not to mention the band’s childhood homes and the churches in which they served as choirboys. As well, it goes without saying we embedded ourselves in the subterranean environs of the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, where the gang performed on 292 occasions between 1961 and 1963 prior to their seismic international debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Not to mention the “Beatles Story” museum along the River Mersey, featuring an extensive audio guide and reconstructed sets of everything from the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover to the inside of a literal yellow submarine.
Certainly, one can luxuriate in the band’s musical magic in less extravagant ways—say, by relistening to their albums or rewatching their improbably endearing films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”—as the inherent accessibility and universality of their work is ultimately the whole point of their appeal. Indeed, I can’t say I derived any less joy from simply replaying “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” back-to-back on a recent bike ride than I did from flying 3,000 miles to catch a glimpse of the barber shop mentioned in “Penny Lane.” (For the record, our vacation included a handful of non-Beatles-related activities every now and again.)
That said, to trod the ground upon which all four bandmates set foot in their formative years confers an ineffable, singular quality perhaps best reflected and understood through the Liverpudlian accent, which I’m happy to report remains entirely and stubbornly intact amongst the town’s locals—not least our tour guide (who referred to the aforementioned Cavern Club as “The Cav’n”) and the various servers and shopkeepers we encountered, who invariably responded to our requests and comments with a simple, “Yeh?” (Yes, always with a question mark.)
In keeping with Orwell’s memorable observation that in England “one's class [is] cruelly stamped on one's tongue,” the good people of Liverpool remind us, by their very speech, that their town is a real place with a real history and character quite separate and distinct from, say, the cosmopolitan London where our family spent the majority of our vacation. As we learned from the unexpectedly excellent Liverpool Museum—situated mere meters from a life-sized Beatles sculpture along the waterfront—the city existed as a major British cultural and maritime hub for the better part of a millennium before the Fab Four officially put it on the map.
There’s real wisdom and perspective in that fact. In the prospect of a world whose existence long predates our own perception and experience thereof and which has the power to shape our lives and fortunes far more than we have to shape them on our own.
In a way, I suppose that’s why one travels anywhere in the first place: Namely, to get a sense of where we come from and where we might be going.
That a modest, working-class, perpetually underappreciated municipality like Liverpool could produce a quartet of musicians whose creative output will likely outpace every person currently alive on Earth constitutes something close to a miracle. While this doesn’t fully convince me of the presence of a supreme being in the inner workings of time and space, it sure as hell fills me with bottomless gratitude for the fruitful results in the absence thereof.