During a recent YouTube journey I came across the classic recording of the Beatles, All You Need is Love. The recording was originally part of a worldwide live broadcast called Our World which took place on June 25, 1967. (Remember? 🙂 It’s only been 50 years!) As I watched and listened I got to think, ‘Boy, that must have been a really bad day for satan’. Here we were, humankind, coming to the age old realization that love is the answer. How freaked out was satan when the record immediately shot up to number one and became the anthem for the Summer of Love. What went through his head? ‘Uh-oh, I wonder if this time it will stick?’
I mean this wasn’t the first time that we, as a race, had heard this message. The Old Testament speaks about loving your neighbor as yourself. And certainly Jesus’s entire earthly ministry was built upon His new commandment, “that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:33-34) And, who has not attended a wedding and heard St. Paul’s amazing dissertation on love (1Cor 13:1-13),…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Truth is truth, and truth scares the heck out of the devil. But you know what scares the devil the most – us believing the truth, us living it. So imagine his chagrin, when the most popular foursome of all time is live, singing around the world, ‘all you need is love’. I mean even Mick Jagger (Mr. Sympathy for the Devil himself) is on the video joining in. He must have thought his days were truly numbered. (I guess getting tossed out of Heaven was probably a down day, but that day wasn’t all bad for old beelzelbub since he did sort of get what he was looking for when he wound up here on earth, bustin’ our chops.)
But how bad a day would it be if we all actually ‘got it’…actually made love our goal, all day, and then every day? What if we actually took the Lennon and McCarthy hymn to heart and looked at each of our problems, our sufferings, and those of others and figured out a way to love our way through them? Well, I’m thinking that would remind our evil antagonist that indeed we do have a plan b, the best one around, and that we just might be able to turn some of those evil grins upside down. What do you say? Are you into doing a little chop-busting of our own? Give the devil a bad day. All you need is love.