This is the Big Kahuna—not only the first day of the week that leaves you in a mood, but the first Sunday of the New Year. As such, we will have to bust out the big guns: the Fab Four.

For I started this series by recalling how my Dad used to muse that, back when he was at BYU, Sundays were always the worst, because that purported “day of rest” left him with way too much time to think: “Will I ever get married? Will I ever have children? Will I ever find a job in my career? Did I pick the right major? What am I even doing with my life?” Now, he always spoke of those existential dreads in the past tense, as old concerns long resolved, as a way to reassure me so I wouldn’t despair when I inevitably had those Sunday mornings in college myself.

Yet here I am now, a completed PhD gainfully employed in my career of choice, happily married with two beautiful children and a book, and still I occasionally awake in that Sunday morning mood. I try to snap out of it by reminding myself that everything I feared would never happen did, that everything more or less worked out in the end (as though anything ever ends), that I should have “an attitude of gratitude” or whatever—but I would a dishonest man if I said I didn’t still have occasional bouts of that mood.

That is, it doesn’t matter how successful you think you are,^[1]I recently caught up with a friend who currently works in finance up in Manhattan, who described his job as “managing transactions between the rich and the very rich,” who cheered on the GameStop … Continue reading you’re still going to have those Sundays where you wonder: what am I even doing with my life? It’s in those moments that I get an inkling for how the individual members of the Beatles—who (you may have heard) were the most fabulously successful, popular, acclaimed, influential, and best-selling Rock band of all time—could have still experienced bouts of depression when they broke up at the height of their powers in 1970.

Yes, even the Beatles experienced that Sunday morning mood, that feeling of What am I even doing with my life? And though they would each release much more pointed kiss-offs to the band during their ensuing solo careers (e.g. Paul McCartney’s “Too Many People,” John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep,” George Harrison’s “Wah Wah“), nevertheless in the midst of the band’s actually break-up—as in so many break-ups—they instinctively, intuitively, turned towards a religious vocabulary to express and confront it.

There are already a million and one extant commentaries of every single Beatles song, so in the grand tradition of LDS Fast & Testimony meetings, I will restrict myself solely to personal responses to each.

First up, Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be,” from the 1970 Beatles album of the same name.

McCartney, a descendant of Irish immigrants^[2]he even once recording a pro-IRA anthem in response to Bloody Sunday–and by the way, just what is it about Sundays that can bring out the worst in us?, was nominally baptized Catholic, but was otherwise raised in an agnostic household. But that didn’t stop him from appropriating Catholic imagery when he finally recorded a religious tune himself—which also in turn didn’t prevente legions of non-Catholics from appropriating the song for themselves.

Case in point: a loved one of mine suffered a postpartum psychotic break a year ago, right around Christmas time (she even had her meltdown in front of the Christmas tree—and I had to tackle her on the front lawn in front of the Christmas lights—like we were in a freaking B-grade Lifetime original movie or something). She’s mostly made a full recovery, thank heavens, but not without extensive prescriptions and intensive therapy. One older member of her therapy group, during a group exercise, chose “Let It Be” as his personal theme song—which in turn prompted her to start listening to “Let It Be” for perhaps the first time in her life (some people simply aren’t natural Beatles fans, believe it or not!). A clichéd choice? Yes, of course—but then, for most folks, cliches are all we have. And when you are overwhelmed with anxiety, depression, and paranoia (which can often feel like the only rational response to this fallen world of ours), sometimes a cliché like “Let it be” ceases to sound like a platitude and almost starts to almost sound like wisdom—perhaps the only real wisdom available.

John Lennon in turn was raised in an even less religious household, and after the Beatles break-up went on to write two of the most sanctimonious atheist anthems of the ’70s: “God” and “Imagine.” But before he recorded either, he let George Harrison’s Hinduism rub off on him just long enough to produce a song that (perhaps not-coincidentally) was heads-and-shoulders better than pretty much anything else he released throughout his solo career: “Across the Universe.”

The summer after I graduated High School, June of 2001, was pretty much one massive Sunday Morning for me. The final end of my entire public education—one that stretched from my earliest childhood memories to the cusp of adulthood—had left me feeling empty, exhausted, and disenchanted with everything and everyone. I had the GPA to get into selective colleges but absolutely no motivation to apply for them; it just all seemed so vapid and vacuous, an endless series of hoop-jumping, as we all scrambled from majors to degrees to careers and so forth in a grim march that had only the grave at the end. My parents encouraged me to get a Summer job at the very least, but the thought of embarking on a lifetime of spinning my wheels in a rat race devoid of any real meaning and purpose beyond satisfying my immediate physical needs filled me with profound depression and an overall sense of futility.^[3]All this, and 9/11 hadn’t even happened yet! I had no honest interest in serving a mission, or in anything else for that matter. I had a vague desire to get out and see the world, but no real plan on how to do it, or even of what was worth doing or seeing at all in this life.

I don’t remember what finally snapped me out of it^[4]it wasn’t 9/11, for whatever it’s worth; sometimes I’m still not sure if I ever fully snapped out of it. I just remember that there were days that empty summer when I would just lay on my bed and listen to “Across the Universe” on repeat, 10 or 12 times in a row, because it was the only song that seemed to even remotely resonate. It was the closest thing I felt to a religious experience till I finally got the gumption to serve a mission myself.

I flatter myself that I have found meaning and motivation many times over in my life since that Summer, but there are still occasional Sunday mornings where only “Across the Universe” does the trick.

Last up is George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” the 1970 #1 hit from his first post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass.

Last semester, I decided to expand the repertoire of my World Literature survey course, trying to get away from the Mediterranean texts that so many Lit. professors default to (I love Homer and Dante too, but guys, there are so many other writers), to instead look further East. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching was a hit, but the Bhagavad-Gita my freshmen really struggled with—and I mean they struggled not just with the language or translations, but with some of the core concepts of Hinduism on a very basic level. Like, I had to repeatedly explain to them what reincarnation is.

In fact, one of the concepts they struggled with the most was that of the eternal existence of the soul. For my Latino students especially, reared in the Catholic tradition of the ex nihilo creation of both the world and the spirit, this idea that the soul has always existed, and will always exist, was radical, alien, and brand-new to them. This astonished me, because being raised in the LDS faith myself, this idea that the soul—“these intelligences”—are possessed of an eternal nature is second-nature to me, (and is even the subject of some our cheesiest media, “Saturday’s Warrior” and so forth). I have to constantly remind myself that for the vast majority of not just Christianity, but the entire monotheistic world, that idea has always been utterly alien, and should be revered as such. But it is also not exclusive to Mormondom; “My Sweet Lord’s” Hinduism has again reminded me of the same.

But on an even more basic level: this song resonates with me because George Harrison is singing about how he wants to see and know his God directly. Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-Gita is one of the great theophanies of World Literature, in its gorgeous description of the time Krishna cast off his human form and revealed himself as Lord Vishnu in his full universe-encompassing glory. It is a revelation of deity comparable to Christ’s Transfiguration on the Mount, or Moses ch. 1, or Joseph Smith’s First Vision.

I am reminded, in fact, of a middle-aged investigator on my mission who, with tears streaming down his cheek, told me suddenly one day that he wanted me to give him a vision of our Heavenly Father, because he wanted to see and know his God at last. Definitely an awkward position to put a 19-year-old in; but as the years have passed, I have understood that impulse more and more. Unlike the eternity of the soul, this yearning for a revelation of the Almighty is much more universal; I don’t need to explain its appeal to my students, or to anyone for that matter. We all share it. George Harrison expresses it. I almost wish this song had a touch more desperation, awe, anger, and wonder, because that’s deep down how we all feel sometimes. And we often feel it most keenly on a Sunday morning.

Happy New Years.