His Sweet Lord

Andrew Ferguson contemplates George Harrison's spirituality in the context of his "heroic capacity for cocaine, brandy, and adultery":

Along with the humility, his unapologetic religious faith made him the most unlikely rock star in history. It wasn’t the faith of his fathers, of course. His mother dragged him to Mass as a boy. “They tried to raise me a Catholic,” he says in Living in the Material World, but he stopped going to church before he was a teenager. Whatever chance he had to become an orthodox believer was snuffed out by the drab and airless Catholicism on offer in the decades leading up to Vatican II. He preferred to lose himself in the teeming pantheism and exotic mysticism of India.

So why, one wonders, the explicitly Christian – and ecumenical – lyrics of the song? I have been able to relate to this song both when I was far more tradition-bound in my faith and since. Harrison may not have been an "orthodox" believer – but neither was Jesus. And then there's the sense of humor – also not usually associated with orthodoxy – but deeply connected to the religious experience of life, its absurdities and its occasional, unsought-for graces and serendipities. Yes, Harrison was able to send up his own faith, as above. Very giggly Maharishi, no?