Love, Blackbirds and Clay Jars

My teenage years were mapped out by the lyrics of Beatles songs. When I was a young teenager they wrote and sung simple, happy love songs; life was uncomplicated. As I grew older their songs had deeper meaning; I started to think more…

Recently my friend Robert said: ‘Would you like to borrow this?’ It was ‘The Lyrics’, by Paul McCartney. I started yesterday. It contains the lyrics of all of McCartney’s songs in alphabetical order, and tells how he came to write the songs…

I started with ‘A’… ‘And I love her’ (1964):

‘I give her all my love, that’s all I do
And if you saw my love
You’d love her too
I love her…’

McCartney explains: In 1964 he started dating the actress Jane Asher, and during a particular trip to the theatre: ‘…because Jane was my girlfriend, I wanted to tell her there that I loved her, and that’s what inspired this song…’

Life and love was simple and uncomplicated – for McCartney, for me.

I came to ‘B’… ‘Blackbird’ (1968):

‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise…’

McCartney’s more aware, more poetic, more thoughtful: ‘…‘blackbird’ being the slang for a Black girl… very conscious that Liverpool was a slave port… it had the first Caribbean community in England… terrible racial tensions in the US… the song was written only  few weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther king… imagery of the broken wings… and the general longing for freedom…’

Life wasn’t so straightforward.

Fifty-six years later, McCartney and me, we’re both still going, older, wiser, but aware of our mortality – more fragile. This morning I read St Paul’s wise words about our ‘treasure in jars of clay’… I’m musing on McCartney’s songwriting treasure… my God-given treasures… still embracing simple love and the blackbird’s social conscience, but held in our fragile clay-jar mortal bodies…