I love the Beatles song “Penny Lane”, a portrait of a village virtually teeming with “nowhere men”. Written by Paul McCartney, recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, and released in February 1967 as one side of a double A-sided single, along with Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever". Beatles producer George Martin has said he believes the pairing of these songs resulted in probably the greatest single ever released by the group. Penny Lane is a study in ‘mundanity’.
The simple sights and sounds of an ordinary suburban neighborhood; of completely commonplace and inconsequential people and events, all set to that rich melody, with the horns, the flute. The chorus: "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes/There beneath the blue suburban skies..." highlights the importance of memory - the importance of experience - the way the smallest visual and aural details build up to form and inform this amazing thing we call Life.
All around us are ordinary phenomena – people, homes, school, shops, shopping centres, neighbourhoods, parks, phone calls, emails, street scenes, routine family life, artistic and cinematic depictions of how we live our lives, everyday work and commercial situations, sociable occasions, non-professional sports activities, transportation contexts, venues of legal and political action, viewing televised entertainment, consuming information from various media, and so on and so on.
These are the places of the ‘uttermost parts of the world’ and the immediate world where real people live and die. This is where the incarnation happens. Not in the disconnected glamour of Rome or Hollywood but in the mud and marketplace of Bethlehem or Cana. This is where we go with the Word and the Spirit. This is the place of the Mustard Seed Kingdom; the place where the small and foolish confound the powers of the world.
What we find as we reflect on the events and places and people ‘under blue suburban skies’; will astound us if only we attend to them with the seriousness they do not typically receive. These unnoticed, unmarked aspects of our communities are often the most important indicators as to what God is up to.
