‘A little help from my friends’: A Jesuit spiritual exercise meets a song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends / Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends / Oh, gonna try with a little help from my friends — John Lennon and Paul McCartney (1967).

Full disclosure: This started out as an Ignatian contemplation, in which I intended to imagine myself as a participant in the gospel story of the healing of a paralytic at Capernaum. But something intervened. My puppylike attention span? The Holy Spirit? Pure dumb luck? All of above? And I wound up contemplating a song from the St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead, from a Beatles album I hadn’t listened to in years.

Here, without getting too deep into TMI, is how it all came down.

I’ve been kind of depressed lately. As usual, it’s a combination of things. Debi was in the hospital at the end of August. (She’s out now, and things are looking better.) And about the same time, I got a call from my now ex-retina doctor’s office informing me that, for reasons too complicated to go into here, the guy couldn’t give me the kind of injections I need to control wet macular degeneration. (I think of him, privately, as “Dr. No,” after the old James Bond movie.)

So all of a sudden, I was thrown back into health care limbo, trying to line up referrals and waiting for my phone calls to be returned. I don’t have a whole boatload of family-of-origin abandonment issues. (And if I did, I wouldn’t go into them here. No TMI here!) But it’s fair to say I was feeling abandoned.

Add to that the steady drumbeat of bad political news. This presidential election is so toxic and demeaning, I don’t even want my poor cat to hear what some of the candidates are saying about Haitian immigrants! And I’m so very tired of hearing journalists, teachers, academics, and old guys like me who still call themselves liberals — in other words, my kind of people — vilified as “woke” Democrat [sic] enemies of the people, antisemites, gun-grabbers, baby-killers, and/or childless cat ladies who do unspeakable things with Kitty Litter and Tampons in the public schools. It even seeps onto my Facebook feed. Cumulatively, it all leaves me feeling isolated and exhausted.

None of this is life-threatening, of course, but it’s exhausting.

So when I blurted out my frustration in my last session with my spiritual director, she sent me a link to a commencement address by Msgr. James Shea at Divine Mercy University, a grad school for mental health professionals. (Good stuff! It’s about asking for help when you feel overwhelmed. It’s on my replay list.) And she suggested I mediate on the gospel story of Jesus healing the paralytic whose friends lowered him down through the roof of a home in Capernaum. It’s in Mark 2 (NRSVue):

When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. ² So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door, and he was speaking the word to them. ³ Then some people^[a] came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. ⁴ And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. ⁵ When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

The general drift of the story is clear enough: You’re not in this alone. Ask for help. It’s the same point Monseigneur Shea made at Divine Mercy.

So in order to get ready for the Ignatian contemplation, I started reading up on Capernaum. To do an Ignatian contemplation right, advises Kevin O’Brien SJ, on Loyola’s Ignatian Spirituality website, “you imagine yourself in a scene from the gospels. “Visualize the event as if you were making a movie. Pay attention to the details: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings of the event. Lose yourself in the story; don’t worry if your imagination is running too wild. At some point, place yourself in the scene.” Another Jesuit author, James Martin, calls this step composing the place.

Composing the place: An ancient church in Capernaum

This, for me, is the fun part! I’ve been there, in fact; the ruins of the house where the paralytic’s friends let him down through the roof so Jesus could heal him have been identified. It was St. Peter’s house — more properly, the home of Peter’s mother-in-law — and it is, according to John Dominic Crossan of the Historical Jesus Seminar, “one of the very few credible localizations of a New Testament tradition” (92). How do we know it was Peter’s house? Early church tradition and 20th-century archaeology give us the clues.

The first-century house is the earliest of four structures built on top of each other. (The latest is a Franciscan shrine, the Pilgrimage Church of St. Peter, erected on pilings to leave the ancient ruins intact.) Dated to the 1st century BCE¹, it consisted of several “quite ordinary” rooms around a central courtyard, But in the 1st century CE, the main room was plastered over, a “a rarity for houses of the day,” according to a writeup on the Biblical Archaeology Society website. But in the mid-1st century CE, things changed. A summary of the archaeological record by Matthew J. Grey for the BYU Religious Studies Center picks up the story:

[Excavators] also found that its subsequent history lent plausibility to the tradition that the house once belonged to Jesus’ most famous disciple. Excavations showed that by the late first or early second century AD, the largest room of the complex (room 1) was renovated with a plastered floor, a feature unattested elsewhere at Capernaum. At this same time, the pottery assemblage in the room shifted from common household wares to oil lamps and storage jars, suggesting that the room began to be used for communal gatherings rather than daily living. 

The Franciscans, under whose authority the archaeological digs were conducted, say the renovated structure functioned as a house church for the next 300 years or so. Gray continues:

The building’s key role in understanding how Christianity began was confirmed by more than a hundred graffiti scratched into the church’s walls. Most of the inscriptions say things like “Lord Jesus Christ help thy servant” or “Christ have mercy.” They are written in Greek, Syriac or Hebrew and are sometimes accompanied by etchings of small crosses or, in one case, a boat.

Finally, in the 5th century, the house church was taken down and an octagonal Byzantine martyrium or shrine commemorating St. Peter erected in its place. (The fourth church on the site is the current Franciscan shrine, built in 1989.) A staff writer for the Biblical Archaeology Society makes the case as well as anyone:

Biblical archaeology discoveries are not cut-and-dry cases. Though there is no definitive proof in this instance that the house ruin uncovered by the excavators actually is the ancient house of Peter, there is layer upon layer of circumstantial evidence to support its importance in early Christianity and its association with Jesus in Capernaum and his foremost disciple, Peter. Were it not for its association with Jesus and Peter, why else would a run-of-the-mill first-century house in Capernaum have become a focal point of Christian worship and identity for centuries to come?

Here’s why I think this historical and archaeological background matters. Crossan and co-author Jonathan L. Reed suggest the original 1st-century roof was made of reeds plastered with mud, like other dwellings in Capernaum, and the paralytic’s friends “dug through the roof” to get him down to Jesus (83-84). (Luke’s version of the story has a tile roof, but that tells us more about the author of Luke, who probably never visited Capernaum, than it does about the gospel story.) The house, built of local basalt, consisted of several rooms that opened onto an open courtyard:

[T]he villagers shared their meals in one of the larger rooms in the short rainy and cold season, and in the shaded portions of the courtyard during hot summers. They ate their meals not on plates, but on bread, onto which they ladled olive oil, lentils, beans. or vegetables in some for, sharing olives and perhaps a bit of cheese or fruit. (96)

Jesus, who appears to have lodged with Peter’s extended family, would preach or heal visitors in the courtyard or a larger room, depending on the weather. This layout is important, I think, to the story in Mark’s gospel.

New Testament scholar NT Wright of St. Andrews’ University and Oxford has an insight that never would have occurred to me. “Jesus himself was the unlucky householder who had his roof was ruined that day,” he says in a bible study geared for small group discussions (12-13). Well, I’m not going to get technical about whose roof it was. I’m sure Jesus didn’t want to get crosswise of Peter’s mother-in-law, and neither do I. In any event, Wright says:

This opens up quite a new possibility for understanding what Jesus said to the paralyzed man. How would you feel if someone made a big hole in your roof? But Jesus looks down and says, with a rueful smile, “All right — I forgive you.”

And that, as it happened, is about as far as I got with my Jesuit exercise.

‘Friends’: A little craft job for Ringo

It didn’t take much to get me off track. For one thing, I have the attention span of a beagle puppy — my home computer is full of half-completed meditations. So after I’d looked up the scholarship on Capernaum — the fun part of any writing project — I got to wondering if there were any hymns on the subject. I couldn’t think of any. But I did remember the Beatles song, “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Oh look! A squirrel!

So I did a keyword search. (When I’m not on deadline, I’ll do anything to procrastinate the part of a writing project where you actually sit down and write.). “Friends” came out in May 1967, one of those years when everything changes. In 1967 my article, “Prosperity and Paper Money: The Loan Office Act of 1723, came out (the only distinction I share with the Beatles). That year I changed majors, from history to English, and I grew sideburns and a mustache. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was kind of a soundtrack for a time when a newly fledged English major could listen to rock music again when I wasn’t grading themes or taking part in anti-war demonstrations.

And it turns out “With a Little Help from My Friends” has a backstory that fits with this theme of friends helping friends. Oh look, another squirrel!

From Wikipedia I learned that George Harrison and John Lennon wrote it as “a tune with a limited range” for Ringo Starr, whose vocals famously didn’t measure up to his skills as a percussionist. “It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job,” McCartney later recalled. Wikipedia picks up the story from there:

The Beatles began recording the song on 29 March 1967, the day before they posed for the Sgt. Pepper album cover. They recorded 10 takes of the song, wrapping up sessions at 5:45 in the morning.^[10] The backing track consisted of Starr on drums, McCartney playing piano, Harrison playing lead guitar and Lennon beating a cowbell. At dawn, Starr trudged up the stairs to head home – but the other Beatles cajoled him into doing his lead vocal then and there, standing around the microphone for moral support.

A little help from his friends, indeed! Wikipedia also records for posterity that the song was briefly called “Bad Finger Boogie,” because Lennon worked out the melody on the piano with his middle finger, having hurt his index finger.

OK, I thought, time to get back to writing. But, first, I had another thought. (Anything to procrastinate. Oh look, another squirrel!) Hey, instead of fighting about politics on Facebook, why don’t I try asking for help?

So I posted a status update soliciting “[p]rayers, thoughts, healing vibes, cute kitty pictures, baby goat videos and other cheerer-uppers” and explained “I’m between eye doctors […] It’s worrisome — no, frightening would be a better word — because you need regular injections into the eyeball to keep the kind of wet macular degeneration I’ve got from progressing.” That was on a Monday night. In all, I got 41 “likes” or care emojis and lots of cat pictures.

Then, Tuesday morning, I got two phone calls just when I wasn’t expecting them.

The first was from Gailey Eye Clinic in Decatur. It was a follow-up. When “Dr. No’s” nurse broke the news to us a few weeks earlier that he wouldn’t do the injections, she had promised to line up a referral. And that she did! Gailey had my files, and they confirmed my appointment for the following week. Glory hallelujah!

Then, just a few minutes later, I got a call from the staffer who handles referrals at Vision Care Associates in Springfield, my primary care provider. She said she hadn’t been able to find an eye doctor in town who uses the kind of local anesthesia I need, but we had options in Bloomington, Champaign and Peoria. I mentioned St. Louis University, whom I’d heard good things about, and she said there were also retina specialists on the Illinois side of the river in Metro East. So we have options! I thanked her profusely and said we were lined up at Gailey in Decatur. But (I added as my abandonment issues kicked in again), if that didn’t work out, I’d get back to her, and, again, thanks so much.

So, in just a few minutes, I had a Plan A and a Plan B! Glory to God in the highest!

I’m not going to try to pass this off as a miracle. No future generations will erect an octagonal Byzantine shrine on the site of my home office where I took the call from the eye doctor’s nurse. Nor do I think it’s necessarily a testimony to the power of prayer. But there’s a saying in 12-step recovery that goes something like this: A coincidence is God’s way of preserving [God’s] anonymity. And it’s certainly a coincidence I got not one but two callbacks the day after I posted a message to social media asking for thoughts, prayers and cat pictures.

Mostly I think it’s a testimony to human nature, to what my father used to refer to as common human decency. When a person needs help, sooner or later someone will step up and offer it. They’ll lower their friend down through a mud roof (or the 21st-century equivalent), they’ll workshop a song so their percussionist can hit all the high notes. Sooner or later, I think most of us want to do the right thing.

Update (or is it an epilog?)

Turned out the folks at Gailey Eye Clinic could work me right in. It’s a much closer drive than St. Louis, and it’s right off I-72 in Forsyth just north of Decatur. The first visit went smoothly — I didn’t even feel the shots — and they’re starting me on a regular schedule of further injections. At some point, I remarked on some little thing they did to make me feel comfortable. (I forget what it was. An extra squirt of eyewash?) And a nurse replied, “Oh yes, we like to keep our patients.” And with those abandonment issues I wasn’t going to talk about, that’s exactly what I needed to hear.

Notes

¹ I use the nonsectarian abbreviations BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era) instead of the specifically Christian BC (before Christ) and AD (anno domini).

Links and Citations

Justin Birckbichler, “Pulling the Cancer Card,” CURE Today, Sept. 10, 2018 https://www.curetoday.com/view/pulling-the-cancer-card.

Grant Hillary Brenner, “What Ever Happened to Basic Human Decency?” Psychology Today, Feb. 28, 2017 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201703/what-ever-happened-to-basic-human-decency

John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, Excavating Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001):

Ellertsen, E. Peter. “Prosperity and Paper Money: The Loan Office Act of 1723.” New. Jersey History, 85 (1967): 47–57.

“Father James Martin: An introduction to Ignatian contemplation,” interview by Sean Salai, America, Sept. 21, 2016 https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/easing-contemplation

Matthew J. Grey, “Simon Peter in Capernaum: An Archaeological Survey of the First-Century Village,” BYU Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University https://rsc.byu.edu/ministry-peter-chief-apostle/simon-peter-capernaum-archaeological-survey-first-century-village.

“The House of Peter: The Home of Jesus in Capernaum?,” Bible History Daily, Biblical Archaeology Society, Oct. 12, 2023 https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/biblical-archaeology-sites/the-house-of-peter-the-home-of-jesus-in-capernaum/

John MacDougal, “Coincidences are God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous,” The Next Step: A Blog, The Retreat, Wayzata, Minn., Sept. 23, 2015 https://blog.theretreat.org/coincidences-are-gods-way-of-remaining-anonymous.

NT Wright, Mark for Everyone: 20th Anniversary Ed. with Study Guide (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2023): 12-13.

[Revised and uplinked Sept. 29, 2024]