Lopez: Imagine something different

"We poured everything" into that house. Fran from Altadena was standing outside the remains of her home, destroyed by the most recent California fires, speaking to a reporter. "I don't even know what I'm doing," she said, apologetic for going through a litany of the people she cared for – her family, her neighbors, their community. "I haven't slept. ... We're staying in a hotel. We have nowhere to go. We don't know what we're doing." And yet, she had her priorities straight on one of her worst days, focusing more on her friends and loved ones than on her personal plight.

Clips of Fran speaking made the rounds on social media the same day as the funeral service for former president Jimmy Carter. Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang John Lennon's "Imagine." A song positing a world without heaven and religion was jarring to hear in what is meant to be a Christian church, Washington's National Cathedral. Put that natural response aside, and a more charitable view is that the song's an anthem for unity and peace. Apparently, it was a favorite song of Carter's, who was well known to be a professing Christian. The problem with the song is something that ails us as Americans more broadly and deeply: radical individualism, humanism and a secular attitude.

The more beautiful moments at Carter's funeral involved turning to God and worshipping Him in thanksgiving for the gift of life; the stuff of traditional religious funerals, in other words.

As Fran surveyed the wreckage of her block, she looked across the street. "We were close neighbors," she said, before talking about some of the people whom she'd lived beside, occasionally giving touching details about their lives.

She reflected, "They are all gone."

Fran's sorrow wasn't about losing things – you could hear it in her voice, in what came to the surface. It was a fear of losing memories and friends that were foremost on her mind – and the torment for people who had already suffered personal devastation before the wind brought the fires to their homes.

Thanksgiving and Christmas in America have come to bring a barrage of media stories on loneliness, depression and anxiety. Maybe it is, in part, those conditions that "Imagine" wants to lift from lives. And yet in seeking to unite, it ignores the transformative power of unplanned community life. (Lennon's song has been considered an anthem to Communism and atheism, although Lennon told Playboy that a Christian prayer book he and Yoko Ono were given inspired him to write the song.) The music has become consolation in times of national grief and trauma. But the words wipe away what we need most in these times and always: the diversity of the personalities and temperaments in communities who love one another.

God bless Fran and her family and friends as they move forward. My friends David and Sarah, who live close to Fran's neighborhood, still have their house, as I write, but most of their neighborhood is uninhabitable now. David told me about the neighbors who were simply beautiful parts of their lives – making salsa as a kind neighborly gift or sharing fruit from a backyard tree.

Fran doesn't have to imagine. She was living what a glimpse of heaven can look like on Earth. You don't need the perfect house – just love. You don't need to swear off organized religion's imperfect institutions, but realize that it's God, through human vessels and sacramental grace, who will bring us the peace we can't even fully imagine.

klopez@nationalreview.com