CAN’T BUY ME LOVE

In 1964 The Beatles recorded Can’t Buy Me love. It was a mega seller. When pressed by American journalists in 1966 to reveal the song's "true" meaning, Paul McCartney said, "The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well, but they won't buy me what I really want." There are lots of things money can buy, and that is well and good. But there is much more that money cannot buy, as McCartney said.

We all know what money can buy. All we have to do is look around at all our possessions. We worked long and hard to pay for them; and if some of them have been given to us as gifts, those who gave them worked long and hard to earn the money to purchase them so that they could give those gifts to us. Material possessions all come at a financial cost and we know it.

So it is good that, at least every once in a while, we do take pause to admire what our hard work and dedication has enabled us to purchase. We can be justly proud of our possessions while at the same time giving thanks to God for whatever gifts and talents with which we have been blessed that enabled us to achieve what we have. Even more, we need to remember while we are rejoicing in all that we have that we will take none of it with us when we die. All possessions are temporary and temporal.

On the other hand, as McCartney’s song reminds, there are some things money cannot buy, love being first and foremost. Sometimes we have been seduced into believing that we can buy another’s love and affection if we simply bestow on the other gift after gift, the more expensive the better. What we have painfully learned in the process is that that love was not only fleeting but was not real.

The danger in our pursuit of more and more is that we can lose that which money cannot buy. Marriages have been broken apart because one or both have spent so much time climbing the corporate ladder that they have grown apart. The bigger house and better cars and all the possessions their increased income enabled them to buy did not bring them closer together. The time apart only drove them apart.

Money can’t buy love. Money can’t buy happiness. Money can’t buy peace of mind. A member of our family was so obsessed with accumulating money that he truly never found happiness and drove away all those who could bring joy and certainly could bring some love into his life. I don’t think he ever knew until the very end of his life what he was missing, if he even did then, and then it was too late.

His was and is a very sad story and it is one that, in this material world of ours, is easy to repeat. We can all fall victim, as he did, to the belief that material wealth can purchase what we truly want and need the most: the love of others. It can’t. It never could and it never will. His story and McCartney’s song are reminders to me, and I hope to you, that while it is good and important to recognize how materially blessed we are, we must, at the same time, take time to make sure we have not lost, in our pursuit and accumulation of the material, the things that are most important and that money can’t buy.