Harrison, like fellow Beatle Paul McCartney, was baptized Catholic as a baby. From what I understand McCartney didn't come from a particularly religious household, but a letter Harrison wrote to his mother around the time he began exploring Eastern mysticism shows that there must have been some familial devotion growing up. He assures her that his new found spiritual journey did not effect his "devotion to Sacred Heart." What he meant by this is open to conjecture. In the idiom of northern England there is the habit of dropping the definite article before a proper noun, so whether he's referring to a parish or the devotion is up for grabs. He does say in an interview from the last decade of his life that he rejected Catholicism because, as he saw it, it asks you to believe in something intellectually without really encountering it through experience (my paraphrase). Harrison is not the only person who left traditional Christianity because he found it dogmatic and detached. I would argue that while his experience of life in the Church may have drawn him to this conclusion, his assessment of what the faith demands of us is still wrong.
What George Harrison's experience highlights is the fact that Cradle Catholics are at a disadvantage in many ways when compared to converts. We are baptized for the faith of our parents, who promise to bring us up in the Church. We are then catechized, receive the other Sacraments of Initiation in their time, but our familiarity with them can blind us to their power. Far from being empty ritual, they are the ways we most readily experience the presence of the God we can not see. They are not the only way we experience God; the Scriptures, meditation and prayer are other ways as well. As we progress we should come to see the presence of God in others. But it is through these external signs that we touch grace and are communicated God's friendship. Unfortunately life long Catholics can sometimes become indifferent to the Sacraments either because we were never really catechized properly, or because they became so familiar we stopped seeing how special they really are. Think of a couple who are married for decades; the fire of passion fades with time and they forget what made them fall in love to begin with. Eventually they take each other for granted and fail to see the special gift of the other. This is not the experience of every couple, of course, but far too many. The convert who has been searching throughout his or her life and encounters the Eucharist, for instance, knows what it was like to live without it and often has a greater appreciation for what they've found.
There is also a paradox of sorts in being a Catholic that can be lost on us. The Eastern philosophies downplay the importance of the body, on one hand, while making meditations and mantras, that set us into a trance of sorts so we can feel the presence of God (however He is defined) within, central. Harrison talks about abandoning psychedelic drugs just as they were becoming popular in the counter culture because he saw that they were a dead end, and that most of the hippies weren't really serious about enlightenment, they were just looking for the newest high. The mantras became very important to him, and described how they brought him into a blissful state, that could sometimes last for days. While the body is unimportant, and to some Eastern religions a hindrance to enlightenment, it is still through the bodily senses that these transcendental experiences become possible.
In Catholicism the body is extremely important. It is how we perceive, learn and communicate love. We believe that we will rise in a glorified, spiritual body, at the end of time. But we still need to move beyond feelings if we are truly to reach the experience of God fully. We must pass through experience, through the deprivation, almost annihilation, of the senses and them come back again into communion with the infinite, which is Bliss itself. It is not that the senses, and by extension the body, is to be destroyed, but rather purified. Harrison was smart enough to know that he had not reached the heights he was looking for, but in concentrating on the experience he never was. It is only through the paradox of Christian asceticism, that disciplines to body so it can be later exalted, that true union with God becomes possible.
As his cancer progressed and he knew the end was near, George Harrison had a press release put out with a quote that he had evidently used many times before: "Everything else can wait, but the search for God can not wait, and love one another." My purpose here is not to judge him in how he went about that search. I only want to say that he was closer than he thought he was to finding Him when he was near the Sacred Heart of his youth, and the Sacraments he passed by.
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