“Since the Puritans got a shock/ When they landed on Plymouth Rock”*

by chuckofish

Today we toast the Broadway star Ethel Merman on her birthday (1908-84). I bet you didn’t know that she was a lifelong Episcopalian (Her funeral was held in a chapel at St. Bartholomew’s in NYC)–which is hilarious (or perhaps not) since she was notorious for her brash demeanor and for telling vulgar stories in public. She was truly a force of nature and very famous in her time, indeed a cultural icon. I’m sure no one under the age of 60 today even knows who she is. Que sera, sera.

It is also the birthday of the English poet Robert Service, about whom I have blogged before. As you toast him, you might read one of his poems or watch The Spoilers (1942) in which he shared a brief scene with Marlene Dietrich. (Service appeared unbilled as a Yukon poet patterned after Service himself.) The Spoilers, which takes place in Alaska, is a good choice for a cold January night.

On a more serious note, this is a good article by Jen Wilkin about the chiastic pattern of life she discovered at her mother’s deathbed. “Remembering that seasons of life follow a patterned order helps us inhabit the season we are in and prioritize how to use the time we are given. Since death announced its presence in Genesis 3, our days have been numbered. Perhaps God, in his infinite kindness, gave us a chiasm, a patterned measuring rod, to number those days rightly.” (A chiasmus is a literary device in which ideas are presented and then subsequently repeated or inverted in a symmetrical mirror-like structure.  A modern example of a short chiasm would be If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. “Jesus makes a pithy chiastic statement in Mark 2:27: ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'”)

This is one of several articles I have read about the inappropriateness of singing ‘Imagine’–“a strange and indeed hopeless song for any funeral, let alone one that is meant to be Christian in nature”–at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. “John Lennon’s song collapses in on its own irrationality. He imagines ‘living life in peace’, and there being no “greed or hunger”, but such talk demands a form and purpose, but atheism and naturalism cannot provide such a definition.” Indeed.

Have a good day. Sing a song loudly and brazenly, read a poem, watch an old movie, think about the arc of your life, thank God for his mercies which are new every morning.

*A line from “Anything Goes” by Cole Porter; Ethel Merman starred in the original Broadway production in 1934.