connecting with culture: my way

What piece of music will be played at your funeral? Hopefully, you’ll have plenty of time to think about it. But songs can movingly reflect and express the kind of person we are (or were). According to one survey recently, the most popular piece of ‘contemporary’ music (as opposed to classical or religious) to be played as we face the final curtain is Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. Ol’ Blue Eyes is certainly still a draw; the advance ticket sales for ‘Sinatra at the Palladium’, which opened this month, were over £3m. And ‘My Way’ itself has all-age appeal as a classic hymn to our uniqueness and individual swagger. ‘Through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spat it out,’ it boasts. ‘I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way.’ Christians, surely, can learn from Sinatra’s verve. After all, according to Psalm 139, we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’; we each have a unique iris and a unique way of seeing the world. Too often, we stand back when we have something to contribute that no one else on earth could do in quite the same way. Yet we also face a point of departure from the song when Sinatra hits his final crescendo: ‘For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself – then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels And not the words of one who kneels…’ The sentiment contrasts with U2’s recent hit ‘Vertigo’, a mesmerising song written by Bono warning of the temptations and sickening dizziness of climbing the ladder. ‘Your love is teaching me how to kneel,’ he concludes. That’s not to let us off the challenge to do what we can and to do it well. The ‘parable of the talents’ offers a frank warning to the person who won’t take risks with what they’ve personally been given to work with; Eugene Petersen, in the Message, describes them as a ‘play-it-safe who won’t go out on a limb’. But it is, once we’ve identified our own strengths, to play to them hard for the sake of the upside-down world of the kingdom. To say (and do) the things we feel - as the words of one who kneels. And that, I hope, in the end, will have been my way. Brian Draper		the most popular song to be played at funerals is Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’
		Christians, surely, can learn from Sinatra’s verve

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