Dean Martin and a fitting send-off for my Uncle Sid

Hey pallies, likes you just never ever know where our Dino is gonna shows up next...likes in this article by Martin Samuel 'bout the funeral of his Uncle Sid. Clicks on the tagg of this Dinomessage to goes to the UK Daily Mail pad to checks it out in it's original context.

This is probably one of the most unusual Dinomentions I have ever shared...but shows how universal our Dino is known and loved. Also sharin' our Dino singin' 'bout "Little Ol' Wine Drinker Me," from a live Dinogig in London 1983. Dinoforever, DMP



Dean Martin and a fitting send-off for my Uncle Sid

By Martin Samuel

Vicar: Reverend Ed Tomlinson said he feels 'like a lemon' at modern funerals

When uncle Sid died, the vicar stood in front of the mourners with a gentle smile. 'Sid didn't believe in God,' he said, 'so I'm hoping that wherever he is now, he's very surprised.'

It was the word 'hoping' that I liked. The vicar was a man of God, but he knew what he was up against in church that day. He knew that in people like Sid, and people who liked Sid, he was not preaching to the converted.

Sid was going out to Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me by Dean Martin - the irony being I can never recall his touching a drop of the stuff in his life. Sid was a whisky man and he liked it straight. He regarded water with suspicion, as if it were a particularly inadequate mixer.

During one spectacular coughing fit caused by his choice of solids to accompany the whisky - 40 cigarettes daily - he was offered a glass from the tap. 'No thanks, son,' he said between wheezes. 'I tried water once, tasted of nothing.'

And that is what some people think about the Church of England, too. That it tastes of nothing. They would prefer something stronger, with a bit of oomph, a little more fire and brimstone, a greater commitment to the cause. Yet no religion could have given Sid a better send-off than he had that day.

The vicar held a service for a man who never set foot inside a church unless he had to, yet did so with dignity and humour. He introduced faith for those that sought comfort from it, and displayed humanity and respect for those who were there just for Sid. And, in doing so, he converted a room of people, not to the beliefs of the Church of England, but to the idea of it.

The very modern, very civilised, concept of a faith that can be all things to all men with a common decency that may come from the teachings of God, or the teachings of Man on subjects as wide-ranging as conservation and contraception. A faith that embraces the Bible and Dean Martin, Charles Wesley and Sid.

Wesley wrote more than 5,500 hymns, including the popular Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and the strangely obscure The Great Archangel's Trump. Some would argue Wesley and other devout men are all funeral services should consist of, even in secular times.

Ed Tomlinson, a vicar in Tunbridge Wells, talked this week of standing like a lemon at a crematorium listening to Tina Turner singing Simply The Best. He railed at the 'pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets'. He missed the point by a mile.

For a start, not all modern music is trite. When If Ever I Would Leave You, from the musical Camelot, was played at my father-in-law's funeral as his farewell to the wife he had known since they were at school together, it was a poignant moment unmatched by any hymn. Further than that, it is when reaching out beyond the realm of the faithful that the Church of England is at its best.

Father Tomlinson is not there for the guy in the coffin with the questionable taste in music. He is there for the living, to provide spiritual comfort for those that believe, and a soft voice of goodness for the rest.
And his Church is not redundant, but more relevant than ever, precisely because it resists dogma, hectoring or the fanatical, because it does not move people to acts of violence or cruelty.

The Pope proposes to welcome Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church, but the ones most eager to take him up on the offer will be those out of step with society, who vehemently oppose the ordination of women as priests, for example.
They see the Church of England as feeble and compromised, they hear Dean Martin where a church organ should be and think it has lost its place in society. They are wrong.

There is great modernity in the inclusiveness of the Anglican Church because it places human kindness to the fore. And that simple grace should never be mistaken for weakness. As Father Tomlinson may come to understand, it is actually his Church's greatest strength.
Once again with feeling

Simply The Best and other funeral favourites such as Wind Beneath My Wings and My Heart Will Go On are irredeemably appalling, but there are some pretty lousy hymns, too. Ever heard There Is A Fountain by William Cowper?

For a start, the fountain is filled with blood, therefore coming off a bit like a rather unnerving Hammer horror film rather than a song of praise.
It also includes this bizarre couplet: 'Then in a nobler, sweeter song, I'll sing Thy power to save / When this poor lisping, stammering tongue, lies silent in the grave.'

So we're singing but silent, yes? Dead, buried, yet somehow still singing. Cowper also wrote the line: 'God moves in mysterious ways.' He sure does.