The Moon and the Stars

Contributed by Stephen Wickman, St. Thomas Episcopal, McLean

I love songs, and the BBC (yes, again) has a neat show called “Inheritance Tracks” that invites celebrities to tell us about one song passed down to them from their parents and one song they want to pass on to future generations. Today Jared Harris – who does look a bit like his more famous father, Richard, and who played General Ulysses S. Grant in “Lincoln”  shared that his father had handed down  “Fly Me to the Moon” and that Jared wanted to pass on Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song.”   

BBC Radio 4 Extra – Inheritance Tracks, Jared Harris 

His father sang the Frank Sinatra version all the time, and then Jared’s drama teacher at Duke University said, “Well, you have to listen to Bennett’s version. It’s sublime.”  Jared remembers being transported by the “romantic longing.”   

Fly me to the moon 
Let me play among the stars 
Let me see what’s spring is like 
on a Jupiter and Mars 

In other words 
hold my hand 
In other words 
baby, kiss me 

Fill my heart with song 
and let me sing forever more 
You are all I long for 
all I worship and I adore 

In other words 
Please, be true 
In other words 
I love you 

Fill my heart with song 
let me sing forever more 
You are all I long for 
all I worship and adore 

In other words 
Please, be true 

In other words 
In other words 
I love you  

Songwriters: Paul David Hewson, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, Dave Evans, Attrell Stephen Jr. Cordes.  

 And now for something completely different. (That’s and inside joke for Python fans like me. I grew up watching them on Canadian TV before they aired here.) 

At Catholic boarding school, Jared said: “I had that whole doctrine hammered into my head, and I was trying to shake it off me.”  But listening to the song as an adult he gained a different perspective: “And you know, you understand that religion and all those things are just early attempts to try and answer the same question, which is that, who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? Where are we going? There’s never, ever been anybody like you that’s ever been born, and at the same time, we’re just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny planet, this incredible thing that’s exploding at the speed of light. It’s amazing. So, remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth!” 

Lyrics 

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown 
And things seem hard or tough 
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft 
And you feel that you’ve had quite enough 
 
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving 
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour 
It’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned 
A sun that is the source of all our power 
 
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see 
Are moving at a million miles a day 
In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour 
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way 
 
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars 
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side 
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick 
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide 
 
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point 
We go round every two hundred million years 
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions 
In this amazing and expanding universe 
 
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding 
In all of the directions it can whizz 
As fast as it can go – the speed of light, you know 
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is 
 
So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure 
How amazingly unlikely is your birth 
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space 
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on earth 

Songwriters: John Du Prez, Eric Idle 

For non-commercial use only. 

This blog post is the expressed opinion of its writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Tysons Interfaith or its members.