Friends,
Over the weekend my family and I went to see the film “Mary Poppins Returns,” and it was wonderful. The storyline made a great sequel to the 1964 film, the acting was fantastic (with sweet cameos by Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury) and while I doubt any of the music in the new film will ever become culturally iconic in the way that “A Spoonful of Sugar” is culturally iconic, still there were some good numbers.
My favorite song in the film is called “Trip a Little Light Fantastic.” It is an homage to “Steppin’ Time” from the original film, only instead of chimney sweeps, the singers and dancers are leeries, or lamp-lighters, and in the place of Dick Van Dyke’s Bert, the lead singer and dancer in “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” is a character called Jack, who is played by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In the song his words, sung to children, begin like this:
Let’s say you’re lost in a park, sure You can give in to the dark or You can trip a little light fantastic with me When you’re alone in your room Your choice is just embrace the gloom Or you can trip a little light fantastic with me.
It is an invitation to join the leeries in the work of lighting lamps as a metaphor for bringing light into darkness.
The day after I saw the film my father and I talked about the new Disney adaptation of P. T. Travers’ work and he pointed out that the idea of a leery beckoning to a child and sparking that child’s imagination probably is an idea borrowed from “The Lamplighter” a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. In the poem a leerie captures a child’s imagination with the work of lighting lamps and the child proclaims:
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea, And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be; But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do, O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you.
Turns out this may be why I loved the song so much: it is inspired by the writer who inspired my dreams as a child (and who inspired my thinking and writing as an adult), a writer my father introduced to me by giving me the book Kidnapped when I was young. But I also loved the song “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” because onscreen it is sung by Lin-Manuel Miranda, an artist my children have taught me to love because he wrote, directed, and starred in the original cast of Hamilton.
To have a song inspired by a writer my father taught me to love, sung by an artist my children taught me to love, was gift beyond imagining, and when we are faithful in our spiritual lives our living can be a similar gift.
For this is part of what religious people do: we practice a faith inspired by what we have learned from past generations, a faith we know is sung most beautifully by those who will carry the faith into the future.
In all that we do, may our melodies and lyrics tell of new things and proclaim new truths in ways that draw wisdom and strength from the inspiration of our elders.
God’s Peace,
Ben
P.S. If you want to see a video of “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ9WKQmcX2k If you want to read the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, follow this link: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/lamplighter/