By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
During a recent funeral, as I took in the icons of St. Michael the Archangel and the Twelve Apostles painted inside a domed Greek Orthodox Church in a small Utah mining town, a revelation swept over me.
The good soul we were there to remember and honor was baptized in, married in, and now buried from, the same century-old sanctuary.
It is one of the most poignant examples I know of a wonderful, and increasingly rare, form of human living…from the cradle to the grave.
That lyrical descriptive phrase debuted in British literature in the early eighteenth century, when a journal author pondered the difference between a modest man and a modest fellow. This 1709 writer explained, “A modest man is in doubt in all his actions; a modest fellow never has a doubt from his cradle to his grave.”
A hundred years later, the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley picked up the phrase and included it in his 1819 song “Men of England,” imploring the working class to contemplate why they “feed and clothe and save, From the cradle to the grave, Those ungrateful drones [the aristocracy] who would, Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?”
Shelley immortalized the expression a year later in his masterpiece Prometheus Unbound. As his four-act lyrical drama ends, Shelley bemoans that the human being is “a despot and a slave, a dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave,” but also believes humanity might evolve, “To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Probably influenced by the works of Shelley, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, repeated the expression in his 1928 poem “The Fool by the Roadside.” In 1943, the very well-read British prime minister Winston Churchill, adapted the catchy phrase for his political purposes, telling a radio audience he supported health insurance “for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.”
Unfortunately, since those heady and literate early days, more pedestrian applications of the expression seem to have dominated.
Today, the EPA uses “cradle to grave” as an analytic tool for monitoring waste production and disposal. Manufacturers use it to measure a finished product’s life cycle, and advertisers cynically deploy it while trying to install a lifetime of brand loyalty by reaching consumers at a very young age.
I am neither word snob or language cop, but I am dismayed that such bureaucratic and technocratic appropriation is draining the magic from one of the most lyrical expressions in the English language, one used so well by the likes of Shelley, Yeats, and Churchill.
My little revelation at the picturesque Utah Orthodox church built in 1916, however, has helped me once again see and hear the simple but lovely life poetry that still clings to the beautiful words “cradle to grave.”
Immigrant farmers and coal miners—primarily from Greece—funded and constructed the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in Price, Utah. It was the thirteenth Greek Orthodox Church built in the United States, and now is said to be the oldest in continuous use west of the Mississippi River. (You can read more about the church’s history here: here and here.)
The church founders wanted a place to remind themselves of home, but also endeavored to bring a sliver of that faraway old country to decorate the new land they now called home. Two children of immigrants—my friends Sylvia Liapis and John Platis—were born in that new home away from home.
John arrived first, born in 1924 in Price. His father Gust (from Lamia, Greece) and his mother Matilda (born in Austria) ran a Main Street candy store that later became a cafe. The family also operated an adjacent lounge and club.
Sylvia was born in 1925 in Hiawatha, a nearby coal town. Her parents (Paul and Fatini) immigrated to America from Portianau and Lemmos in Greece during the preceding decade. Sylvia’s mother kept house while her father toiled in the local coal mines.
John and Sylvia both were baptized at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church. They grew up (John with 12 siblings and Sylvia with 5) in the close-knit boisterous Greek community surrounding the church. They attended the same Sunday services and the local Carbon County schools.
The same year the church was built, John’s father opened a candy store on Main Street which he later converted into a restaurant. Over the years, John worked in the family business and Sylvia’s family members ate there.
John joined the Navy beginning in 1943 in the waning years of World War II. He attended college, but also started flying planes while in the Navy. He earned his private pilot license in 1946.
Sylvia attended the local college too and soon caught John’s discerning eye. After a short courtship, John took her up in his plane, proposed, and refused to land until she accepted.
After that soaring offer, the young couple married in 1948. The wedding at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church took only an hour or two. The marriage lasted 65 years.
The newlyweds John and Sylvia took over the Platis Cafe from John’s parents, and renamed it the Century Cafe. The couple ran the popular community gathering spot for the next 35 years, until they retired in 1983.
Along with the wider Carbon County community so dependent on coal, they endured economic downturns when the mines were shuttered or temporarily closed by accidents or fires.
There were good times too, like an anniversary celebration of the longtime family business. They offered 1916 prices in the cafe and the local paper playfully depicted John and Sylvia, cartoon style, in “Hello Dolly” turn of the century garb.
It was hard work. Sylvia took the day shift. John worked at night.
In between those regular and sometimes grueling 10 and 12 hour shifts, they raised two daughters. They baptized both girls at the local church and then sent them back there to learn the Greek language, Greek culture, and Greek dancing.
Both daughters went to college, funded by the cafe’s receipts. One daughter got married at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church. In the 1970s, the family helped start (and thereafter always supported) the Greek festival held each July in Price for the last fifty years.
Having made personal history with Sylvia in and around a place now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, John passed away in March 2014. Sylvia followed a few years later in October 2023.
As a final act of grace, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church sent John and Sylvia—with a local police escort—off to eternal life. They now rest in peace under large shade trees at the city cemetery, close to Paul and Fatini, to Gust and Matilda, and to dozens of other cradle to grave relatives and friends.
Each autumn, Christians remember the best of us (All Saints Day on November 1) and then all the rest of us on November 2—All Souls Day. I’ve aspired to be a saint, of course, but more easily identify with the ordinary souls. Maybe, like the singer Billy Joel, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”
The three most important events in the life of an orthodox Christian are baptism, marriage, and death. John and Sylvia were imperfect, but good devoted souls, and they undertook all three benchmark life moments—as well as all the living in between—with hope and resilience.
In a way, that just might make them saints too.
Mother Teresa often explained “Saints are only sinners who keep trying.” Thomas Merton said, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore, the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
Sylvia and John found their true selves doing ordinary, familiar things while happily tethered to a quaint old church in a small town in rural Eastern Utah.
They seemed to understand—as did the great British writer Shelley who shared their affinity for a cradle to grave life—that, “Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”
Perhaps that’s what made their simple but meaningful life so poetic.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
