It has been a stormy 10 years. We've seen: 

 

   The first and (God willing) only attack on our mainland,

 

  An economic recession at the beginning of the decade, an economic crash towards   the end,

 

  Giant businesses shattered by the moral failings of leadership within and without,

 

  Two wars bringing great pain and sacrifice, and sometimes worse, to our fighters      and their families,

 

  Millions of Americans out of work and millions more rising each day without        much hope of working.

 

It's not easy facing the day by fearing it.  

 

Here's how the first American managed the first few minutes every day: 

It's dawn on the ocean sea five centuries ago. The sea at that time was the undisputed enemy of mankind: vast and powerful and filled with strange beasts. The zone from which many never returned.

He was a sailor,a striver, a widower who sired his second son out of wedlock with a mistress, proud and adventurous as a youth, and hungry for status and wealth in his prime. But he became something else, as time went by. 

 

He reminded his peers more of a friar than a ship's captain: modest, prayerful, intolerant of any attempt by his men to swap baubles for Indian gold.  Once he rescued 14 teens of one tribe from the cannibalism of another; the girls and boys had been held and were being fattened for an awful feast when Columbus came upon them.  His journals are almost as often the story of a soul as the log of an explorer.      

 

Anyway, every day, at dawn aboard ship, amid the creak of the boards and the flap of the sails, he caused to be heard the high, clear voice of a young sailor. Such a  young sailor would have been very young indeed, often just  a boy, and his voice like a modern chorister's treble or soprano in a great cathedral,  The kind of bell-like voice that hushes a crowd and pierces trouble. 

Here is the hymn from 519 years ago, sung every dawn aboard the Santa Maria as it bobbled its way west to our shores.

 

Blessed be the light of day

And the Holy Cross we say

And the Lord of Verite (Truth)

And the Holy Trinity

Blessed be the immortal soul

And the Lord who keeps it whole

Blessed be the light of day

and He who sends the night away. 

Christopher Columbus and his crew were doing a lot of traveling, more than anyone had done before them, no doubt. That's the song  they heard every morning as the day began on the the voyage to our America.

We're still traveling now, and, Lord, it feels rough.

 

The compelling thing about this poem, this prayer, is that when you say it or even just think it, your mind and heart are nowhere else. Try that. Just say the last two lines.

 

 It is a thank you.

 

And when you think thanks or say thanks or, for that matter, burst out in a song of thanks like the little guy on deck more than five hundred years ago, no other thinking is possible.

 

Certainly not the dark or grim thought that does so much to weaken clear thinking and threaten resolve.

 

Gratitude has no room for negatives.  Strange but true. It is a verity, as they might have said in the time of  Columbus.  

 

Say thanks for the day and you will not only get through it, you just might triumph over it. 

 

It worked for Columbus.

 

Thankful sailing!