Poetry Analysis: "Fire Dreams" by Carl Sandburg

Today, a day to be thankful for many reasons, the least of which for friends and family, good health, dignified and stimulating work, we celebrate Thanksgiving.  This is truly an American holiday.  Over the years I’ve posted various types of Thanksgiving messages.  I’ve posted George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation that is the root of the holiday, and I posted a heartfelt statement of gratitude to all my blogger friends, past and present.  I’ve posted on St. Paul’s prayer of gratitude at the beginning of his epistle to the Romans, and I posted on part of the Eucharistic prayer of thankfulness in the Mass.  There are other posts.  If you type in “Thanksgiving” in the little search box in the upper left of the blog you will pull them all up.

This year I wanted to post a Thanksgiving poem, and there are quite a few out there to select from.  It was hard choosing but I chose one that from the title one would not guess is on Thanksgiving.  It’s “Fire Dreams” by Carl Sandburg.  

 

At the time of Carl Sandburg’s death (1967) the United States was 191 years old if you consider 1776 as the birthdate of the country.  Sandberg lived to 89 years old, and so had lived through nearly half of the country’s lifespan.  And since he was born in 1878, he lived through the formative years of the United States entering the world stage and becoming the leader of the free world.  Sandburg saw the nation’s urbanization, the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, the Great Depression, the African-American migration, the development of American music in Broadway musicals, Jazz, Gospel, and Rock and Roll, and so much more.  He was a distinctly American poet and, perhaps more specifically, a Midwestern and Chicagoan poet.  He won numerous awards in his lifetime and along with Robert Frost may have been seen as the two Great American poets in their day.  Sandburg’s poetry does not have the modernist sensibility, and so perhaps his reputation has come down after his life.  Still his poetry speaks to us simply and directly, especially as Americans. 

 

 

Fire Dreams

By Carl Sandburg

 

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)

 

 

I remember here by the fire,

In the flickering reds and saffrons,

They came in a ramshackle tub,

Pilgrims in tall hats,

Pilgrims of iron jaws,

Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,

And the random chapters say

They were glad and sang to God.

 

And so

Since the iron-jawed men sat down

And said, “Thanks, O God,”

For life and soup and a little less

Than a hobo handout to-day,

Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,

Since the iron-jawed men sang “Thanks, O God,”

You and I, O Child of the West,

Remember more than ever

November and the hunter’s moon,

November and the yellow-spotted hills.

 

And so

In the name of the iron-jawed men

I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.

God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,

God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,

I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: “Thanks, O God.”

 

It should be noted, the poem has a proem, an introductory line that sets the tone for the poem.  The proem stipulates the poem should be read aloud on Thanksgiving Day.

The poem body is in three stanzas of varying number of lines.  The first stanza has eight lines, the second eleven, and the third six.  The lines are in free verse of varying length, what I would call Whitman-esk lines.  Sandburg seems to have an affinity for Walt Whitman.  This poem is a very akin to Walt Whitman.

The situation is set in the first two lines: the poet sitting by a fire recalling the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.  The poet imagines their ship which he refers to as a “ramshackle tub,” imagines the pilgrims in “tall hats,” and repeated three more times in the poem as “iron-jawed.”  Significantly, the poet imagines the pilgrims thanking God for the success of their voyage.  This is from where the tile, “Fire Dreams” comes from.  The poet is by what I imagine is a campfire (or perhaps a fireplace) and has images of the pilgrims come to mind.

In the second stanza the poet imagines the initial assistance the pilgrims received as they settled in the country.  The lines that imagines the assistance is superb: “For life and soup and a little less/Than a hobo handout to-day.”  Twice in the stanza they thank God and twice their “iron-jaw” disposition is referenced.  Interestingly, never in the poem does Sandburg allude to the Native-Americans who were the complementary half to the pilgrims’ feast.  The poet mentions his “Child of the West,” which I take is his child, and tells the child to remember the month of November and its association with the hunt that will provide for Thanksgiving, 

The third stanza brings the memory to a climax where the poet and his child stand up and “in the name of the iron-jawed men” and praise God in gratitude.  The pilgrim’s “iron-jaw” is referenced once more.

Several poeticisms should be highlighted.  First the imagery of the pilgrims stands in the foreground—the imagery of their hats, their sea voyage, their ship, Plymouth Rock, and the weather, and of course the pilgrim’s iron-jaw.”  The humility of accepting a “hobo” meal is also visually distinct.  In contrast, the image of the poet and his child by the fire stands in the background, and it seems that in the third stanza when the poet and child are ready to express their thanks they step into the foreground to take center stage.  That is a nice effect.

Second, the language of the poem is very American.  Hobo is an Americanism which seems to date to 1889.  The poem was published in 1918, about thirty years from when “hobo” was coined.  “Iron-jaw” is another Americanism and coined a little earlier than “hobo.”  Iron-jaw was coined in 1880.  While “pilgrim” and “ramshackle” are not Americanism, they have become much more frequent in the American lexicon.  They do feel American. 

Finally the “s” sound predominates the poem, and it does so to great effect.  We see and hear if spoken aloud the “s” alliteration of the words: saffrons, seas, soup, since, sleet, sang, says, sleep, so, spotted, star, and I think I may have missed a few still.  That is quite an amount in such a short poem.  Even more remarkable is the frequent ending of the words with the “s” sound.  Notice all the plurals: pilgrims, saffron, reds, seas, jaws, and so on.  I’m not going to list them all but Sandburg seems to go out of his way to make words plural.  He also chooses words that naturally end with “s”: less, West, and most importantly, “Thanks.”  The cumulative effect of all the “s” sounds prepares the listener for the climactic moment when the poet and child “stand” together and “sing,” “Thanks, O God.”  All those “s” prior to the last line prepare the reader/listener for the poet to stand into the foreground and repeat the words from the pilgrim’s lips.

What a wonderful poem.

Happy Thanksgiving all!

Notable Quote: It is Truly Right and Just to Give Thanks

Today is the great American holiday of Thanksgiving.  It’s not a religious holiday, and yet it is religious.  It is a day to thank God for all the blessings he has given us.  Since all religions I think thank God in some way and since we have many religions in the United States living side by side, this is a perfect American holiday.  One that we can all share.

But we Catholics know gratitude to the Lord in a special way.  Every Mass as part of the Eucharistic Prayer we offer God our thanks.  This exchange which leads to the Eucharistic Prayer should be familiar to Catholics.

 

Priest:  The Lord be with you.  

People:  And with your spirit.

 

Priest:  Lift up your hearts.  

People:  We lift them up to the Lord.

 

Priest:  Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.  

People:  It is right and just.

The bold is my emphasis to highlight the formal gratitude to the Lord.  And then the priest goes into one of several Eucharistic Prayer choices, but each at the beginning recapitulate the words of the rightness and justness of being thankful.  I’ll just quote the opening of Eucharistic Prayer II, again my emphasis:

 

“It is truly right and just, our duty and salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy, through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, your Word through whom you made all things, whom you sent as our Savior and Redeemer, incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin. Fulfilling your will and gaining for you a holy people, he stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection…”

It goes on, but part of our liturgical prayer is a formal thanksgiving to the Father most holy.  As a liturgy it is repeated as a sacred rite.

And so in our “liturgical” calendar as Americans, we have this day to give thanks for all our blessings, personal and national, to the creator God of our understanding.  It is right and just and our duty to give thanks.  It is the sacred rite we come to every year, repeated with friends and family gathered together at our table of blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving 2020

In what has to be the worst year in memory, we should still count all our blessings and thank All Mighty God. Someone sent me this beautiful prayer of blessings that seems to originate from the Dominican.  That's Dominican in the Order of St. Dominic.

Edit: Here is my little Thanksgiving present for you all.  It's a great article by Fr. Dwight Longenecker tilted "The Theology of Thanksgiving."  Here are two paragraphs to grab your interest.

"The Thanksgiving meal celebrated by the pilgrims, the settlers in Canada and earlier by Spanish settlers in Florida had its roots in well-established European harvest time traditions. When I moved to England I was delighted to find that, although they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving as such, most Anglican parishes celebrated Harvest Festival in the Autumn. The church would be decorated with autumn flowers, colorful pumpkins, squash and everyone would bring tinned goods to be distributed to the poor. Some of them joked that this was their Thanksgiving — giving thanks that they had got rid of all those troublesome Puritans. So still the English celebrate harvest festival — a medieval custom which somehow survived the stripping of the altars. This treasured tradition, however, has deeper roots which the Protestants first rejected, then forgot.

For, of course, in Greek the word ‘Thanksgiving’ is ‘Eucharist’, and the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass has its roots in the Jewish thanksgiving sacrifice called the todah which is Hebrew for ‘thanksgiving and praise.’ Anyone familiar with the Old Testament religion may know about sacrifices such as the holocaust offering, sin offering or burnt offering, but not many will be aware of the todah."

There's a lot more.  

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers.  May God bless you all.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019

I don’t know who still reads my blog, but I miss you all that used to comment here.  I miss visiting the blogs of my blogger friends.  Many of you have stopped blogging,  Blogging seems to be a dying art.  I still use it.  I still think it’s a great way to express oneself, whether people read it or not.  As Shakespeare says, “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand” (Sonnet 60, l. 13) so too this blog will stand the test of time!

Well, dear friends of past and present, I want to wish you the most glorious of Thanksgiving Days. 

Thanksgiving with Augustine

Today is Thanksgiving Day, which is such a uniquely American holiday.  Today is a day to be thankful for all of God’s gifts to: your family, your friends, your home, the abundance of food, and perhaps all the material things we have available and at our fingertips.  The source of all is our Creator, and we should be grateful and thankful.

I was reading this passage last night in St. Augustine’s Confessions from Book Nine.  Augustine’s mother Monica, who prayed for his soul no matter what throughout Augustine’s pagan and dissolute years, has recently seen his conversion.  Shortly after this joy in her life, Monica (who will also be canonized a saint) catches a fever and within nine days dies.  Augustine offers this prayer of thanks and for her soul, which I found very touching and apt for today’s feast.

Book Nine, Chapter 13, Paragraph 35:

So it is, Praise and my Life, God of my heart, that I set aside for a little her good actions, for which I give thanks to you with rejoicing, and pray to you for my mother’s sins.  Hear my prayers, through the Healing of our wounds, who hung on a tree, who sitting at the right hand of the Father, intercedes for us.  I know that she dealt mercifully, and forgave her debtors from her heart; forgive her what debts she gave up in all those years after she was washed in the saving waters.  Forgive, Lord, forgive, I pray.  Enter not into judgement with her.  Let mercy triumph over judgement, for your sayings are true, and you have promised mercy to the merciful.  That they are merciful is your gift also; you who have mercy to those to whom you will have mercy, and are merciful to those to whom you will grant mercy.

                -Phillip Burton translation, Everyman Library.

Augustine is thankful for all his mother did for him, and goes on to pray for God to have mercy on her.  And in that last sentence we see that Augustine sees God having mercy as a gift too. 

So today, among your many blessings, be additionally thankful for your mother and for God’s mercy.

Short Story Analysis: “Monday,” by Mark Helprin

This is a story of incredible beauty and love.  It is a simple tale, a parable almost, if reduced to essence.  It is a story set in the aftermath of 9-11, a story of Fitch a construction contractor who gives up all he has to remodel a house for a young lady who has recently lost her husband in the collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center.

You have to piece of a few details together over the course of the story to get the full picture.  It is January in 2002.  Fitch is off to a job on a regular work day.  He comes across a funeral procession—“the mortuary convoys”—which apparently has become routine since the tragic event.  Fitch stops and covers his heart in respect.  He gets a call on his cell, and it’s from an old client, Lily, who he had remodeled her kitchen two years prior.  She has sold that house and is buying a new one in Brooklyn Heights, if not on the Promenade, close enough to have a view of the Lower Manhattan skyline. 

For those not familiar with New York City, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is across the river from Manhattan and has this view.

Of course that is a post 9-11 picture.  What is missing are the two Twin Towers of the WTC which would have dwarfed those buildings.  Here are people on the Promenade watching the Towers collapse.

Here is another picture with the new Liberty Tower being built in the location where the towers fell.

Fitch agrees to look at Lily’s new place, but he knows he doesn’t have the time to fit her into his schedule.  He’s booked solid for over a year.  But out of professional courtesy to a good, previous customer he will advise her.  He wonders why Lily hasn’t mentioned her husband, and he speculates that they may have divorced.  When she gets there with her parents and reviews the work she wants done, Fitch off handily mentions the dust that has to be removed from the face of the building.

Fitch was hungry.  He wanted to go home and eat.  He needed to talk to Gustavo and Georgy.  He needed a hot bath.  But he wanted to leave with less abruptness than the sudden silence suggested, so he took a step toward the windows of the living room, his face lit by the skyscraper light, and said, “On September eleventh, we were working on Joralemon Street.  When we heard that the first plane had hit, we went up on the roof.  Everyone kept on saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ and we stayed up there, and watched the towers come down.  The dust on the windows is from the ‘Trade Center.  It will have to be washed down very carefully, or the mineral grit will scratch and fog the glass.  And it will have to be done respectfully, because the clouds of dust that floated against these windows were more than merely inanimate.” 

When he turned back to them, only the father was there.  He could hear Lilly on the stairs, and her mother following.  Fitch thought this was somewhat ungracious.  Then her father moved a step toward him and took him lightly by the elbow, the way men of that generation do.  His tweed coat reminded Fitch of old New York; that is, of the twenties and thirties, when the buildings were faced in stone the color of tweed, when the light was warmer and dimmer, and when in much of the city, for much of the time, there was silence.

“Her husband was in the south tower,” the father said quietly.  “He didn’t get out.”  Then he turned and went after his daughter, walking stiffly down the stairs, like a crane.

As in many of Helprin’s works, we see here the motif of “light” that punctuates critical moments in his stories.  Fitch’s face is covered in light from the skyscrapers, and when he has his moment of nostalgia, he thinks of the city as covered in warm light.  Light in this work will symbolize a moment of idealism, and a moment of beauty.  It is this moment that works into Fitch’s soul.  He will reschedule all his jobs, even take a financial penalties; he will give Lilly an incredible deal.  He writes up a contract and a couple of weeks later they meet at an Oyster Bar to review it.  He tells her he doesn’t need a deposit.

“You don’t?  What about materials?”

“We’re coming off other jobs,” Fitch said.  “We’re hardly short of funds.  Don’t worry.”

She had not done enough of this kind of thing to know how unusual this was.  Her father would have been—and would be later—very suspicious, but she was not.

“And materials, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about.  We have a warehouse where we store our materials, tools, and trucks.  We do a lot of expensive projects, and most of the time the clients have no way to use excess material, so they ask us to take it.  Because we bring particular types of marble, tile, fixtures, moldings, whatever, from job to job, most of the time this is to our advantage.  But if we go to another kind of job where we don’t use the exact set, we have no room in our warehouse for the things we might need.”

“So you want to offload it on me?”

“No.  We can sell it back, but with restocking fee and prices for broken lots, it works out to the same thing as buying new material at a lesser quality, and it’s an accounting nightmare.  After your place, we’re going to the U.N. Plaza to do two entire floors, and the materials are specific to that job.  We’ve got to empty our warehouse so there may be opportunities for advantageous substitutions.”

This was totally untrue: his warehouse was too well managed to be overfull.  He simply intended to give her, at his own expense, a far better job than she could afford, and he did not want her to know that he had done so.

“I’ve made an extensive list, with cut sheets and full specifications, of these potential substitutes.  It has only upgrades, as you’ll see.  And if you don’t like anything, we’ll pull it out and go with the original.”

“You can do that?” 

“There’s no structural work.  We can do that.”

“But you might have to repaint a room, or redo a floor or something.  Wouldn’t that injure your profit?”

“No,” said Fitch, quite honestly, for on this job he would have no profit as commonly understood.  He would have, as commonly understood, a loss.  “You’ll see in the contract that if any substitution, or all, will not meet your approval, you can require us at absolutely no additional expense to install the original, to meet the contract specifications exactly.”

Taking out a little leather portfolio, she opened its red Florentine cover and, shuffling the pages, said, “I’m going to be away until Monday, March eighteenth.  You might put a lot in, in a month, that I might make you pull out.”

“Not to worry,” Fitch told her.  “In a month, we’ll be mainly setting up, doing demolition, the system rough-ins, framing, and administration—permits, ordering, receiving, inspections, all that kind of thing.  It’s a five month job.”

And so we get the name of the story, “Monday,” because Fitch doesn’t just do a six month job in five as he promises, he will have it done in a month by that Monday, March 18^th.  He will have his crew work around the clock and at a great loss to have it done by that Monday.  I searched around to see if there is any significance to the March 18^th date.  The only thing I could find was that was the date the United States countered the 9-11 attacks with an invasion of Afghanistan.  I don’t know if that was intentional or if it has any significance to the story, but it’s an interesting fact.

Lilly then questions Fitch’s generosity.  She says,

“It sounds so disadvantageous to you.  It makes me nervous.  Do you understand?”

“Of course I do.  Look, I don’t know what happened to this country, but everybody tries to screw everybody else.  More so than in my father’s day, more so than when I was a child, more so than when I was a young man, more so than ten years ago…more so than last year.  Everybody lies, cheats, manipulates, and steals.  It’s as if the world is a game, and all you’re supposed to do is try for maximum advantage.  Even if you don’t want to do it that way, when you find yourself attacked from all sides in such a fashion, you begin to do it anyway.  Because, if you don’t, you lose.  And no one these days can tolerate losing.”

“Can you?” Lilly asked?

“Yes,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He hesitated, listening to the clink of glasses and the oceanlike roar of conversations magnified and remagnified under the vaulted ceilings of the dining rooms off to the side.  “I can tolerate losing,” he said, if that’s the price I pay, if it’s what’s required, for honor.”

“Honor,” she repeated.

“Honor.  I often go into things—I almost always go into things—with no calculation but for honor, which I find far more attractive and alluring, and satisfying in every way than winning.  I find it deeply, incomparably satisfying.” 

And so we find the core of Fitch’s character.  He has been moved to redeem her loss and his integrity wants to bring whole the situation.  Ultimately he tells her he wants her to be happy.

Moved by this, for many reasons, some of which seemed even to her to be mysterious, Lilly looked away—at the long sweep of the bar at which they sat, and the blur of waiters and barmen in white, moving like the crowds in Grand Central, even busier, and the noise like that of water and ice flowing in a rock-strewn brook.

“Tell me why you value honor,” she said.

“I’m fifty-three,” he answered with analytic detachment.  “My father died at fifty-nine.  What good is money?  If I have six years left or thirty, it makes no difference.  My life will be buoyant, and my death will be tranquil, only if I can rest upon a store of honor.”

“There are other things.”

“Name them,” he challenged.

She met his challenge.  “Love.”

“Harder than honor, I’m afraid, to keep and sustain.”

This startled her into silence.

At one point in the story we learn that Fitch is divorced; his wife had left him.  When he speaks about love being harder than honor, he speaks from experience.  But while it is true Fitch is an honorable man, what he does goes beyond honor.  One doesn’t have to work for a loss to be honorable.  What he does for Lilly is for love, not romantic love, but love for a fellow human being.  He tries to explain it to Gustavo, his foreman.

“We’ll finish here in less than a month?  Gustavo was stunned.

“I’m going to call in as many subcontractors as we need, pay overtime, work day and night myself.  It’ll be done by that date.  When she returns from California she’ll come back to the most beautifully done space she’s ever seen—in pristine condition, clean, quiet, safe, complete—with a Fitch Company bill that says, ‘No Charge.’  That’s what I want.”

“Why?” Gustavo asked.  And, when Fitch was not forthcoming, Gustavo commanded, “You’ve got to tell me why.”

“If you could see her…,” said Fitch.

“I saw her when we did the kitchen.  She’s pretty.  She’s beautiful.  But she’s not that beautiful.”

“Yes, she is,” said Fitch.  “She bears up, but I’ve never seen a more wounded, deeply aggrieved woman.  It’s not because she’s physically beautiful.  What the hell do I care?  It’s because she needs something like this, from me, from us, from everyone.  Not that it would or could be a substitute, but as a gesture.”

“A substitute for what?” Gustavo asked.

“Her husband.”

“Her husband left her?”

“Her husband was in the south tower when it came down,” Fitch said.  “For Christ’s sake, they’ll never even find the bodies.  Vaporized, made into paste.  What can she think?  What can she feel?”

And so the narrative follows to its fabulous conclusion.  The men work to extraordinary strength and endurance to make right in one small person a deep wrong, a deep experiential hurt.  What was knocked down from hate, a rebuilding in love follows.  A wound from experience is healed by returning her to innocence.  The idealism overcomes the cynicism.  And ultimately Fitch too in his endeavor is healed.  The extraordinary effort becomes mystical, religious.

A lapsed but believing Catholic, [Fitch] had not been to mass since mass had lapsed out of Latin, but what happened in the weeks of February and March made up for the thousands of masses he had missed.  The mass existed, in his perhaps heretical view, to keep, encourage, and sustain a sense of holiness, and to hold open the channels to grace that, with age and discouragement, tend to close.  Witness to those who had little sacrificing what they had, to their children contributing to the work in their way, and to the fathers’ pride in this, Fitch felt the divine presence as he had not since the height of his youth.  The less he had and the closer to death he felt, the more intense, finer, and calmer the world seemed.  It had been a long time since he had been on the ocean on a day of sun and wind, but now he and all his men were lifted and traveling on the selfsame wave.

When the day comes and Lilly steps inside to find “ a work of art” that “was a beauty that arose from love” she is stunned back into innocence.  This was a a moving story, a story worthy of our Thanksgiving Holiday.  Perhaps having lived through September 11^th myself, the story was particularly moving for me.  You can find the story in Helprin’s collection, The Pacific and Other Stories.  

Happy Thanksgiving.

Matthew Monday: Thanksgiving Mass

This goes back a few weeks.  During the Thanksgiving week there was a special mass one evening where the kindergarten and first grade children from the church school were given either an Indian or Pilgrim headdress.  They just sort of marched in together and sat as a group.  Matthew got to wear feathers as an Indian.  Here's my devout little Indian coming in the entrance procession.

And in first grade (a year above Matthew) is Matthew's second cousin, Kayla, who got to dress as a Pilgrim woman.

Kayla is tall for her age, but they look so cute together.

Faith Filled Friday: Thanksgiving Blessing

It’s not quite Friday but it’s Thanksgiving Thursday night, and we have had our holiday dinner.  Our bellies are overstuffed and still there is lots of food left.  This is the moment to thank God for this wonderful life, abundant food, and love of family and friends.  God bless all that may see this.  I leave you with a blessing from Johnny Cash on his guitar.

Faith Filled Friday: George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

Umm, I know, it’s not Friday.  But I wanted this out for Thanksgiving, which is a Thursday.  I assume many of you have seen this, but I wanted to post it.  This is President George Washington’s Proclamation for a national day of Thanksgiving in the first year of our nation’s history.
 

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

You can’t say it better than that.  I am thankful for so many things, but especially my family and friends and all those who stop here to comment.  God bless you all.  In a small way you are all part of this blessed life that God has graciously given me.

 

 

Faith Filled Friday: Thanksgiving Prayer

Well, my mother had her operation on her finger Wednesday.  You can read about the need here.  All went well.  The only hangup was trying to get one of her earrings off.  She was to take all jewelery off, but no matter how we tried we couldn't unclasp the right one.  The nurse put tape over it, something about it getting too hot during the operation and burning her.  I can't say I understand.  It had no bearing on the operation.

The operation took under an hour.  She went in at 12:25, and I went out to get lunch.  I also took a little walk since it was such a beautiful spring day here.  I got back to the waiting room at 1:20 and the doctor had gone.  He had stuck his head out to look for me and I wasn't there.  Mama was in a recovery bay sipping a cup of coffee and looking like she had slept pleasantly.  I had them call the doctor for me and he said it all went well.  The tendon/ligament (not sure if that's the same thing) had torn and was in need of reconstruction.  I think he used that word, but I'm not sure.  Then he put pins in to hold it together for the next ten days when he will see her again.  We were home an hour later.

Thank you for all those who prayed for her.  The finger will be the finger, but my biggest concern was her going under sedation.  One never knows with that. 

And finally I thank the Lord for this little blessing.  His blessings are too numerous to count.  Special devotion to the Holy Family on this instance.  I'll end with this Thanksgiving Prayer.

Blessed are You, loving Father,

For all your gifts to us.
Blessed are You for giving us family and friends

To be with us in times of joy and sorrow,
To help us in days of need,

And to rejoice with us in moments of celebration..

Father,

We praise You for Your Son Jesus,

Who knew the happiness of family and friends,
And in the love of Your Holy Spirit.

Blessed are you for ever and ever.

Amen.

Prayer source from here.