Sail On, O Ship of State

Sail On, O Ship of State

“Fluctuat nec mergitur” is Paris’s official motto.

It means “Tossed but not sunk.”   Or “The one who rises with the wave is not swallowed by it.”

You see it everywhere in Paris, on buildings like this school, streetlamps, even on every firefighter’s helmet.  This week Parisians boldly held up “Fluctuat nec mergitur” signs at rallies and wrote it on prayer cards.

Originally the motto of the Seine River boatmen in the Middle Ages, it’s a powerful metaphor for a city with a long tumultuous history; the small ship, the big wave, the brave sailors, the skilled navigators, tossed but not sunk.

“Fluctuare” in Latin means “be wave-like.”  Hence “rise with the wave,” a more active image than “tossed.”  Either way, the sea is rough, but we survive, strong and together.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow popularized the “ship of state” metaphor for Americans in 1850, concluding an 80 page (!) poem about the building of a ship with this stirring stanza:

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, — are all with thee!

That stanza became a rallying cry for those in favor of Union and against slavery; children memorized it, Lincoln was seen to cry when reading it.  Nearly a century later FDR sent the poem to Winston Churchill, a former Head of the British Navy, saying the words were meant to encourage “you and your seafaring nation.”  Churchill cited it in a broadcast; cards and calendars with the words circulated both nations.

Leonard Cohen uses the metaphor in his song “Democracy,” with a twist:

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

At our Blue Theology Mission Station here in Pacific Grove we love all things nautical.  
We are pro-ship and anti-shipwreck.  We ourselves have been tossed in horrible storms literal and figurative.

We stand on deck in solidarity with the sailors of so many ships of state being tossed by “gale and tempest’s roar.”

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, — are all with thee!


Bluetheology.com