This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist
It was a freezing February day more than 40 years ago. It had been sleeting on and off all morning. I was a young lad working as a labourer on a building site in Euston. My boss was a big bear of an Irishman who was taciturn and gruff and as wide as he was tall.
That day, “the ganger”, as we called him, summoned me over and told me to go up to the third floor of the building and find a scaffold board. He said I was to get a hammer and chisel from the stores, in order to take out a thin fillet of wood that had been cast into the side of the concrete slab when it was laid. I needed the scaffold board because the scaffold had not been boarded out yet. Only the metal scaffold tubes were in place.
I climbed up the stairs to the third floor and, with some hesitation, ducked underneath the safety rail and lowered myself onto my single scaffold board, which was 10 feet long and nine inches wide. The scaffold tubes were wet and slippery from the sleet that had fallen earlier. Initially I stood stock still, contemplating the fact that my legs had gone wobbly. I wasn’t harnessed to the safety rail, as you would be nowadays, and I can vividly remember the sense of apprehension I felt as I edged the single board along the scaffold tubes and the side of the slab, three floors up and at least 30 feet off the ground.
After a while I got used to the height and the precariousness of my position. In some places it took a lot of hammering to get the wooden strip out, but in other parts it came away easily in extended lengths. In my eagerness to pull out a lengthy piece of wood, I put my full weight onto the edge of the scaffold board, beyond the point where it was supported by a cross prop. It reared up and went clattering down the side of the building, banging against the scaffold tubes as it did so. In that split second, I lunged at the base of the safety rail, grabbed it, and scrambled up on to the slab. I looked down to the ground where the ganger had been standing, watching me. He took off his hard hat and hurled it to the ground. I could hear him cursing me loudly.
He had calmed down a bit by the time I got down to the ground. He said to me, “That’s the quickest I’ve seen you move. You should say a feckin’ prayer of thanks to the feckin’ Almighty tonight, boy, as you nearly met him today, you feckin’ gormless eejit.”
Then he told me to get two scaffold boards this time, and to go back up there and finish the job, which I did.
My mind wandered back to this near miss recently as I listened to the choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields singing the well-known hymn “Now thank we all our God”. The minister explained a little bit about how the hymn came to be written. It started life as a prayer, written by the Lutheran minister Martin Rinkart for his children in 1637. Rinkart was an interesting character. He was appointed the Archdeacon of Eilenburg, a walled town near Leipzig in eastern Germany, just as the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The year he wrote his prayer, 4,000 people died in Eilenburg, from combat, plague or famine, and on one day alone Rinkart conducted 50 funeral services.
What thoughts ran through Rinkart’s mind, I wondered, as he stood on the city ramparts and looked down at the thin ribbons of white smoke rising from the campfires of the Swedish army, which had laid siege to Eilenburg? The scene behind him was one of utter bleakness, as Rinkart took his life in his hands and, leaving the protection of the city walls, interceded with the Swedish general. He persuaded the general to greatly reduce the tribute he was demanding to lift the siege. Rinkart saved many lives that day by imploring the Swedes to show some humanity to their enemies in the midst of a brutal war. He was rebuffed at first but he continued to describe some of the horrors that were happening on the other side of its walls. He spoke of the starving wretches fighting in the streets over the carcasses of cats and crows, because the dogs had long since been devoured. He graphically depicted the looting, the blackened plague victims, and the parents driven mad because they could not watch their children starving to death and dying before them.
What state of mind, I wondered, enabled him very shortly after these events to write the following lines?
Now thank we all our God,
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done,
In whom the world rejoices
When I heard of this my first thought was one of incredulity. Was he mad? Where was God when all these terrible things were happening? What had God done that warranted thanks? On further reflection, it seemed to me that his reaction to this desolation was not just admirable but, in its own way, an example of what Christ called “the kingdom of God within us”.
In his wonderful short book The Art of Loving (1956), Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst and humanist philosopher, analyses all forms of love, including the love of parents for children, romantic love, brotherly love and the love of God. His basic premise is that learning to love requires practice and dedication. Fromm himself was not a believer. He acknowledged that belief in God gave many people’s lives a meaning and validity. But he did not buy into it. He wrote:
There exists no spiritual realm outside of man or transcending him. The realm of love, reason and justice exists as a reality only because and inasmuch as man has become able to develop these powers in himself ... There is no meaning to life, except the meaning man himself gives to it; man is utterly alone except inasmuch as he helps another.
The devout Rinkart would not accept this view of the world, but he lived in an intensely religious age. Would he have been able to remain so unshakeably devoted to his God if he had been born in the 20th century, and had lived through the industrial-scale genocide that took place during that century?
Coming back to my lucky escape, more than 40 years ago, I am certain God was not with me that day on the scaffold. He did not guide my hand towards the guard rail that saved my life.
I was utterly alone and it was blind luck and the quick reflexes of youth that saved me. I shall not be singing “All praise and thanks to God / the Father now be given” any time soon, whatever the ganger said.
