Thought for the day – Wednesday 8th April 2020
These are unprecedented times. Even so, as an avid lover of hymns I find I am still inclined to hum (and sometimes sing out loud) hymns routinely. I have so many favourites, but if I really had to pick a favourite it would be the hymn below. It will be the first hymn to be sung at my funeral. It is a hymn for all seasons and situations, not least in times like ours.
In normal circumstances, when we use the term “natural resources” we will be referring to things like water, forests, and land deposits containing minerals and fossil fuels. As we get further into this current crisis, though, another “natural resource” is increasingly going to become more ‘obvious’: human relationships. From psychiatrists to social workers, from life-coaches to preachers in all Faiths, everyone affirms that love and social connection matter more than anything else in life. The priority of such relational wealth may not be obvious, given some of the purchasing and lifestyle decisions people have been making recently. But plenty of those decisions turn out to be distractions that only cloud the importance of social needs vital to the survival of homo sapiens.
I doubt many would challenge the suggestion that people now gather together less frequently in person, meet fewer people overall, and develop less meaningful and durable bonds than previous generations did. Loneliness is widespread in modern times and its dramatic rise has occurred in a relatively short period of recent history. Curiously, though, it is often a crisis – whether in the family, community, or at national level – that strengthens our relational wealth by drawing us closer together.
What makes the current coronavirus pandemic such a different situation sociologically is that we are actually being told to push away from one another. Social distancing requirements are physically separating people, just as quarantine measures would isolate them. Both deliver stress to those social connections we all depend on as a species. The resulting loneliness, fear, and uncertainty beckons us to scan the landscape for signs of hope.
The man who wrote my favourite hymn lived a life that is such a magnificent inspirational hope in a crisis like ours: Martin Rinkart (1586–1649). Rinkart was a gifted musician at several prominent churches in Saxony, Germany, before becoming a minister. He served as pastor to the people of Eilenburg for 30 years before his death – years that almost exactly overlapped with the dreadful Thirty Years’ War. Because it was a walled city, refugees from the surrounding countryside, besieged by invasions of the Swedish military, poured into Eilenburg. It did not take long for famine and pestilence to set in. In 1637 alone, 8,000 people died of disease – including many clergy, most of the town council, and Martin’s own wife. Rinkart was left to minister to the entire city, sometimes preaching at burial services for as many as 200 dead in one week. Known as a faithful and caring pastor, he gave away everything he owned except for the barest essentials to care for his family.
In the depths of the communal suffering that surrounded him, Rinkart wrote the hymn text now familiar to so many of us: “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices; Who wondrous things has done, In whom this world rejoices.” In another verse, Rinkart speaks of a bounteous God staying near us through our anxiety: “Keep us all in grace, and guide us when perplexed, and free us from all ills, In this world and the next.”
It is a hymn worth coming back to when COVID-19 fears force us to hole up at home and wonder when we will see our most precious natural resource fully restored again.
Some of the text above draws on article by Peter W Marty in The Christian Century magazine.