Now Thank We All Our God: The Thanksgiving Hymn Written in a Plague Year

Read Time:13 Minute, 33 Second The organ starts, everyone stands, and the first line comes up on the screen or in the book: Now thank we all our God. And you are standing there with the one thing nobody in the room can see. The chair that is empty this year. The diagnosis you have not told anyone about yet. The job that went. You are expected to sing, and the song is cheerful, and you are not. Here is what almost nobody mentions when Now Thank We All Our God gets sung in late November, or at a harvest festival, or at a wedding. The man who wrote it was not having a good year. He was living inside a walled town in the middle of a war, and within about a year of writing it, by the usual account, he was burying his neighbours by the dozen, and then his wife. That changes what the hymn is asking of you. Quite a lot, actually. Now Thank We All Our God Was Not Written in a Good Year The words are by Martin Rinkart, a Lutheran pastor.

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