I thank God that I’ve never been overawed by privilege. Surround me with cocktails and the finest people that money can buy, and I’ll look for a reason to leave early.

(I’m also blessed to have a woman with get-up-and-go. While I’m making the apologies, she’s already in the car with the engine running.)

But put me on a building site – among hard hats and hairy legs – and I’m overcome by the urge to fawn, to genuflect, to clutch at the hem of a fluro jacket. For here are men with extraordinary powers – to build, to create, to wrest order from chaos.

Christchurch swarms with such worker-bees these days, none more industrious than the Naylor Love crew piecing together the cardboard cathedral.

I was shown round the Latimer Square site this week by the development manager, Rev’d Craig Dixon, and I was struck again by the audacity of his vision.

It’s a “little acorn” story: the fact that Craig was propped up in bed one night with the design magazine Urbis when he happened on an article about Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect who designs cardboard creations for disaster zones. Pro bono, what’s more.

Well, the acorn took root after enquiries to Shigeru; drawings were done, consents granted, and Christchurch’s cardboard cathedral is now chasing a July completion date. But not without much groaning in travail.

The original estimate of $4m has ballooned to over $7m, due largely to rising compliance costs. And worse: court action has stopped (for the time being at least) diocesan plans to use insurance proceeds from the Cathedral in the Square.

This means that the diocese is underwriting the project while Craig tries to solicit public money, as well as oversee the build.

(He also heads a citywide fruit and vege co-op in the name of the cathedral, but that’s another story coming to a website near you.)

Despite its official title, the “Transitional Cathedral” is anything but makeshift. The cardboard A-frame, soaring six storeys, has graphite cores while the laminate beam across the entrance looks sturdy enough to carry the national debt.

The promise is plain: if there’s another major shake in Christchurch, a very safe refuge will be our much-maligned cardboard cathedral. With full remission of sins while you wait.

Comings and goings

The day we toured the cathedral site, a fractious southerly was plucking at the plastic sheets and raking leaves from the Latimer chestnuts. Puddled tyre-ruts reflected a glowering sky.

‘If you think this is cold, hang about a bit,’ said the forecast. A huddle of tourists needed no second warning.

All the leading hands at Naylor Love know that Craig is both instigator and high priest of the project. They know, too, that he won’t be on the job for much longer because funding for his own salary has run out.

Comings and goings are common on building sites, so there’s no space for sentiment. But Craig’s impending departure descends on the site office like a wrecking ball, and the foreman extends the rare courtesy of an open pass to the worksite – “as our guest, whenever.”

Actually, Craig has offered to join the construction crew if the cathedral isn’t finished by the time his job ends. The son of a builder, he’s determined to sign off the project with his bare hands, if need be.

On a 23deg autumnal afternoon I was moved by the same desire – visualising myself in hardhat and yellow vest, squinting into the sun, with nail-gun slung low against legs like pinetrees in winter.

But then Craig took me over the site as a southerly whipped the workers, and reality bit home – because it’s rugged work at ground zero, as winter bites.

The men are well kitted in jackets and scarves and boots but the open-ended cathedral is a wind tunnel.

The floor is an obstacle course of wooden boxing and reinforcing steel; electrical cable spills from walls, and cranes pivot overhead. My instinct is to duck.

Truth to tell, the site looks to me more like an apocalypse than a rebuild. But that, I suppose, only confirms that I’m a desk dweller, with hands like finest suede and an aversion to windblown dust and dirt.

I don’t know how much money your average construction worker makes. A lot less, I’d wager, than the money-movers and the politicians who mastermind Christchurch’s rebuild in air-conditioned comfort.

Whatever: the worker-bees in yellow deserve every cent they get. By rights, they should also be up on the dais when the cardboard cathedral is officially opened. Next to their high priest.

Brian Thomas is online editor for Anglican Taonga: www.anglicantaonga.org.nz