I received the text while waiting in a doctor’s office. “Notre Dame is burning!” I read the headlines, checked my twitter feed, and watched the same videos we’ve all seen. Shocking and surreal to think of two trips in the past when I was there. For much of Monday, the world waited without knowing if “Our Lady” would fall into a heap of stone and ash.
A building on fire terrifies in a primordial way- violent, vicious, and menacing. I watched aghast as the flames dismantled more than a cathedral; they took a testament to the human and the divine, a symbol of what mankind can do for the worship of God. Those flames ripped up human history, too, and we all shuddered when the great spire fell.
I also marveled at the emotional responses of the people in Paris and abroad, Christians, people of other faiths, secularists, political leaders, regular folks. Those who have studied the church, those who have visited, and those who haven’t yet. In almost every expression, I could hear that age old respect for beauty. I wondered why we needed the burning of a church to make us feel it again.
Notre Dame, like all the great cathedrals and religious temples destroyed during our thousands of years history as human beings, will be restored. And for this reason, I thought of how “Our Lady” had stood for 850 years, patiently enduring the best and worst of humanity, the coronations of kings and a Corsican emperor, the grisly Revolution, the wars and other conflagrations. I also thought of how we have been here before, that our great institutions crumble at times, but because we need them, we rebuild them. In this sense, even in our supposedly secularist times in supposedly secularist Europe, we will continue to build upon those churches that make us great.
Thank you for reading.
