Ode to Notre-Dame

from 04.15.19

I am surprised this evening to feel such a palpable sense of loss over a building a continent away. When I saw the images of it burning, I felt sick. No lives to mourn and no malicious intentions to spark indignation, and still I feel unsettled.

I remember standing inside Notre-Dame as an eleven-year-old boy and marveling at the scope—the beauty that surpassed my capacity to experience it and the history that overwhelmed any appreciation I had for it. Notre-Dame is not just a building—it is a monument. A place endowed with meaning and memory for millions of people. And for the French, I imagine, it was a spiritual presence—portal, parent, guardian, pillar, friend—that they never expected to lose.

As with any monument so long-standing and so inextricably tied to cultural experience, it seemed to be almost eternal. And for reasons I don’t understand, it was comforting to me, when I thought of France, to picture Notre-Dame standing there in Paris as though it always had and always would.

Perhaps my sadness is due in part to the realization this destruction compels—that nothing, no matter how sacred or resilient, no matter how beautiful and revered, is ever excepted from the possibility of ruin. I’ve read that the French people gathered on the streets and sang hymns as their beloved cathedral yielded to the fire, and I suspect that they too realized if Notre-Dame could fall, so could anything else. What a loss we are called upon to witness.

But it is more than this. Speaking to his people and to the world, President Macron said, “We are going to rebuild this cathedral, all of us together . . . because it is our profound destiny.”

Notre-Dame is not gone forever—it will be reawakened from its ashy stillness by people who give generously and work tirelessly to breath its hollow lungs back to life. And this is our human endeavor, as the President said—to resurrect ravaged beauty and reclaim life standing side-by-side. What a redemption we are privileged to see unfold.