There is something moving about the response to the burning of Notre Dame. Many people felt distressed because part of our cultural heritage was being threatened, an irreplaceable building that spans an era from celestial stained glass to the selfie-stick, encompassing along the way everything from the whispered prayers of peasants to the coronation of kings and emperors.
For others it was personal – memories of precious times past, strolls along the Seine, the cathedral soaring and yet solid, seemingly indestructible.
And, of course, there were also those rushing to Twitter to declare that as a symbol of white colonial privilege it was overdue for burning.
The cathedral as a museum, monument to human creation – that is one future for Notre Dame. It has experienced worse fates in the past
But for the majority it was a moment of simple sadness in this holiest of weeks, and a chance, perhaps, to unite in a moment of solidarity. There is something about the building that speaks to people in the way that true beauty speaks, uncovering in us a desire for something that transcends the everyday and intimates the eternal.
An Irish Times letter writer quoted a line from Philip Larkin’s Church Going. “A serious house on serious ground it is, /In whose blent air all our compulsions meet /Are recognised, and robed as destinies/ And that much can never be obsolete.”
Although Larkin was devoid of faith the old cynic regularly visited churches. Church Going was inspired by finding a ruined church when he was out cycling during his time working as a librarian at Queen’s University, Belfast.
In the poem Larkin assumes a time will come when churches will fall out of use, and wonders “if we shall keep/ A few cathedrals chronically on show,/Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases.”
Sacred space
The cathedral as a museum, monument to human creation – that is one future for Notre Dame. It has experienced worse fates in the past: Catholic clergy murdered, the sacred space desecrated during the French Revolution, rededicated first as a Temple of Reason and then as part of the short-lived Cult of the Supreme Being.
Our Lady was replaced by the goddess Liberty, something with particular resonance for our age.
But perhaps Dennis O'Driscoll and his beautiful, evocative poem Missing God, is closer to what at least some people were feeling as they watched the cathedral in flames.
Ours is an age when we are stuffed full of information, starved of meaning and restless without really knowing why
Although declaring himself incapable of the "big affirmations, the thundering assertions, the breast-beating credos", O'Driscoll said that he would "incline towards ticking the 'non non-believer' box on the God questionnaire", and that his poem Missing God, "is not a mere exercise in religious nostalgia" .
In Missing God, O’Driscoll meditates on the times when even though we believe that we have cheerfully abandoned faith, we find ourselves aching for something more, perhaps during a civil wedding “when, at the blossomy altar of the registrar’s desk, we wait in vain to be fed a line containing words like ‘everlasting’ and ‘divine’.”
O’Driscoll includes missing “Him when our journey leads us under leaves of Gothic tracery, an arch of overlapping branches that meet like hands in Michelangelo’s creation”.
Ours is an age when we are stuffed full of information, starved of meaning and restless without really knowing why.
To step inside the cathedral of Notre Dame was to be flooded with beauty, the eye drawn upward and filled with the light of the magnificent windows.
Longing
For some, at least, it was to experience an inchoate longing for something greater than themselves, even if they could not share in the worldview that created the cathedral.
That moment of openness to the transcendent might help people to understand what Notre Dame means to Christians. The Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit, expressed it when he said that "you have to remember why it was built. This jewel case was made for what jewel? It was not for the crown of thorns, it was for a piece of bread – this piece of bread that we believe to be the body of Christ."
A video taken while Notre Dame burned has gone viral: Parisians on their knees, singing a beautiful version of the Hail Mary, another reminder that Notre Dame is not the grand old lady of France but a church dedicated to the Mother of God.
Which is why it is important that the rebuilding acknowledges that Notre Dame is not just a historical monument, a tourist attraction or a symbol of France. It is a living church, designed and used daily for worship.
Nor does restoring Notre Dame preclude care for the poor or the planet, and care for both should take precedence in all our lives. But it is wise to remember the woman at Bethany described in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 14 verses 3-9.
While Christians worldwide long for the restoration of Notre Dame (and are probably praying that the architectural competition announced by the French prime minister to replace the spire will not result in a monstrosity) ultimately it will not have been saved at all if it becomes merely a ghost of a cathedral, “chronically on show”.