If you’ve been there, you will never forget it. If you have the chance you will go back again and again, no matter what your religious preference or none.
Notre
Dame de Paris took two hundred years to build and stood for nearly nine hundred
years. The world watched, shocked, as it burned to near rubble in 2019, within
fifteen to thirty minutes of total collapse. The bell towers and walls of the
nave were saved by the buttresses and the firefighters. People in the know said
it could never be rebuilt. It was.
I
remember visiting the grand cathedral once when the organ was playing gently until it wasn’t. The organist prodded it until walls shook and the floor
vibrated a little. The orgue, all eight
thousand pipes, was saved but it had to be dismantled, cleaned of toxins, and
reconstructed.
Les
cloches, nine of them weighing from thirteen tons to as little as seventeen
hundred pounds, were lowered, cleaned, and raised again to new support beams.
You can hear them from nearly any spot in the inner arrondissements of Paris.
This
last weekend the rejuvenated church opened to fanfare witnessed by leaders from
around the world in both a secular ceremony for la crème de la crème on
Saturday, and a religious rite of consecration and Mass on Sunday. The iconic
building has an unusual status: owned by the state, which is anti-religion, and
the cathedra[i] of the Catholic Archbishop
of Paris, a parish church and a tourist destination, the icon of Paris.
Much
can be made of the reconstruction: religious, secular, nationalism, or just
beauty. As the TV cameras panned the cathedral before the opening ceremony,
it showed a large section of the nave with empty seats. Early in the
ceremony firefighters entered, clad in their bright uniforms, followed by
artists, engineers, stone masons, and others who had worked to restore the
building. The applause was deafening as they filled the seats reserved for
them.
The
thousands who labored for five years were the backstory of the reconstruction.
The initial decision to rebuild the edifice as it had been originally built
caused a wave of old skills to be
renewed. People went to the original forest to topple trees and hand-hew the beams
that would form the roof, held together with hand-shaped dowels. Young men and
women learned the old skills of stone carving, painting restoration, granite
cleaning, leaded glass cleaning, and reconstruction. The soot and toxic debris demanded
that the interior walls be cleaned, removing over eight hundred years of grime,
resulting in a bright white interior mirroring its original opening so many
centuries ago.
In 1962, President Kennedy challenged the nation: “ We choose
to go to the moon in this decade … not
because they are [it is] easy, but because they are [it is] hard, because that goal will
serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one we intend to win…” We did.
President
Macron rallied his nation after the fire: “The fire at Notre Dame reminds us
that our history never stops and we will always have challenges to overcome. We
will rebuild Notre Dame, more beautiful than before – and I want it done in the next five years. We
can do it. After the time of testing comes a time of reflection and of action.”
They did.
Both
challenges required great organization, highly skilled workers and artisans,
and a great deal of money; nine hundred million dollars for the cathedral. But
it brought focus to a nation in disarray economically and politically. It set a
goal to be achieved, and its achievement shouts to us to raise our expectations
and change our behavior.
Individuals
and nations can achieve greatness if rightly directed, challenged, and given a
chance. We can do better than we are doing. What if our leaders urged us to
greatness rather than in-fighting all the time. What if our leaders gave us
great goals that moved the world forward to real greatness, to end the funk we
are in, to end starvation and disease, to end wars, to let the people rule the
world, to shoot for Mars and beyond? Imagine if someone said we could do all that
in five or ten years, and we said yes. Out of the fire, we can bring beauty to
the world.
“You
may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us,
and the world will live as one.”[ii]
