An arrow fell, the one that was pointing towards the sky…
This fire devastated everything. The long and high flames have not only devoured beams, roofs, stained glass windows, statues, they have attacked our thoughts. Smoke not only pollutes the atmosphere, but darkens our future. How could we think about the future without relying on our national and spiritual history, on a collective memory that Notre-Dame embodied? We realized that our roots lay in a pinnacle in the middle of the blues. Some traumas produce happy consequences: the shared emotion reveals a common identity. Believers or not, Parisians or not, we cry in front of Notre-Dame wrapped in fire. Suddenly we were from a time and a land. This April 15, 2019The fire made us French.
An arrow fell, the one that was pointing towards the sky…
By working for us, this fall has distanced us from environmental materialism and reminded us of the importance of the sacred. When a supermarket burns, it affects its owner and its employees, it does not cause immense pain like the one that invaded us, cut by technological fetishism, far from the ideal of possession, foreign to commercial considerations . It was the deep mystery of the human condition and of incarnation that the furnace threatened, and this mystery reappeared at once. suddenly, as if shouting through the flames. We rediscovered what we had before our eyes. The sacred did not retreat, it emerged.
An arrow fell, the one that was pointing towards the sky…
The emotion went even further, beyond France, spreading to the universal: everywhere, people wondered if it was possible to die at 856 years old, if it was not a shame that our time failed to preserve the treasures of others. We were confronted with the reality of duration: time passes inexorably, or does our genius manage to set it in stone? Through the screens that displayed the terrible images of a masterpiece in decline, everyone realized that art offers an anti-destiny, certainly, but precarious, like everything that is human. Awareness of frailty swept the globe.
An arrow fell, the one that was pointing towards the sky…
How should we, Christians, among whom I count myself, interpret such an event? Had God abandoned us to the point of despising the temples we had built for Him? Couldn’t God have played with fire? It was God who was joking Notre Dame ? The fire strengthened my theology: God is not Providence, he does not interfere in our affairs, he made us free, free for good, free for evil. The devastation of Our Lady did not concern them, it came to us and only concerned us. Through his silence and abstention, God invites individuals to behave as responsible beings. It humanizes us.
Firefighters brought the fire under control. Thanks to them, the cathedral did not collapse. Yet the emotion persisted. A destructive emotion? A redemptive emotion. The fire has burned, but it also revives. What you do ? Attachment to Notre-Dame. We had imagined her immortal, the old woman, to the point of not paying attention to her anymore. Sent by the rich, the poor, the children, the atheists, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the secularists, the money flows to deal with it. Restoration became the other name for love.
Since then, architects, companies and workers have to go back to work to revive it. For five years, thousands of workers ran to the lady’s bed. We are all waiting to return there, I mean everyone, because this good Mary, mother of Jesus – we know her again – watches over everyone, those who believe as well as those who do not believe. Especially since she knew other depravities, not only those that come from time, those due to men. During the Revolution, bells, altars, relics and liturgical objects were destroyed, looted or melted down for their material value. The 28 statues representing the biblical kings, located on the west facade, were decapitated, since the revolutionaries took the cake for representing the kings of France.
In 1793, Notre-Dame was transformed into a “temple of Reason”, a civil religion was celebrated there. Reduced to secular use, the cathedral served as a warehouse, especially the grain and fodder warehouse, and was prepared to be demolished to reuse its materials. In short, excited people vandalized it in the desire for a clean slate, to erase the memory, like the Daesh terrorists in Palmyra and Mosul. There are no fundamentalists only religious…
Our generation raises fewer and fewer monuments to the soul, but excels in restoration and thus leaves its mark in the endless history of Christian art. Anyone who enters Notre-Dame enters a building that is both old and new. Notre-Dame is now a old new. The stones have been scraped away, revealing the delicate paleness of the Ile-de-France limestone where many animals, from snails to mice, have left their fossil footprints. Farewell to a millennium of smoke spewed from candles and censers!
Our era does not cut or sculpt better than the previous ones, but it shines in an art: that of light. We will not see the cathedral as our ancestors saw it in the 14th century.e century, we will see it differently, because intelligent lighting has been installed.
Result? Notre-Dame abruptly escapes a certain conception of the Middle Ages. It is still gothic, of course, but more gothic according to the 19the century The novelist Victor Hugo and then the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc appreciated its arcades, its gargoyles, its stained glass windows, the fantastic, the supernatural, the picturesque. From now on, Notre-Dame is no longer melancholy. Freed from the romantic filter, it becomes gothic according to the 21ste century His mystery becomes clearer, his spirituality becomes more cheerful. What could be more enigmatic and energetic than light?
Its size remains to not implement the same axes. If the building retains its liquid smell of fresh stone, its scent of young marsh, illustrates another faith. Not the one who complains, the one who smiles, not even the one who laughs. Personally, I see myself there.
Coming soon the archbishop he will beat the ground with his crozier and the organ will resound. Notre-Dame wakes up, different. And luckily. Being reborn is even more precious than living, right?
And its spire once again dominates Paris. We always plant arrows in the sky: there are our roots.
