Today is the two year anniversary of the burning of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. On April 15, 2019—Palm Sunday—men and women from across the globe watched as Notre Dame was consumed in what can only be described as hellfire. France watched on its knees as its beloved cathedral wouldn’t stop burning.
I am not French. As far as I’m aware, I don’t have a drop on French blood inside me. But the burning of Notre Dame cathedral holds a special place in my life because I was one of the last few thousand people who attended Mass there. My friend and I had been visiting Paris for the weekend during our semester abroad, and we decided to go to Notre Dame. We checked the Holy Week schedule, and as luck would have it, there was a vigil Mass in a few minutes. I dropped a euro into a basket, and a man in turn handed me what Parisians apparently use for palms: a short boxtree branch.
Sitting in Mass, it felt a lot like any other Mass. I have zero understanding of the spoken French language, but I was able to decipher the Palm Sunday readings well enough. I remember attempting to understand the homily but ultimately giving up and rereading the booklet I was given at the beginning of Mass—also in French. I have no comprehension what the homily was that day, and to be frank, my experience of Notre Dame is actually embarrassingly limited. I went to Mass, but in the shuffle afterward, my friend and I didn’t actually get to see the whole cathedral. We stepped outside of the cathedral and into the setting sun, snapped a few photos, and took a metro ride back to our hotel.
The next day, we flew out of Paris and a few hours later, parents and grandparents were texting me, asking me if I was all right—Notre Dame was burning to the ground. I opened the livestream on my phone and watched as the structure I sat in two days before went up in flames. The spire fell, the roof caved in, and the glass melted away—at least, that’s what we were told in the early hours of the fire. Decades of survival, a testament to Christendom over the course of eight centuries: gone. And I was one of the last people to see it intact. I had philosophy homework I was supposed to be reading, and I sat on my bed, trying to concentrate. The livestream glowed with orange and red flames as the sky darkened around Notre Dame. The sun was setting around me also. I realized I couldn’t read. Instead, I watched Notre Dame burn in fascinated horror.
In the wake of the fire, I thought about permanence and oddly enough, death. Being relatively young, I have not encountered much death. My grandparents are still living, and the funerals I have been to are for people I don’t know horribly well. When I lived in Europe for those few months during my semester, I noticed that somehow, it seemed as if this world didn’t care so much about death—or at least, they took it more as a matter of course. Things were built to last, or at the very least, recycled; it seemed that almost every structure in Europe had been broken down and used for something else. Stones that adorned the outside of the Coliseum, I was told, were used elsewhere after a shift in power. The United States seems to like to place its history behind glass cases—only gloved experts are allowed to breathe the same air as the Declaration of Independence. “Preservation” didn’t seem as big a deal to Europeans, or at least, not to the ancient ones. And human death, at least in ancient times, seemed to be more of an opportunity to show off your wealth in a ridiculously lavish grave (that is, if you were rich enough.)
This, obviously, was not the attitude of modern Parisians as Notre Dame was suddenly destroyed. My thought process went something to the tune of suddenly losing a family member: “But I just spoke to him last night, and he seemed perfectly fine!” While I cannot speak for France, there were likely many Parisians who felt the same way. That cathedral withstood two world wars and was eight-hundred and fifty-six years old. And if this cathedral could be destroyed in one afternoon, what does that mean for a human life? As the flames started to die down, the motto of the Catholic Church flashed through my mind: sic transit gloria mundi, “thus passes the glory of the world.” Notre Dame was the glory of Paris. It’s not gone, by any stretch, but it no longer quite so glorious.
Death happens, even sudden, unexpected death, and it’s only human to attach significance to stone cathedrals. The glory of the world does pass away, and philosophers and theologians are always the first to point these things out. Change is inevitable, they say, and the world itself is ephemeral and fleeting. One thing I never really hear, at least in philosophy or theology, is about humanity’s almost desperate need to rebuild. That is what people have done and what people will do until the end of time. I don’t have the ability to grieve over Notre Dame the way the people of France did. It may not be rebuilt in the same way, and it is possible it will never be quite as beautiful ever again. But there were glimmers of hope shortly after the fire was extinguished. The Crown of Thorns was rescued by a brave priest, the windows weren’t as damaged as they thought, and it turned out that a lot of the art hadn’t been inside anyway because of the restoration project.
This world was not made for permanence. Not even stone structures will last forever. Paris lost something very dear to it, but we will pick up the pieces, salvage what we can, grieve, and start again. It might not look quite the same, but rebuilding seems to be an almost essential to being human. The ancients seemed to understand that as they recycled their old stone buildings and statues. Tragedy changes the landscape, but human beings tend to take those scars and reintegrate them into something cohesive and whole once again.
I expect nothing less from humanity. Even when things seem hopeless, we somehow muddle through.