Nothing unites our collective consciousness faster and with greater clarity than tragedy.
Whatever one’s religion, it was impossible to remain emotionally unmoved by the awful spectacle unfolding across innumerable newsfeeds, online papers and livestreams last week. Indelible images: a beautiful clear blue Paris sky blotted by an ugly blackish spiral of smoke; a latticework roof once painstakingly assembled over years from an entire forest of trees, battlements fashioned from stone arduously hewn from quarries throughout France all wash in a sea of flames as red as those of Dante’s hell.
Every human mind is hotwired differently, the result of innumerable chemical reactions, firing neutrons, accumulated experience, shaped environments and cultural exposure. Yet, for all our variance, we are still collectively programmed to process and display a common reaction to primeval fear and shock.
Such a moment came when the cathedral’s spire, reconstructed in the 1840s (the original, constructed in the 13th century, probably between 1220 and 1230 was battered, weakened and bent by the wind over five centuries, and finally was removed in 1786) its oak and lead structural integrity compromised by the flame, snapped like a twig, tumbling into the raging inferno. One could feel the palpable intake of breath from the horrified onlookers thronging Parisian streets, and from viewers all across the world.
The very place where St. Joan of Arc proclaimed her revolution, where Napoleon crowned himself emperor, which had withstood relentless siege from rain, snow, sleet and even Hitler’s bombs, stood on the precipice of extinction. Not, it seems at this stage, as the result of terrorist perfidy, but rather the infinitely more mundane human error cause by an electrical short.
That this could happen now, in the very midst of Christianity’s holiest week, seemed a particularly cruel irony. In those horrific minutes it was all too easy to envision this as an act of an angered deity sending humanity a harbinger of more tumultuous days ahead. A warning to change our wayward trajectory from greed, crime, vice, madmen with their fingers on nuclear buttons, or to wake up to the fact that, according to the UN’s climate change panel at least, earth’s environment will be irretrievably damaged in scarce more than a decade. This was certainly the vision peddled by an overwrought media eager to create the sensationalist atmosphere that sells.
It is also wrong.
The very act of living is dichotomous: as with all creatures we are born only to die; in our sentience we have united long enough to set foot on the moon, yet been divided enough to massacre millions on the altars of twisted ego; the very minds who created the means by which we can end all life have created a society that, if so focused, could eradicate poverty, homelessness and starvation. So why would there not also be an alternate narrative to the apocalyptic visions of a Creator so angered by His creations that he would choose such a visible illustration as the burning of a church dedicated to His glory?
Easter is a time of death, yes, the earthly passing of Jesus Christ. Yet, it is also a moment of His eventual triumphant resurrection, mere days later. Endings, and beginnings. Isn’t Holy Week all about renewal? The dawn which invariably comes after darkness? So too was hope and faith rewarded: the three great stained glass windows with their intricate, transcendent beauty, Jesus’ Crown of thorns, encased from the elements in a halo of glass; the vast organ with its forest of pipes all survived the conflagration, saved by human hands for sure, but if there were proof of some divine hand orchestrating this message then all one has to do is to remember the first pictures taken moments after firefighters had repulsed the flames: through the gloom cast by still smouldering embers and ash wafting through heavy acrid air, is a single, defiant point of light, reflecting off the surface of the altar’s golden cross, emerging surprisingly intact. This visual metaphor – resilience, defiance, steadfastness – was unmistakable.
A light in the darkness. The end of things is but an opportunity for new beginnings. Much has been lost, but what is essential yet abides, for what are the relics that were recovered? Irrespective of their ultimate authenticity, their true value is represented in what they symbolize. Hope still lives, Christianity (and Paris itself) endures. Both have seen great calamity as well as triumphs over the years. What is one more such? After all, notwithstanding what we saw, what we know is that cathedrals of brick, wood, stone and mortar can be rebuilt so long as we retain faith in our hearts.