Losing a Sacred Site

T

his morning, two days after the horrendous burning of Nôtre Dame, I reached for a dish towel.  The one on the rack was a red, white, and blue striped towel, a memento from France.  I’ve had it for close to twenty years now, a gift from Robert, a friend who taught college French during the time he and I lived in the same community.  Back from a trip to Paris he brought me the dish towel.  The blue stripe bears an image of the Eiffel Tower.  The red, an image of Nôtre Dame.

Like lots of things of this sort, the towel has transitioned from gift to everyday usage to being well on its way towards the rag pile.  I wash it, dry it, use it, hang it up with scarcely a thought of France or of Nôtre Dame, but surprisingly often on some level remembering Robert, whose death several years ago I discovered belatedly through meeting his son quite by surprise.  

Something about the confluence of friendship, death, and the near loss of Nôtre Dame is leading me at this moment to get beyond my shock and grief over the fire.  Why would I care so much about an 850-year-old building if it were not a friend?  Why would I perhaps lament its tragedy more openly and obviously than I grieve for friend Robert? 

The answer goes back a long time. My sixth grade class in Conway, South Carolina, reached the chapter in our social studies text that introduced me to the Middle Ages.  There on the page was a black-and-white photograph of the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame.  I was mesmerized by it.  I looked at it for what seemed like (and probably was) days.  I learned what flying buttresses were, the architectural significance of the Gothic arch, the symbolism of the rose window, the cruciform pattern of medieval cathedrals.  In a day when international travel was so rare as to be generally restricted to the rich, I could only imagine actually seeing Nôtre Dame or any other cathedral. Yet, on some level, I knew I had to.

So, after three years of college French but never a trip to France until 2010, I stood one early fall morning in a long queue awaiting the opening of the cathedral.  Finding it darker and much smaller than in my boyhood I’d imagined, I moved through its arches and into its art-filled nooks and crannies trying to make out inscriptions on tombs and fancying what the funeral of Louis XIV might have been like in that sacred space.  Later I stood on the Pont Saint-Louis in something of a reverie, looking towards its east end, remembering my boyhood dream as my eyes scanned those flying buttresses. 

 There is no way of explaining why or how places become sacred to us.  Chances are the spot on which Nôtre Dame was built was a sacred site long before Our Lady birthed Jesus, that being the usual case with holy places.  We point to age, beauty, art, architecture, history, prayer, priceless relics and sacred story and are able to say why a building is more than important, particularly one that has lasted nearly a millennium.  But there is more.  Down deep there is something about a sacred place that can reach out and capture some inarticulate longing, even if it approaches us in the flat form of a photograph. Then memory does its work. Fixed in the mind is the image or actual experience of the place, fettered to a place in the heart that can’t be explained in terms of anything on that list of age and beauty and art and all the rest.  Indeed sometimes spaces are sacred to us with few or none of those characteristics so obvious in a medieval cathedral. A church in our childhood, a cemetery where parents and friends lie buried, the bell tower at an alma mater, the woods we roamed as kids, the creek that ran through summer camp where we caught tadpoles: the loss of any such place we experience as a soul wound.  We grieve.

Not surprisingly, those who lack any such connection to the sacred space react quite differently. There are more important things, they say.  What about this or that or the other human need?  What about someone else’s burial ground being bulldozed to make a parking lot, or some suffering far worse than a building become an inferno? What about…?  What about…?  And the mantra of culture is not infrequently, “It will be replaced.”  And even the harsh, “Get over it.”  Replacement is never the same as recollection. Getting over a loss never equals healing.

Today it’s Nôtre Dame, tomorrow it’s some place else.  As Heraclitus described the life of the world, “It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”[1] As my friend David Townsend, a medieval scholar, said yesterday, “This is the way of cathedrals. They burn. They get bombed.  They collapse.”  He was not being dismissive, only telling the truth. The same is true when a human body becomes a corpse.  Rather than seeing this as an invitation to “get over it,” or to ignore the pain, what I am beginning dimly to see is that this “ever-living fire,” the constant change of which Heraclitus speaks, is itself the Holy.  God is not working in spite of the fire.  God manifests as fire, just as God manifests in the rose window, the roof, the spire, the altar of Nôtre Dame.  The Holy—called by whatever name—is the energy, the Spirit expressed in every body in the cosmos.  And the Holy is also the pure consciousness that upholds and indwells the entirety of the universe—or, if you will, the multiverse. 

The morning after: the Cathedral still stands, battered and scarred but still with us.

Holding onto the cathedral, the ground, the embodiment of the sacred, is something so human we are not about to forfeit it.  Yet whatever we gain by holding onto anything we can count as loss compared to the liberation that comes with accepting the flow and flux of change that are the nature of life.  Beyond the things that come and go is the still point, of which Eliot speaks:

            Love is the unfamiliar Name

            Behind the hands that wove

            The intolerable shirt of flame

            Which human power cannot remove.

               We only live, only suspire

               Consumed by either fire or fire.

…

            And all shall be well and

            All manner of thing shall be well

            When the tongues of flame are in-folded

            Into the crowned knot of fire

            And the fire and the rose are one.[2]

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[1] Quotation found on the internet at https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/77989.Heraclitus?page=2 , accessed April 17, 2019.

[2] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1967), pp. 144, 145.