One way to pick out Americans from the crowd abroad is our fascination with old things.
I certainly felt this fascination the first time I traveled to Europe, at 14 years old. Coming from Wyoming, where most towns were founded in the last 100 years, the centuries- or millennia-old buildings on every other street corner of France inspired a sort of awe.
No where was that awe stronger than standing before the arched entrance of Notre Dame, an 850-year-old cathedral on an island in the ancient river Seine flowing through the heart of the ancient city of Paris.
Its enormous and intricate stained-glass rose windows made the small stained glass panels at our church in Pinedale look like a kindergartener’s crayon drawing compared to the Mona Lisa. Its flying buttresses, delicate ribs of stone that support the walls from outside, seemed to defy gravity. And of course, the vertigo-inducing height of its clerestories rising a couple hundred feet above the ground made me marvel at the medieval architects who dared to reach for the heavens.
More than its architecture, though, Notre Dame holds a special place in the heart of Parisians, the French and dare I say the world at large for the history contained within its walls.
This is where an archbishop called for the Third Crusade to reconquer the Holy Land, where English monarchs were married and where Napoleon was crowned emperor of France. It’s where Joan of Arc’s mother begged the Pope to overturn her daughter’s conviction of heresy, where the Cult of Reason was celebrated during the French Revolution and where bells rang to celebrate the end of World War II.
So much beauty, so much history, is contained in Notre Dame that even from a world away I mourned alongside presidents, priests and millions of ordinary citizens around the world when news broke Monday that a fire destroyed the cathedral’s iconic spire, two-thirds of the roof and possibly many of the cathedral’s sculptures, paintings and relics.
Not every nation (think the United States) has a cultural history as long and as rich as the one represented in Notre Dame. But the cathedral’s history is part of humanity’s history, stretching from medieval to modern times, so we should all mourn that loss.
Salvaging what’s left will be a long and difficult process. Even with governments already pledging millions to aid in the cathedral’s reconstruction, it will never be the same unstained, proudly standing structure I first laid eyes on five years ago; I also mourn for the people who will never see it as it was then.
Appreciate your monuments, your history and heritage, because you never know when they might go up in flames.
