Notre Dame: Has God moved out?

Since Notre Dame burned, there’s been much emphasis in the news on the officially secular nature of France’s society – analysing the significance of an eight-hundred year old church in what one commentator last night referred to as our ‘Godless society’.  Strangely, it was an expression that made me cringe a little; I’m not especially Godly myself, but I fear what God may have been replaced with in our world, and I’m sad for people with faith in God who it seems are written out of society with such a phrase.

Nonetheless, the blaze at Notre Dame has sparked reactions that get you thinking.  As of this morning, €800million have been raised for the reconstruction of Notre Dame, including enormous donations from wealthy families and their businesses – Gucci, Yves Saint Lauren, Louis Vuitton, L’Oreal and Total among them – and President Macron has boldly pledged that the great Cathedral will be rebuilt in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

In this secular, Godless world, what motivates this generosity?  Where does God feature in Macron’s determination and the desires of people all around the world to see that great monument to Him restored to its former glory?

I think I understand some of the emotions that swept around the world as the flames swept through Notre Dame, which have prompted this will to rebuild.  Firstly, there’s that connection to a special (even sacred) place that many will have felt.  Like me, millions have stood in front of those twin towers, gazed in awe at those beautiful stained-glass windows and sat in peaceful silence in that vast nave.  Notre Dame is a place where it feels you can reach out and touch history, and maybe even touch the divine.  Even if you haven’t been there, you know of somewhere special – even spiritual – that it would be devastating to lose.  When these places are gutted by fire, we are all gutted.

Then there’s something elemental and timeless about fire that plays to all the fears that permanently lurk at the back of our minds.  It starts so easily with that one spark and spreads so quickly, out of our control.  It burns so fiercely and indiscriminately, destroying just about everything in its path.  There’s a reason hell is a place of fire and brimstone: fire can seem evil; we fear it more than almost anything.

On Tuesday night, when almost all hope had been lost, the fire at Notre Dame was beaten; evil was defeated.  Fear and despair were replaced with good old Christian feelings of triumph, hope and rejoicing.  The ancient walls of Notre Dame stood strong – an enduring symbol of hope and resilience and, apparently, the strength of French (and even European) culture, faith and society.  It’s no wonder that we all want to see the cathedral rebuilt, phoenix-like.

These same sentiments would almost certainly have played out similarly had Notre Dame been ravaged by fire in any of its nine centuries.  But there would have been another dimension to them: the God dimension.  Had Notre Dame burned in Holy Week a few hundred years ago, a God-fearing society would less have launched an inquiry into how it started as questioned why.  What had they done to provoke such divine retribution?  And their determination to rebuild would have been to the glory of God – the same motivation that sent great cathedrals soaring skyward a millennium ago.

As much as I too want to see Notre Dame rebuilt, there is today something odd about a proudly secular government of a liberal, multi-cultural society pledging to rebuild a grand house of God.  Does this imply that France is actually less secular than we thought or that Notre Dame is these days less a place of God?  Has he moved out?

What too of those benefactors who will help fund the cathedral’s reconstruction?  Once upon a time, they may have believed such generosity to the Church booked them an eventual one-way ticket to paradise.  Is it too cynical to wonder what they think they are buying today?  Validation in the court of public opinion, perhaps.  And how comfortable ought we and the Church be with oil companies and fashion houses funding holy endeavour?  (If that’s what it is.)   I don’t know about the morality of these donations but post-Sackler and once the embers of the Notre Dame fire have died down, it surely won’t be long before someone questions it.

Finally, to use a somewhat hackneyed Christian question, too often asked in school assemblies: What would Jesus do?  Specifically, I wonder what Jesus would do if he suddenly found himself with nigh-on a billion Euros.  It seems quite a pertinent question to ask in Holy Week.  We are told he said, ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy … but store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven.’  (And for ‘moth and rust’, we could as easily read ‘fire’.)  I wonder then, would he want that billion Euros spent on building a great monument to himself or would he want it spent on refugee children like he himself had been, clothing the poor, healing the sick, feeding the hungry and bringing hope to the lonely?  

God knows what the answers to all these questions might be.  Throughout time though, people of all faiths would have seen a calamity like the great fire of Notre Dame as a sort of test.  At this time of year especially, Christians today, sharing faith with those who first built all our ancient churches, must surely see the significance of the fire in the asking of those questions.

Probably like most people of faith in God and of no faith, I want to see a billion Euros spent on rebuilding Notre Dame and at least another billion spent on the poor, homeless, starving, sick and needy this Easter – a practical renewal of ideals you might call Christian, if you like.  I’d like to see Notre Dame restored not only as a magnificent testimony to what can be built in stone but as a shining beacon of what humanity can achieve.