The sight of flames hungrily engulfing the spire of Notre Dame de Paris has been experienced as a physical shock by those of us Catholics who have seen it on video, on our televisions or computer screens. Far from Paris, far from France, far from personal associations of memory and experience with what is, after all, just a building, the shock of loss still is real.
Perhaps this is because Our Lady's Cathedral is, like other magnificent manifestations of the Christian faith in artistic action, a testament to the highest and noblest aspirations of man in his relationship to the Divine.
The very existence of these masterpieces reassures us. We are moderns living in the utilitarian trappings of today's aggressively secular culture, a culture whose eyes are fixed firmly and somewhat grimly on the ground just ahead. But, the great cathedrals tell us, there was a time when life was immeasurably harder and, yet, men and women somehow were able to look up and not only see truth, beauty and self-sacrificing love but also to carve their images into stone.
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