Thoughts on Nôtre Dame

What can I say about the fire at Nôtre Dame?

It is a terrible, terrible disaster. The burning of this great and greatly beloved cathedral church is beyond the capacity of mere words, at least in the shock of tonight’s news. What moved me more even than the images of Nôtre Dame being attacked by the flames was to see French people weeping in the streets of Paris. Old, young, people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but especially Catholics for whom this is a uniquely sacred place, all were saying that this is a tragedy for France.

But the first thing to say is that thank God, no one appears to have been killed or injured thus far by this huge destructive fire. We must keep the fire fighters and others plunged into this emergency in our thoughts tonight. Trying to save a medieval building from total collapse entails great risks to many people’s safety. But there is at least a real hope that the western parts of the Cathedral with its twin towers may have escaped the worst and can be conserved. Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the people of France tonight. Like them we are stunned by this calamity that has overtaken them

I’ve visited Nôtre Dame often. I never went to Paris without venturing inside this miracle of a gothic cathedral. It was never a peaceful place - all year round crowds surged through the building,
laughing, chattering, taking selfies on their mobile phones...and yet they came in their millions,
drawn here by something many of them could not have articulated but which religious faith wants to describe in terms of the mystery of God. No English cathedral attracts visitors in such phenomenal numbers (though some might perhaps, if they did not charge for entry). It was wonderful to think that for the vast majority of tourists, coming to Paris without visiting its cathedral was unthinkable.

This isn’t the place to lament the celebrated treasures of Nôtre Dame that will have been lost, or at least severely damaged. It’s too early to tell how much of the glorious medieval glass has survived, or the sculptures or the furnishings or the organ. The fabric itself will be capable of being reconstructed much as it appeared before; after all, this was precisely what the great nineteenth century architect Viollet le Duc achieved when the French authorities realised that the Cathedral was falling down and would soon be beyond repair. The sacred space can be reimagined, but it’s the contents that are irreplaceable.

We need to understand what Nôtre Dame symbolises for the people of France. It’s similar to the emblematic significance of St Paul’s Cathedral for the English. The famous image of St Paul’s rising serenely above the fires and smoke of wartime London that did not destroy it (though the nation feared for its survival) suggest what France is feeling tonight. But I think the French feel their attachment to Nôtre Dame even more intensely. For all its laicité, France has a powerful feeling for its great Catholic shrines. Emotionally if not spiritually, for the French, Nôtre Dame is the greatest of them all.

This is because the Cathedral has stood “strong and stable” (forgive me) over so many centuries, never yielding to the often chaotic events of France’s turbulent history, surviving war, defeat, revolution, civil unrest and neglect in ways that we English haven’t experienced to quite the same extent. It’s not too much to say that Nôtre Dame symbolises the soul of France. It is its mystic heart, if you like, its collective memory reaching back into the middle ages, and even beyond to late antiquity when her first saints worshipped and evangelised on this very site in the former Roman city. This is why this catastrophe will be felt far beyond Paris, right across the country, right across Europe, right across the world not only by the French but by everyone who loves France. As President Macron said tonight, Notre Dame is part of us alL

I learned a little about what happens to a community when fire engulfs its cathedral. I’m thinking of course of Coventry Cathedral where I worked as a canon for eight years. In 1987 when it celebrated the silver jubilee of the new Cathedral, there were plenty of people who could tell stories about the night of 14 November 1940 when Luftwaffe incendiary bombs burned the medieval church of St Michael. The new building seemed a palpable symbol of resurrection, while the ruins of the old Cathedral became a symbol of forgiveness, reconciliation and hope. TO THE GLORY OF GOD THIS CATHEDRAL BURNED AND IS REBUILT says the striking inscription set in big brass letters into the nave floor of the new building. I was always deeply moved by those words.

What about Nôtre Dame? I’ve no doubt that even tonight, many people will already be thinking about what happens next. This is an especially cruel blow to have struck this great Cathedral during the holiest season of the chuch year, just when the liturgies of Holy Week had begun to be celebrated, and the days were building up to the great Paschal Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Easter.

Yes, crucifixion comes into things. But to recognise this on Holy Monday is the clue to what must follow. There will be a resurrection of Nôtre Dame, of that we can be as certain as that we shall celebrate Easter at the culmination of this Holy Week. How and when will be questions that will need to be debated for a long time. But catholic France will not lose hope as a result of this terrible fire. What feels tonight like an irrecoverable attack on a cherished holy place is, from a larger perspective another opportunity for resurrection to be experienced. When St Paul’s burned in the Great Fire of London, a new splendour rose out of the ashes. So it was at York Minster (twice). So it was at Coventry. So it will be in Paris.

These words from one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were important to those who oversaw the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction. They were spoken to the despondent exiles who returned from Babylon to Judah to find that their beloved temple was in ruins. Could it ever rise again? The prophet raises their spirits to stir them into action with a promise of hope. “The latter glory shall be greater more than it was before, says the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity” (Haggai 2.9). As the Psalm says, “Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Tonight must be about new life as well as death. Which is why the great word of Easter must be the last one on this evening of tears and lament: RESURGAM!

Afterthought on Tuesday morning. Thank God the fire is contained, and the core of the medieval fabric is still standing. The relics have been saved, including the Crown of Thorns, and some of the art works. The firefighters have done a magnificent job, risking their lives for a cathedral they love. Already thoughts are turning towards the rebuilding of the Cathedral and one benefactor has pledged a hundred million euros. Christians in Paris will go on observing Holy Week, but with a new intensity now, and with many tears - but, I think, with a stronger sense of resurrection hope than ever. We feel for them and pray for them today. For now, we are all Parisians.

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words: Thoughts on an Armistice Photo

For me, this will be the abiding image of this weekend's Armistice centenary commemorations.

Amid so much that has been moving in the ceremonies in France and Belgium, and here in the UK, I keep coming back to this photograph. It was taken at Compiègne in northern France where the Armistice was signed in a railway carriage in 1918. It has added poignancy because it was on this very spot that Adolph Hitler received the surrender of France in 1940, a highly symbolic location chosen out of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles.

That clasp of hands, the touching embrace that followed: it came across as completely authentic, entirely unstaged. It touched me deeply, and I wasn't alone. Here's what a non-European posted on Twitter. I'm from the Middle East. This picture moves me nearly to tears - curiously, more than I find it moves young Europeans. Do young Europeans even realize what has been achieved? It's nothing less than sacred, because peace is sacred, because human life is sacred.

I ended my last blog by writing that "there is nothing left to say. Except to be thankful". That's still true today. A picture's worth a thousand words. Yet there is more to say, and I want to write it while the events of this extraordinary weekend are still vivid in the memory. Here are three comments I'd like to make.

First, and most important, could we have asked for a more powerful image of reconciliation and friendship than this? France and Germany had fought each other no fewer than three times in the century leading up to the end of the last war. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the Great War of 1914-18 had cost both nations dear. France, especially, had suffered unimaginably. Among elderly French people, bitter memories even of the earlier conflict were still alive in the 1960s when I started visiting France. To them, the second world war with its terrible destructiveness was an inevitable aftermath of those earlier wars, a continuation of a story of European conflict that would never come to an end.

Up to the time I was born, exactly half-way through the twentieth century, it was inconceivable that these two great European powers could ever be friends. Do young Europeans even realise what has been achieved? asked my middle-eastern Tweeter. Maybe even older Europeans like me haven't quite taken it in. To anyone with a feeling for modern history, it does seem like a miracle. Not that these two leaders should stand together at such an emblematic site, but that their meeting should be so genuine, their gestures so spontaneous, so deeply felt by them both. These are the kinds of events that define history, and that promise great hope for the future. Isn't this what those who fell in war went to their deaths for?

Secondly, as I tried to argue in my last blog, we need to understand what's made this difference. I don't think that reconciliation just happens, or that time is automatically a great healer. Many - maybe most? - of the conflicts of our time are caused precisely because of old wounds that are opened up afresh, unhealed memories that are allowed to fester. What's different on continental Europe is the intention not to allow historical injuries to blight the lives of succeeding generations. "Parents have eaten sour grapes" as the prophet Ezekiel says (18.2), but that's no reason for their children's teeth for ever to be set on edge.

You know what I'm going to say. It's the European project that has created an environment where relationships can be negotiated afresh. The European Union, as we now have it, has brought peoples together in a purposeful way. It has helped fashion a different kind of narrative and discourse where nation-states stop fracturing the continent and instead start living together in peaceful, collaborative relationships in a common European home. We mustn't forget how hard-won that achievement is. Monsieur Macron said today in Paris that "patriotism and nationalism are opposites", that "nationalism is treason" because it is driven by a nation's self-interest, not the welfare of others. This is what causes wars. How much better to affiliate to families of peoples that will protect us from the nationalisms that tear our world apart. It's not that we shouldn't love our country - only that we shouldn't think of it as somehow better than any other country. I don't hesitate to say that renouncing nationalism is one of the most urgent tasks facing our world today. If we don't succeed, I fear it may end up destroying us.

Remembrance means many things - gratitude, sadness and pride among them. But lament for the past needs to be part of it too, and this means a mental and spiritual toughness that is capable of thinking forward to a future that is different from our broken history. So to me, this Armistice centenary and Brexit are closely linked. The peace of 1918 and the peace of 1945 both point to the crying need for nations to reimagine their "belonging", to think beyond national self-interest to the common flourishing of humanity. During the referendum campaign, we heard endlessly about "what's best for Britain", and not nearly enough about what the UK has to contribute to Europe and the wider world. Europeanism is not the end of a process but a beginning, for if we are incapable of thinking globally, then it's likely that the globe itself doesn't have a future worth working for. Clearly, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron understood the profound political significance of the day. How we remember shapes us in the present and (for good or ill) sets directions for the future. The logic that connects the Armistice with the European project is inescapable. It says: choose a different way, a more excellent way. Cultivate love, reconciliation and all that makes for peace. It's all there in that photograph.

Thirdly, and as a bit of an afterthought, it seems to me that there someone is palpably absent from the photo. It's our Prime Minister. Now, there may be all sorts of good reasons why she couldn't be there just then. Maybe she needed to set off for London to be back in time for the evening's Festival of Remembrance. We would all understand that and support it. Maybe the Macron-Merkel photo was set up as "Europhiles only" and she would have been de trop. Perhaps she was asked and politely declined. Nevertheless, her absence is striking.  At Compiègne on 11 November 1918, there were not two signatory nations but three: France, Germany and Great Britain. In the light of that, how could the British not have been included in this powerful image of postwar reconciliation?

I don't know the answer. But what I read in the photo is a European future from which Britain is absent. And that distresses me beyond measure. Just think what a three-way embrace would have symbolised, how powerful its message would have been! But Brexit means Brexit. So while it's a wonderful photograph to treasure out of this weekend of commemorations, it's also a forlorn one, at least as far as Europeans in Britain are concerned. We could have been part of this true European entente cordiale, this tender reaching out of hands to those who have become firm friends and allies.

But while they are better together, we have turned away. We are on our own. And that is unbearably sad.