Mortality's flame

I kept hearing the voice of the young woman, as history burned in Paris. Clear and sweet, her song spiraled up and up into the vaulted dimness that day -- some paean to God in liquid French, one soaring note after another echoing among all those ancient arches of stone.

It followed us as we shuffled from one iconic window/statue/alcove to another that warm day in 2005, the day we toured the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the middle of afternoon Mass.

I don't know who the young woman was. But she sang again in my head yesterday as I watched the flames consume the steeple and then the roof and then engulf the interior of Notre Dame, doing what neither Hitler nor any other despot could do in some 800 years.

The flames did not get it all, thankfully. When the fire crews finally tamed them the façade was intact and much of the interior infrastructure, though it was extensively damaged. And so Notre Dame will rise again. It will be rebuilt, piece by piece. It is the natural instinct of every civilized human through all the eons of history: When we fall, we get up. And we keep going.

But that doesn't mean we don't mourn the fall, and what it has cost us.

And so Notre Dame will still be Notre Dame, and yet it will not be. Eight hundred years of history was altered irrevocably yesterday; it will be rebuilt, but it will not be the same. The Notre Dame my wife and I visited 14 years ago, the ancient, iconic Notre Dame, was swallowed by the flames on April 15, 2019, reminding us that everything in this world is mortal. When we go back, if we go back, what we will find will not be nearly so ancient, nor so iconic.

This is a loss to all of us. It is a loss to civilization itself.

I can only hope that when we go back, if we go back, some things will still be the same.

The clear sweetness of a young woman's hymn, spiraling upward to the newness above.

The bagpipers performing outside.

The other young woman standing outside the cathedral, holding birdseed aloft with widespread arms.

And giggling now, as a cloud of small birds (Sparrows? Finches? Not sure) descend on her fingertips, as if they were magnets and the birds were metal shavings.

It was magic. It was wonder. It was, perhaps, as eternal as any worldly thing is allowed to be.