Notre Dame: A holy place in ruins?

Three years ago this April, I was making the most of my last few weeks in Paris. As well as slipping into art galleries and wandering through the Louvre, I paid a final visit to that old church in the centre of Paris: Notre-Dame.

Seeing front pages emblazoned with the images of that same building in flames, I feel a vague sense of disbelief. It’s strange to think that that beautiful place now exists only in memory.

I understand why the people of France, and particularly Paris, would want someone to mourn the loss of something that has played a key role in a country’s history and culture for almost nine centuries. But, with the mortified crowds singing outside Ave Maria as the fire tore through Notre-Dame, it’s clear that some people were mourning more than a beautiful building that has withstood both revolutions and counter-revolutions. They were grieving the destruction of somewhere holy. Somewhere set. Somewhere where God is more likely to be. 

While I can understand the sadness of someone losing their church building in the week before Easter, I could never see the destruction of Notre-Dame as the destruction of something sacred. I would be sad if my church building suffered devastating damage a few days before Good Friday. Soon enough, though, the attention of its members would turn to finding ways of ensuring that we still held our Easter services. Because fire damage is a practical, not a spiritual, matter.  Because no church has ever been made up of four walls and a roof, but of the people within it.

The idea that the church is not a building is a bit of a cliché, I know. But the sight of devotees praying on their knees whilst the cathedral burned are a reminder that some people still think that certain places are holy.

I'm sure that Notre Dame was in one sense holy. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that wherever two or three gather to pray, He would be there with them. And so when two or three, and two or three gathered in Notre Dame to worship God sincerely, Jesus was there. But that was nothing to do with Notre Dame. As a friend of mine said after the after, ‘When people pray together, the crappiest place on earth becomes holy.’

I’ve prayed in so many different churches over the course of my life, some more impressive than others. I’ve prayed in Notre Dame, in a windowless building in rural Tanzania, an ex-synagogue in South Wales and a thirteenth-century church in central London. In fact, I was lying when I said that my church could burn down. We don’t even have a building yet. We meet in a university lecture theatre that is most definitely not a sacred place for six days of the week. But wherever we and whenever we pray, we know that God is with us. No building is intrinsically holy or sacred. Those who found God in Notre Dame could have found Him anywhere else. Or rather, He could have found them anywhere else.

But there is an even deeper sense in which it’s wrong to think of Notre Dame as more sacred than anywhere else.

Some Christians call this week before Easter ‘Holy Week’. Although that usually refers to the significance of the events that we celebrate, Easter is about a radical redefinition of holiness. Because Easter is not about holiness staying in sacred, set apart places. It’s about holiness leaving holy places.

Before Jesus, God was present amongst the people of Israel, who were meant to a holy people set apart for Him. But there was always something not quite right about that presence. Not that it was imperfect. Yet God was never fully present in a way that allowed people to interact with Him. At first, one man, Moses, was the mediator between Israel and God. But even He wasn’t allowed to see God face to face. Later, God was present in one holy place within a temple. Only a handful of set apart priests were able to enter their presence. They could only do that occasionally, and only after they had obeyed strict commandments that made them temporarily holy. Eventually, God‘s presence left that temple because the people of Israel had done everything they could to make that place unholy.

Over the centuries that followed, invaders destroyed the temple that had once been made holy by God’s presence. The people of Israel mourned for that temple. But they found that God was still with them, answering their prayers and protecting them as they lived as exiles in a foreign land.

Then, in about 7BC, something unexpected happened. A child who was the Son of God was born to two human parents, both faithful to God but neither spectacularly holy. And so the holiest being left the holiest place, heaven, and lived on an unholy planet full of unholy people. Growing up, he developed a knack for finding those unholy people. He touched and healed ‘unclean’ lepers who’d been kicked out of the holy places. Lying tax collectors, ‘immoral women’, foreigners… He just couldn’t keep away from unholy people.

This was an altogether different type of holiness. A holiness that could coexist with filth yet still stay sacred. A holiness that, when dragged through the dust, made even the dust holy.

But that holiness was destroyed. It was nailed to a cross. Bleeding and gasping for breath, the world’s one holy person screamed out in agony and died. With his final, tortuous breath, the curtain in the temple dividing the holy from the less-then-holy tore in two, rendered obsolete by a revelation of holiness that defied even the grave. Three days later, too holy for death and decay, He got up and walked again through an unholy world.  

It turned out, though, that He’d been telling us that this would happen. He even talked, blasphemously in the eyes of the seemingly religious, of His body being a holy temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt. He’d promised that this would happen. Just like He’d promised that, one day, we could join him, finally holy, in his holy place.

If all that teaches one thing about holiness, it is that holiness cannot be limited to one place. 

You can mourn the loss of a building of immense cultural and historical significance, but you cannot say that Notre Dane has been desecrated. You cannot say that a holy place is now in ruins. True holiness cannot be destroyed.

That is, after all, the reason why we have Easter.

Sometimes I doubt...

This week, while sitting on a hot, crowded and delayed train, I read a book which asked why God would create a world in which suffering was possible. Cue an average Tuesday punctuated by a series of minor existential crises. Yet later that night, as I lay in bed, thought occurred to me: I still believed in God. And what’s more, it took no more effort to believe in Him than it had the day before. I believed, and that was that.

While many Christians, at some time in their lives, will go through periods of prolonged and serious doubts, I suspect that day-to-day doubts like mine are a more consistent part of the lives of most Christians.  Like an Agatha Christie in the middle of an alphabetically-arranged bookshelves, these doubts stand out not because they are commonplace, but because they are exceptional. We doubt, but then, our questions resolved or unresolved, we find ourselves returning to belief. We doubt but still find ourselves convinced.

Not that I have find myself absolutely certain that all of it is true.  Do I know whether God exists? Of course, I don’t. And neither does the Pope. Nor Richard Dawkins, for that matter. No, I find myself in a place of relative certainty. As certain I can be in the absence of definitive proof either way.

And I don’t think we do need definitive proof either way. It’s true that Christians sometimes talk about proof or evidence perhaps in response to people like Dawkins, who once described faith as the ‘belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’ But while it’s right to emphasise that there are rational reasons for belief in God, the beliefs at the heart of our faith are fundamentally unproveable. While we can prove that Jesus lived and died, the question of whether he died and lived is not something that history can answer easily. Though we can use the unexpected and inexplicable emergence of the belief in the resurrection as a reason to believe in it, we can hardly pass it off as proof. It’s a reason to believe. I happen to think it’s a strong one. But there will always be the possibility of some unknown unknown that could explain the whole thing away. In the end, although reason can guide us part of the way to a belief in the resurrection, it will always come down to a leap of faith. Not a leap into the dark. But a leap, perhaps, into the half-lit shadows of belief.

Despite this, reason can help us deal with my doubts. While I didn’t come to my belief in God through a process of reasoning, I find myself convinced again and again by the arguments for His existence.  And so, whenever my belief in God seems less credible, or I am overly conscious of its weirdness, I remind myself of those arguments. They help me to realise that my doubts are often not usually caused by any resurgence of reason, but by my ever-changing emotions.  

Yes, while we often think of doubts as what happens when we cling on to what we feel to be true in spite of reason, just as often it is our emotions that shape what we find credible. Bizarrely, on a sunny day when I’ve had enough sleep and it feels like everything is right in the world, the existence of God feels more likely. Similarly, when I’m downing my third coffee of the morning, half-asleep at my desk yet unusually aware of all my flaws and the inadequacies of my life, my belief in God feels so much less rational.  But the arguments for believing in God haven’t in fact become more or less credible. They haven’t changed; I have. And so when I remind myself of those arguments, I’m not trying to make them seem more credible. I’m not trying to brainwash myself so that I can, in spite of reason, carry on believing what I want to be true. I’m telling myself to carry on believing, in spite of my changing emotions, what I have already reasoned to be true.

That’s not to say that I don’t have any unresolved issues. I have so many unanswered questions.  It’s been a whole three days since my mini-crisis of faith and I still haven’t sorted out the problem of evil. Just thinking about it for a few seconds is starting to make me feel a little bit stressed. Sometimes, I find even the good bits about Christianity overwhelming. I struggle to understand, let alone feel excited about, the prospect of heaven. While I can get behind the popular conception of heaven as a sort of celestial safety net that is preferable to oblivion, I just don’t connect with the idea that it could be a state of eternal fulfilment. To be honest, I find the concept of eternity vaguely terrifying. I believe, even though part of my doesn’t want it to be true.  

I still try to deal with my unanswered questions. But I know that any other worldview I adopted would come with its own unresolved issues. Take the problem of evil, for example. I find it hard to comprehend why God would allow a world in which evil was possible. Yet I also struggle to see how an atheistic worldview could explain why I find that evil repulsive. Perhaps a basic conscience could emerge as humans who cooperated with each other managed to survive for longer. But how could that explain why we think rape is wrong? In a morality governed by the survival of the fittest, why on earth would sexual consent matter? Rape would be a good, perhaps even praiseworthy thing. And if we could explain every aspect of our conscience using natural selection, why would that evolved morality have any intrinsic value?

There are unresolved issues in any worldview. It just so happens that I find Christianity both leaves fewer questions unanswered and gives better answers to the rest. In the end, I find I still believe in spite of my changing emotions because, while there are moments when I’m not convinced by Christianity, I’ve certainly never been convinced by anything else.