My favorite approach to Notre Dame begins four kilometers northeast, in the working-class neighborhood of Ménilmontant. There Rue Oberkampf starts to slope gently downhill toward the river. At 6 a.m. you can walk Oberkampf in the dark and watch working Paris wake up around you.<\/p>\n
At that hour, apartment windows are still dark — Parisians take their waking slow. The shops are dark too, except the bakeries, the bakers inside already busy at their art. A delivery truck rumbles down the narrow street. A lone bicyclist passes. On the sidewalk a shopkeeper chats with a driver. Oberkampf starts to pulse with the rhythms of those who live and work here, the Parisians who, more than any monument or museum, are the real attractions of Paris.<\/p>\n
Then we cross over into the upscale Marais and zig-zag onto Rue des Archives, which brings us down to the Seine. Cafés start to open. Waiters set out the sidewalk seating — even in February.<\/p>\n
If we’ve timed it just right, we will be crossing the cathedral’s parvis just as day breaks in the east beyond the towers. Time for a double espresso to help us contemplate the city around us and the meaning of Notre Dame, Paris’s spiritual heart. <\/p>\n
My latest visits to Paris I’ve made some delightful acquaintances: Monic the public radio DJ who shares my taste for klezmer-tinged punk music; gracious Ben and Alexandra from Auberge des Artistes in Ménilmontant; lovely Rémi the consummate showman, who ends his rock band’s show by tap-dancing; Rabbi Tom and the folks at Kelihat Gesher; and Liisa the opera singer, whom I met through a Sitka friend I met at university in Washington. (Small world, right?)<\/p>\n
Indeed, I first heard about the fire, as it was happening, in a text from Liisa, who was on the street nearby. My heart sank for her and the friends I’ve made there. Notre Dame is a critical inquiry, in the language of light and space, into the nature of spirituality, and its meaning must be found in how we define spirituality itself — but that requires some reflecting on the cathedral’s life among Parisians.<\/p>\n
Hard to imagine, but Notre Dame’s parvis was once little more than a country churchyard. One 15th-century painting shows the cathedral rising above an island village set amid rolling hills just beyond the Seine. The image must have been anachronistic even then, as Paris was already a teeming international crossroads of commerce and the Humanities.<\/p>\n
The modern city emerged. Each epoch placed its own demands on the cathedral. During the French Revolution, the cathedral became a symbol of oppression, and the only way it could satisfy Parisians’ spiritual hunger was by its defilement: revolutionary mobs vandalized whatever they could reach. Lamenting the twin effacements of disintegration and depredation, Victor Hugo wrote: “Time is blind, but men are stupid.”<\/p>\n
(This past February, I sat in a small concert hall at Paris’s medieval museum surrounded by an eerie phalanx of giant stony heads those mobs had lopped off Notre Dame’s statues.)<\/p>\n
“Spirituality is biography,” writes theologian Anthony Padovano. I think that’s right, but it’s not simply an individual’s biography. It’s something like socio-biography — the life we share, our connections to one another, the life of our sharing. Call it friendliness writ large: that’s spirituality. I don’t know how it could be otherwise.<\/p>\n
In the wee hours of Thanksgiving night in 2017, wandering back to the apartment from a music club near Oberkampf, I took a long detour out of my way to see what the cathedral looked like at that time of night. I was crossing the empty parvis just as the flood lights illuminating the western façade shut off for the night, suddenly leaving Notre Dame to darkness and to me.<\/p>\n
I sat down to appreciate the sleeping face of Our Lady of Paris and the city sleeping around us. I find the meaning of Notre Dame in the life — the lives — around it. Blind time and stupidity notwithstanding, this cathedral will survive in one form or another as long as Parisians and all the rest of us struggle to find a way to live together and be friends.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Jim Hale is a member of Congregation Sukkat Shalom. \u201cLiving Growing\u201d is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders.<\/b><\/p>\n
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