The heartache of Notre Dame, the saving of St Mel’s and an Easter message of hope and renewal
Many people in Ireland and especially in Longford had a déja vu experience on Monday last as they watched flames engulf Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. They were brought back to the terrible scene at our own St Mel’s cathedral in Longford on Christmas Day 2009. The sense of disbelief and bewilderment expressed on the streets of Paris was reminiscent of the sentiments of Longford people on that Christmas Day. As one Parisian put it ‘an old friend has been damaged’, a building that meant so much to many people has been destroyed.
President Emmanuel Macron’s swift and assured response that the cathedral will be rebuilt was similar to Bishop Colm O’Reilly’s determination that the ‘Longford Phoenix’ would rise from the ashes. The president’s five-year plan of restoration parallels the exact time frame it took to restore St Mel’s.
Already plans are in train to fund and engage architects, engineers and artists to restore Notre Dame. No one yet knows the monetary cost of the French project; in Longford it cost €30million.
That amount was spent on the specialist work, the architects, engineers, project managers, planners and the men and women who carried out the restoration and whose imagination and skill decorated the building and made it the warm, bright and inviting place it is today – a blend of the old and the new, the modern and the traditional with the all-important sense of a living and breathing place of worship.
The €30million flowed into the pay packages of women and men whose skill and perseverance brought St Mel’s back from the ashes.
The restoration project was an enormous boost to employment and the local economy at a time when it was most needed. It marshalled the talents and skills of artists and craftsmen and women, and added to the treasury of artistic and craftwork skills in our country.
In St Mel’s during these days of Holy Week and Easter, we held our ceremonies, Passion Sunday, the Chrism Mass, and Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday morning Mass, as well as several busy days with the sacrament of Penance. At the end of our Chrism Mass, after blessing and consecrating the sacred oils, we prayed for the worshipping community of Notre Dame. We prayed with a sense of empathy and hope, we have been where you are, we got through it and so will you.
Cathedrals and churches are places of worship, where the community gathers to pray, to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to joyfully marry and baptise, to sensitively offer sympathy, to celebrate and to pray. I notice people often dropping in to churches, to sit a while, to feel the presence of the Lord, to light a candle, and in these recent days of Lent to move around the Stations of the Cross.
The Gospel at the Mass of Chrism, which we celebrated in St Mel’s on Tuesday last and whose celebration in Paris was moved to the church of Saint Sulpice, tells us that Jesus returned to Nazara, where He grew up. He went to his home town to launch his public ministry; He returned to his roots.
That is what Christians do at Easter: we return to our roots, we listen again to the story of the foundations of our faith. The Holy Land is where it happened, we picture those scenes, and we listen to the accounts, maybe experience a re-enactment of the historic events in drama and music.
Sometimes it is good and necessary to return to our roots, to the significant place where our journey as Christians began. It could be a physical return, as in the case of Jesus, to his home town and familiar synagogue.
Or it could be a journey of the heart and mind, to the original motives, the original inspirations that moved us on to the path of following Jesus.
The example, the routine, the mystery, the sense of belonging and the sense of meaning that combined to usher us on the road of faith.
We cannot keep our gaze on the past, we have to look to the present and the future of our personal, family and faith community lives. Our early experience of faith may have grown and matured into a very real link, relationship, or acceptance of Jesus Christ and his wonderful story of redemption.
What originally introduced us to faith may no longer hold relevance for us, we may have grown into a more reflective and questioning attitude to our faith.
We may have found it wanting or irrelevant and jettisoned it altogether.
We may be joyful and hopeful, we may be indifferent, we may be angry; that is us, that is complex and beautiful kaleidoscope of human thinking. That is us, it was for us He died and it was for us He was raised from the dead, to eternal life.
The first human to be raised never to die again, He invites us to follow, to believe and to have hope. He invites us ‘to wash the feet’ of others; to be like him, to be of service to our neighbour.
For believers, and non-believers alike, the sacred space which is Notre Dame cathedral has become a metaphor of hope for the whole of humanity. We are an Easter people and the darkness of last week, like the season of Lent itself, will pass.
Whether our roots are in Bawnboy, Longford or Paris, and no matter where our present is and future may be, we are invited by Jesus to follow him and to have hope in him, the ‘risen one’, Alleluia.