Notre Dame de Paris

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris. Surely, the only pilgrimage I have ever made.

I was filled with awe and hope and dread before I ever entered.

 

The foundation stone to Notre Dame was laid in 1163. Its visionaries were King Louis IX (Saint Louis, who also built Sainte-Chapelle) and Bishop Maurice de Sully. The construction extended over 150 years. It accommodates a congregation of 9000.

 

I will not describe the exterior. I could not do it justice. The mathematician or the architect may have at their disposal language that can provide the specifications and the measurements; a coolly distant methodical detailing of the subjects intricately carved into the portals, or the dimensions and placement of the flying buttresses, the height and breadth of frontal towers and spire, but I do not possess the language skills to describe the overall achievement. “Breathtaking, beautiful, stunning, magnificent,” are pale markers.

 

I will take a moment however, to mention the gargoyles. I loved them. I was fascinated by them. I stood in the middle of streets to gaze up at them. Their function as waterspouts, transporting water from roof to street is well known. But their form is still a mystery. Some speculate that the intention behind their grotesqueness was to frighten demons that might dare attempt to enter the sacred space, but this theory has not been proved. They were products of the medieval craftsmen’s imagination and skill; fantasy and perhaps the comic. The visuals in which I took the most delight in Paris were the gargoyles and Degas’ ballerinas. A contradiction in subjects? Perhaps not. Degas was known for his obsession with the contortions of the ballerinas’ bodies. The dancers’ bodies in his paintings are twisted, distorted, doubled-over, truncated. There are rumors that Degas enjoyed watching the physical demands that were placed on his models while he painted them; the tension and pain they would endure while maintaining the impossible poses he asked of them, like a 19th century Hitchcock (who took pleasure in the terror his beautiful blonde actresses would experience in a scene). But this bizarre and sadistic history was not a part of my knowledge or my initial fascination. I researched Degas only after I returned from Paris. But I must admit, that evidently I was (am) fascinated by these grotesques in gargoyle and ballerina even though, even now, I don’t know why. 

 

We entered through the Portal-de-Sainte-Anne (Mary’s mother). My conflicted anticipation was temporarily disturbed by a sign that greets the visitors at the entrance. For there, as one enters through the portal is a sign, hand-written in red ink on a piece of torn, shabby cardboard, “Beware of Pickpockets.” I was momentarily shaken. The stark contrast of the beautiful Sainte-Anne’s portal with a pickpocket warning caused cognitive dissonance. That the thefts happen often enough so as to require the sign was troubling, but that there are those who would steal inside Notre Dame Cathedral spoke to me of a moral violation I could not fathom. Go to The Louvre. Steal at the Centre Pompidou. Pick pockets at the Musee d’Orsay, but not here. Not here.

 

As I began to walk down the southernmost aisle (there are 5, the wide center nave and two on either side) I was seized by an overwhelming emotion. I had to sit down in one of the pews (there would have been none in the Middle Ages. Worshippers would have stood). And then, I wept. I buried my face in my hands and cried.  As I reflect now on that moment I still cannot articulate the full range of feeling that I experienced. I was overcome by the beauty, yes, but it was so much more than that. I wept for the symbol of the thing; the longings of men to please God, the offering of tribute to the Queen of Heaven; the monument to men’s determination to live lives that are worthy of this structure, which all too often end in failure; the desire to fuse the creation of beauty with piety. I wept too for my own lost, innocent faith. I wept for my childhood memories of comfort and love I once knew within walls such as these (though surely none so majestic). I wept because I know this place as I know my own heart. In this place I was joined to hundreds of thousands of believers who come to her for hope and sustenance and rest. And though my faith had been drastically altered, my understanding of such faith was not. And so, for a moment, I grieved my loss. And I wept for a people who sought forgiveness and mercy and redemption and who, all too often, stumbled from womb to grave without knowing them.

 

I can hear some you now, “Geez, Louise. You are SO dramatic.” I assure you I felt all these things though I have not articulated them until now. And if you can understand any of what I just wrote, if you can go there with me in your imaginations to the darkness and beauty of that place, then you know too why I wept.

 

I rose and began to walk down her nave. I crossed the transept and stopped to gaze left and right at the North and South Rose Windows. I approached the Baroque high altar. Just behind the altar is a life-sized Pieta; the Virgin Mother holds her dead son in her arms, timeless anguish and tenderness etched in her face. There is so much human experience expressed in a Pieta; love, compassion and tenderness; motherhood, sorrow and grief, and horror. I feel an affinity with Mary. I inherited a respect and a sense of her power as Theotokos (God-bearer) from my mother and grandmother. No one would tell them that she does not possess the power of a goddess.

 

I moved through the side chapels of which there are many in Notre Dame; the chapel dedicated to Aquinas, to Joan of Arc. And in front of Saint Joan’s statue, I lit a votive. The word votive is derived from the Greek for vow and in classical Greece one would offer a sacrifice to a god or goddess while speaking a vow. I didn’t make a vow to a god that day, or to Joan. I uttered my own blessing, for my daughter whose presence in this city had brought me to this place.

 

The last thing I saw in Notre Dame Cathedral was a priest. I had purchased a beautiful lapis lazuli rosary for my mother in the Cathedral gift shop (don’t tell anyone…I bought one for myself as well, but for its form, not its function). My mother is a devout Catholic who prays the rosary everyday. I knew that she would not pray this one if it was not blessed by a priest.  I knew every priest that she knew in Rhode Island and I didn’t want any of them touching it. So I brought my mother’s rosary to an old  priest who was hearing confessions in a side chapel. In English and in broken French I asked him to bless my mother’s rosary. We talked for a while and he was surprised to learn of my theological education. And then he asked a favor of me in return for his blessing. He asked me to say a prayer with him and he offered to do so in English. I said no, that I preferred to recite it in French. And so we did. And it remains one of my sweetest memories of Paris; this Catholic priest and I together as we prayed in French, the Lord’s Prayer.