Christ in the Clutter: Notre Dame Then and Now
Watching the spillover crowd in Notre Dame de Paris at the Sunday evening vigil for the victims of the terrorist attack was a moving experience. It’s amazing how a brush with evil can turn people towards God. But it reminded me of a long ago personal experience, which also led to a deep spiritual turn.
One August day in 1968, I went ambling alone along the streets of Paris. I had a cheap hotel room in the Saint Germain area, and I took my time sauntering over to and across the Pont Neuf to the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame.
At that point in my life, I was a pagan college kid, and I’d been inside just two Catholic churches, both in Ohio: one in my neighborhood for the mysterious First Communion of an elementary-school classmate, pretty in her white dress and mantilla – that was pre-Vatican II; the other just a few months before – at a Mass my Catholic girlfriend took me to, held in a Quonset hut that was the temporary parish church on campus. In neither case had I paid the least attention to what was going on. It was just about the girls.
The candles and statuary and crucifixes inside Our Lady of Paris – the sheer foreignness of it all – offended me, for I was used to the shark-like simplicity of the Methodist church of my youth, although I was, as a pagan would be, utterly indifferent to facile Protestant piety. Yes, I thought, Notre Dame is interesting architecturally, but it’s too ornate. How could you find God in all this clutter, if there were a God to find?
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/