Something beautiful happened late last year. As 2024 wound down, the world celebrated the rebuilding of glorious Notre Dame de Paris, which a mere five and a half years before was engulfed in horrifying flames. At the reopening ceremony in Paris, her bells rang for the first time since the fire.
The pleasing peal called to my mind a poem that raises up something no less beautiful than the French Gothic monument: her builders. This memory in turn led to an epiphany, which is fitting as the Epiphany, or Christian celebration of the revelation of God as human in Jesus Christ, fast approaches.
"Cathedral Builders," written by Welsh poet John Ormond and published in the journal "Poetry Wales" in 1965, lyrically reminds us of a very simple truth with profound consequences. It is often ordinary people who create the most extraordinary beauty, particularly when the undertaking is grand in scope.
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Ormond exalts the sanctifying work of countless craftsmen whose identities are known only to history, but whose toil built the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. Most of them knew they wouldn’t live to see the final fruits of their massive multi-generational endeavor. They climbed their ladders anyway.
With soaring yet simple language befitting the ethereal work of earthy men, Ormond lionizes unheralded laborers who "hoisted hewn rock into heaven" by day and then "came down to their suppers and small beer" in the evening. So understood, a cathedral is no more sublime than her humblest builder. Each is an icon to the other.
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I thought of "Cathedral Builders" as I reflected upon the 2,000 or so workers it took to rebuild Notre Dame within French President Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious five-year deadline. Unlike their medieval counterparts, the vast majority of these artisans lived to see their loving mission completed.
Yet like these ancestors, they created lasting beauty by pledging their lives to something outside of and greater than themselves. Amidst still-burning embers in 2019, life imitated art when these cathedral builders once again chose to make art of their lives. Notre Dame is their masterpiece.
That choice, I believe, is exactly of the ennobling kind of second-century theologian St. Irenaeus had in mind when he said "the glory of God is man fully alive." Aesthetic achievement aside, is there a lesson for the rest of us, those who lack the talent to make clerestories soar? I think so.
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Most of us aren’t called to build cathedrals of stone, but all are called to build cathedrals of our lives. Some acts will be soaring – the spire atop the cathedral – for instance, a soldier sacrificing his life in combat to save his brother-in-arms. Other acts will be simple – the mortar on a lowly footpath appearing like a smile to a passing stranger on the street.
But great and small, all are acts of love, of willing the good of the other and stone by figurative stone, they surely will build a cathedral over one’s lifetime. It may not be tangible or visible to man like Notre Dame de Paris, but it is no less real, and no less lovely. Besides, invisible to man is not invisible.
Therein lies the beauty of "Cathedral Builders," and what is most inspirational about Notre Dame’s exemplary builders. By reminding a weary world to see both the small in the great and the great in the small, they provide a blueprint for not only a cathedral well-made, but something far more important: a life well-lived.
That is my epiphany as the Epiphany approaches. I am grateful for poet John Ormond, for the valiant laborers of Notre Dame de Paris and all who strive to build cathedrals of their lives. They remind us that there is beauty in both the soaring and the simple.
