Notre Dame et Notre Seigneur

I am not well travelled, but even with my limitations it was not hard to dig into my pictures and find one of a recent (rainy!) visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the most visited tourist sites in the world.

And yesterday France, to its horror, saw a great fire that reduced the great building to what appears little more than a stone shell.  The French President prioritised a site meeting and vowed that it shall be rebuilt.  At first hearing this appears an unlikely ambition for the ultra-secular French Republic - but an icon is an icon.  Hundreds of millions of Euros are already promised for its restoration.

'The World weeps', reads one newspaper headline, thereby conveniently forgetting hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and the Eastern world who either don't know or certainly don't care that Notre Dame exists.  It is a little hard to imagine the refugee camps along the Turkish border feeling that this morning they have lost something important.

What a contrast there is, this Easter Week, between the way we regard a Christian cultural icon and the way we regard the One that Christianity is all about.

Not for him a nation hanging a tearful head in mourning;

Not for him a National Leader making pledges of restoration;

Not for him a world weeping or a tweet from Rome's Imperial Palace.

Not for him (despite the written appellation the King of the Jews) a declaration that we have all lost a part of us.

A mocking crowd;

A Governor who has washed his hands;

A world that didn't notice;

A man abandoned, betrayed, denied even by his friends - not a part of us, said Peter.

May the flames of the icon, inflame our love for the Saviour to whom, at its best, the icon seeks to point.

Jonah Lomu et al.

The especially unwelcome death of Jonah Lomu aged 40 is an awesome human moment for followers of sport.  Rugby is a fundamentally physical team sport in which, at its elite level, man mountains clash in frightening contests of strength, power and speed so that you know that to be challenged by two of them would be the downfall of anyone.

What Jonah showed when he burst into elite international rugby was that one man could on occasion make the going tough for eight others - singlehandedly.  He was simply a physical peak of human power, a man among boys when those boys were by normal standards themselves men among boys.

If anyone needs to be reminded of the power of death, Remembrance Week, Paris and Jonah in their three different ways have revealed it.  Many gallant memories are recorded, many tributes paid, in the case of the Paris attack people are sometimes demonstrating astonishing rejection of bitterness against the planners of the evil.  As so often in a large corner of Rock culture the Eagles of Death Metal Band gave an appearance of embracing death with their motifs and titles.  Until they ran from it off stage.

But real death?  There is nothing we can do.  We cannot stop it, we cannot forgive it, we cannot live with it, we cannot deny it, we cannot move on away from it, we cannot win over it, we cannot play with it, we cannot get past it.

We need(ed) help.

Friday 13th

The terrible events on Friday 13th in Paris are all the news just now.

Surprisingly little reference is being made to Friday 13th.  As it happened, earlier in the day I was talking with a receptionist who randomly commented that she hoped I had a nice day even though it was Friday 13th.  As it happened I did.  But then I wasn't in Paris.

I take it that the unwillingness to identify the events that happened with this superstitious date is because of the awkwardness of the idea of bad luck.  Sometimes I find it amazing how the awfulness of the human situation brings people so much nearer the truth.  The awesomeness of evil forbids notions of luck in this case and by wise extension could reveal the same about so much supposed chance.  

Even though the atheist cannot believe in evil but only in fate/luck:  [In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.]  something deep in the human soul will not allow this.  This Friday 13th we can see (though we'd rather be somewhere we couldn't) that humanity is not only part of a system of genetic process but part of a moral and immoral universe.

The real bad luck this Friday 13th was not to be mowed down (that was a result of evil), but to embrace an unbelief that means that those who were mowed down didn't ultimately matter.