When the Homily is about Immunology

France Part 4



I wrote the following on a greeting card while inside Notre Dame...

I have often lamented people coming to Orthodox Parishes in the spirit of learning how they "used to worship." In a sense treating a living parish as a museum: an experience one is able to stand outside of and interpret by the power of one's own grand wisdom. I am determined not to allow this attitude to taint my experience this place (even my sometimes superior - and often sinful - sense of being Orthodox as opposed to being 'western')...but really I must be honest, it is terribly difficult to stand feeling in any way superior in this place.

Notre Dame is massive, almost ominous. I dare not (and neither should the rest of you other cynics out there) judge the extent to which it's claim to be a living parish is really true. The ambience certainly suffers from the constant flow of museum-minded tourists, who are constantly reminded by signs to be quiet and respectful because "this is a Holy Place."

Sitting here in the dim light from a cloudy Parisian day, under the seemingly endless arches and squinting at the Pieta [see this poem I stumbled upon and was a bit captured by] so far far away, the holiness of this place cannot escape me. Oh how marvelous it would be to hear the ancient chants echoing along the vast surfaces of these stones and colored glass.

How many souls through the centuries have sought and found God here? Souls, who in the shallow eyes of men are both great and small? Nothing remotely this old exists in my normal realm of experience, and so surely I have never been inside a place so haunted with memories. With new memories being made - thank God.

The wonder of it, the magnificence of it does not in my mind overshadow the simple fact that the lives of everyday individuals passed through this place. People fed on Christ here - and I took that rather odd picture of me touching an otherwise indistinct column among many in order to remind me: We don't just touch history here, we touch God.

Huge books near the altar of the church asked that we write down our private petitions which would be added to the prayers of the cathedral (how exactly they do this I cannot guess), but I asked simply for the healing of the divisions between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics.

As I finished writing this petition I began to smell the very familiar perfume of incense, the origin of which I was never able to discern, but wherever it came from it definately made me feel at home.