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When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, something extraordinary happened.
People around the world watched as flames tore through the roof of one of the most famous churches on earth. Many of those watching were practising Christians, of course, but countless others were not. Some probably hadn’t attended a church service for years. Others would not have described themselves as religious at all.
Yet people grieved.
They stood in the streets of Paris and sang hymns. They watched television pictures in silence. People thousands of miles away spoke about the building as though something that belonged to all of us was being lost.
I remember being amazed by the outpouring of emotion.
After all, Notre-Dame is a building. An extraordinary building, certainly, but still stone, timber, glass and metal. Christianity itself insists that God cannot be contained within walls, however beautiful they might be, and yet watching a church burn somehow did not feel like watching an ordinary building burn.
I have been thinking about that tension for much of my own faith journey.
