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A beautiful thing happened late last year. As the year 2024 draws to a close, the world celebrates the rebuilding of the glorious Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which burned down in a horrific fire just five and a half years ago. At the reopening ceremony in Paris, its bells rang for the first time since the fire.
The joyful peal called to my mind a poem that evoked something no less beautiful than the French Gothic monument: its builders. This memory in turn led to an epiphany, which is appropriate for epiphany, or Christian celebration The revelation of God as man in Jesus Christ is rapidly approaching.
“The Cathedral Builders,” written by the Welsh poet John Ormond and published in Welsh Poetry in 1965, lyrically reminds us of a very simple truth that has profound consequences. It's often ordinary people who create the most extraordinary beauty, especially when the project is large in scope.
Notre Dame hosts first Mass since the 2019 fire, drawing crowds in the thousands
Ormond glorifies the sacred work of countless craftsmen whose identities only history knows, but whose toil built The great cathedrals of medieval Europe. Most of them knew that they would not live to see the final fruits of their massive, multi-generational endeavors. They climbed their stairs anyway.
With soaring, simple language befitting the ethereal work of earthy men, Ormond pays tribute to the unheralded laborers who “raised the hewn rocks to the sky” by day and then “came down to supper and a little ale” in the evening. It is understood that a cathedral is no more sublime than its humblest builder. Each is an icon for the other.
Trump and Jill Biden attend the reopening of Notre Dame in France with world leaders
I thought of the “cathedral builders” as I thought of the 2,000 or so workers it took to rebuild Notre Dame inside French President Emmanuel Macron An ambitious five-year deadline. Unlike their medieval counterparts, the vast majority of these craftsmen lived to see their beloved task completed.
However, like these ancestors, they created lasting beauty by pledging their lives to something beyond themselves and greater than themselves. Amid the still-smoldering embers of 2019, life imitated art when these cathedral builders once again chose to make their lives art. Notre Dame is their masterpiece.
I believe that this choice is exactly the noble kind that the second-century theologian Saint Irenaeus had in mind when he said: “The glory of God is the fully living human being.” Aside from the aesthetic achievement, is there a lesson for the rest of us, those who lack the talent needed to make the clergy rise? I think so.
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Most of us are not called to build cathedrals of stone, but we are all called to build the cathedrals of our lives. Some of the works will soar – the tower at the top of the cathedral – for example, a soldier giving his life in combat to save his brother in arms. Other actions will be simple – a mortar on an unassuming driveway looks like a smile to a stranger passing in the street.
Priests and clergy arrive for the opening Mass, with the consecration of the high altar, in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, five and a half years after a fire destroyed the Gothic masterpiece, as part of a Remembrance Day ceremony. The cathedral reopens after its restoration, in Paris, France, Sunday, December 8, 2024. (Sarah Messonnier/Pool Photo via AP)
But large and small, they are all acts of love, of wishing for the good of the other, and, symbolic stone by stone, they will surely build a cathedral over one's lifetime. It may not be as tangible or visible to man as Notre Dame in Paris, but it is no less real, and no less beautiful. Moreover, what is invisible to man is not invisible.
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Therein lies the beauty of The Cathedral Builders, and what is most inspiring about it The ideal builders of Notre Dame. By reminding the weary world to see both the small in the big and the great in the small, they offer a blueprint not just for a well-made cathedral, but for something far more important: a life well lived.
This is my epiphany as the Epiphany approaches. I am grateful to the poet John Ormond, to the brave workers of Notre-Dame de Paris and to all who strive to build the cathedrals of their lives. They remind us that there is beauty in both elevation and simplicity.
