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Something beautiful happened at the end of last year. At the end of 2024, the world celebrated the rebuilding of the famous Notre Dame de Paris, which was engulfed in a terrible fire just five and a half years ago. At the reopening ceremony in Paris, her bells rang for the first time since the fire.
The pleasant sound called to mind a poem that exalts something less beautiful than a French Gothic monument: its builders. This memory in turn led to the Epiphany, which is aptly called Epiphany, or Christian celebration the revelation of God as a man in Jesus Christ is fast approaching.
“The Builders of the Cathedral”, written by the Welsh poet John Ormond and published in the magazine “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, especially when the undertaking is large in scope.
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Ormond glorifies the sanctifying work of countless craftsmen whose identity is known only to history, but whose labor he built the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. Most of them knew that they would not see the final fruits of their enormous multi-generational undertaking. They climbed their ladder anyway.
In lofty but simple language befitting the ethereal work of earthlings, Ormond represents the lion’s share of unheralded workers who “lifted the carved rock into the sky” by day and “came down to their dinners and a little beer” in the evening. Understood in this way, the cathedral is no more sublime than its humblest builder. Each is an icon to the other.
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I thought of the “Cathedral Builders” as I thought about the 2,000 or so workers it took to rebuild Notre Dame within French President Emmanuel Macron an ambitious deadline of five years. 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 beyond themselves and greater than themselves. Amidst the still-burning fervor of 2019, life imitated art when these cathedral builders once again chose to make art out of their lives. Notre Dame is their masterpiece.
This choice, I believe, is precisely the ennobling type that St. Irenaeus had in mind as a theologian from the second century when he said that “the glory of God is a fully alive man.” Aesthetic achievements aside, is there a lesson for the rest of us who don’t have the talent to lift lamps? i think i am.
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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 works will be tall – a tower on top of a cathedral – for example, a soldier who sacrifices his life in battle to save his brother in arms. Other actions will be simple – the mortar on the low path will appear like a smile to a stranger passing by on the street.
Priests and clergy arrive to attend the inaugural Mass, with the dedication of the high altar, at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, five and a half years after a fire ravaged the Gothic masterpiece, as part of ceremonies marking the reopening of the cathedral after restoration, in Paris, France, Sunday, December 8, 2024. (Sarah Meyssonnier/Pool Photo via AP)
But big and small, they are all works of love, desire for the good of others, and stone by stone, they will surely build a cathedral during 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, the invisible is not invisible to man.
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Therein lies the beauty of “Cathedral Builders” and what is most inspiring Exemplary builders of Notre Dame. Reminding a weary world to see both the small in the big and the big in the small, they provide a blueprint not just for a well-made cathedral, but for something far more important: a life well lived.
It is my Epiphany as the Epiphany approaches. I am grateful for the poet John Ormond, for the brave workers of Notre Dame de Paris and for all those who strive to build the cathedrals of their lives. They remind us that there is beauty in both the sublime and the simple.
