Is It Worth It?

 

Is It Worth It?

November 25, 2020

 

In 2019 the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris was extensively, indeed nearly totally destroyed, by fire. Notre Dame was a great treasure of French, European, and even world culture. It brought together all of the elements of Gothic architecture for the first time. It’s stained glass windows, especially the famous rose windows, are beautiful beyond description and are utterly irreplaceable. Notre Dame has stood on the Ile de la Cité in Paris for eight hundred years. It is a great monument to European culture in the High Middle Ages. Even for people for whom its religious function and the religious nature of the art with which it is filled are not important, Notre Dame has been a magnificent symbol of Paris, of France, and of the human spirit. As the news of the fire came in I thought the entire structure had been lost. Thank God it wasn’t. It appears that Notre Dame will be saved, although substantial risks of collapse or other damage remains. The French government is committed to rebuilding Notre Dame, but that reconstruction will cost an enormous amount of money. The French government has not finalized the budget for the reconstruction, but experts say that the cost could well exceed one billion dollars. That of course is an immense amount of money.

The question naturally arises: Is it worth it? Think of how much else the French government could do with that much money. Imagine the social ills it could address. Imagine how French education could be enriched. Imagine how much health care that much money could provide. Imagine the other cultural projects to enrich the lives of the French people that money could finance. Think of the housing it could build or the families it could feed. Imagine how it could reduce French taxes. The list of other worthwhile things that money could do is virtually endless. Few Europeans, including few French people, are religious anymore. Notre Dame’s religious significance as a Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to the mother of Christ doesn’t mean much to most contemporary French people. So why spend that much money to restore it? Why not just tear it down and use the money for something else?

These questions remind me of an experience I had when I was a young university student doing a year abroad in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1968-69 academic year. We are all young radicals. We had wanted Gene McCarthy to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 1968. We hated Richard Nixon. We hated the Vietnam war. We were all radical social liberals at least if not outright socialists. There we were in Germany surrounded by the great monuments of Germany’s history and culture. There are Gothic and baroque cathedrals everywhere. There are palaces of magnificent architecture decorated with beautiful art everywhere. Most of the members of our group from the Oregon State System of Higher Education thought those treasures were a total waste of money. They said most people in the years when those things were built were extremely poor. Huge amounts of money went into creating them. My colleagues said think how many people could have been fed and housed with the money that went into building those things. What a waste, they said.

I said no, it wasn’t a waste at all. I said that these structures, especially the churches, are magnificent expressions of the human spirit. I said they express the yearning of the human spirit for something more, for an expression of the spiritual heights to which the human being is capable of aspiring. I said that if we ever lose our spirit of creation, our ability to create and appreciate beauty, to strive for the transcendent, we will lose a great deal of what it is to be human. Yes, I had to acknowledge, a lot of human needs could have been met with the money that went into building those churches and palaces, but I believed then and I believe now that human life would be immensely impoverished if we were to lose our drive toward something higher, something more beautiful than our ordinary lives, something even divine. That’s why I disagreed with my friends in their dismissal of the value of the great monuments of the human spirit that we saw in Europe that year.

I didn’t express it this way then. I wasn’t the least bit religious then. I didn’t have the education and experience with things spiritual then that I have now. Today I say that what those great achievements of the human spirit express is our drive toward the transcendent. Yes, the great Gothic cathedrals were built as much for civic and political reasons as for religious ones. Still, they are cathedrals. They are churches. Notre Dame de Paris is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. Even the secular baroque buildings like palaces give people a vision of heaven, a vision of a life better and more beautiful than the lives they live. We would lose a lot if we ever lost our inherent human drive toward the transcendent that those buildings express.

Today that drive mostly gets expressed in different ways. There have been great places of worship built in many religious traditions in modern times, but our drive toward the transcendent mostly gets expressed in different ways. I was in Stuttgart during that year abroad when the US landed two men on the moon and returned them safely to earth. A lot of people were asking the same questions about that project as my friends asked about the cultural monuments of Europe that we saw that year. Was it worth the enormous cost? Think of all the good that could have been done with the money we spent to go to the moon. Think of all the food we could buy, all the housing we could build, all the education and medical services we could provide. Of course it’s true. We could have done a lot in those areas with the money we spent to go to the moon. Was going to the moon worth it?

Yes, I say. Going to the moon was worth it, and it was worth it for the same reasons that it was worth it for Europeans of earlier times to build the Gothic cathedrals. It was worth it because going to the moon was an expression of the human spirit always to always accomplish more. Always to strive to reach beyond ourselves for what is higher. Always to strive to transcend our reality and to reach for something better, something higher. Building great cathedrals was an expression of that inherent aspect of what it is to be human. So was going to the moon. So are our efforts to disclose the secrets of the universe and of subatomic particles. So is the work of poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and all who seek to create beauty and meaning in the world. Perhaps none of that feeds a single hungry person, but all of that makes us human. All of that expresses our nature as made in the image and likeness of God.

So yes. It’s worth it. It’s worth it to rebuild Notre Dame. It is worth it to go to the moon and to reach for the stars. It’s also worth it to do everything we can to address the very real human needs of people in this country and around the world that so often and so tragically are not met. The two realms of human endeavor need not be mutually exclusive. We can do both if we just will. Both are part of what it is to be truly, fully human. So let us reach for the stars literally and figuratively in every area of human undertaking. Our call as humans is to become fully human. We don’t do that by not creating beauty and spiritual meaning. We don’t do that by not doing everything we can we can to make life better for every human being. Yes, it’s worth it to rebuild Notre Dame despite the enormous cost of doing so. Let’s never forget that striving beyond ourselves is a core part of what it is to be human. So let’s strive. Let’s be fully human. Let’s never let anything stop us from that sacred task.