Weather: Cold and partly cloudy
I took this photo in 2000, when I visited Paris as a sort of school trip while I was homeschooling. I may not be Christian, but Notre Dame de Paris is a sacred place to me. I just love gothic architecture, and Notre Dame is a wonderful expression of it--and it's easily the most famous gothic building in the world. There's something very forest-like in a cathedral's tall pillars and stained glass windows, which filter light like leaves. In the book Native Roots, Jack Weatherford suggests that humans try to mimic the forest in our architecture, and I think he's right:
Something of the forest can be seen even in the column clusters of Greek and Roman temples, and in the cathedrals of Europe. After the Europeans destroyed most of their great forests and covered the land with farms, manors, castles, and cities, they built large temples such as the cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres...The interior of the building reaches toward the sky, and the builders decorated it with multicolored windows that let light stream in as though coming through the trees...No matter how urban humans have become, something within them still longs for the forest.Notre Dame stands in the middle of Paris on an island in the Seine known as Ile de la Cité, and the island has been a sacred site for millennia. Construction on the cathedral started in 1163; before that, a smaller church, the Saint Etienne Basilica, stood on the spot. During the Roman Empire, the Romans built a temple to Jupiter there--and Jupiter, incidently, originates from the same Indo-European thunder god as Yahweh, the god that Christians now worship in the same place. There are suggestions that the Romans built the temple there because it was already a sacred place to the Gauls, who held ceremonies on the island to honor their own gods.
Probably what I felt when I stood in that cathedral was merely the beauty of the architecture, the darkness broken by candlelight and stained glass windows. But maybe I could sense what made that place sacred to all the people who have stood there over the years. Our modern religions focus worship toward the skies and perceive the world temporally, but animist cultures see the world in spatial terms, relating to events by location rather than time. Sacred places are the centers of these religions, and the people of these religions emphasize the spiritual bond between them and these locations. Standing in a place like Notre Dame, I can understand that sense of sacred place.
