When Notre Dame burned in 2019, J and I were struck with particular horror. We had been in the building the previous summer on our first trip to France. We'd toured the crypt, we'd attended a vespers service, and we'd both been deeply moved by both the weight of history before our eyes and the very real, very live reading of the psalm about "nations gathering in the temple" as tourists made their way around the sanctuary.
Cathedral architecture is one of those subjects like sailing or astronomy that seems to consume those who get a taste of it and can lead them to laying out enormous sums of money for obscure pleasures that other people would probably regard as punishments, like standing in line to climb a narrow staircase just to look at some dusty rafters somewhere in the north of England in winter.
I'm aware that I'm curious.
But I'm genuinely curious, informed about the architecture or not, to see the inside of Notre Dame again. And I also want to hear a grand cathedral service again.
I found a great free app (after several failed attempts to load a massive pdf document on my kindle) that is basically an index of the Liber Usualis. It's a calendar-referenced library of the entire chant tradition of Western Christianity, and it's become an every day part of my morning.
I am (mostly) reading chant notation fluently now, and am even working on a service at church where we'll have all plainsong instead of congregational singing by rewriting the service music in a way that the choir can guide a Presbyterian congregation through the day's chants in modern notation. (It helps that we can project Latin translations on our big screen.)
It's evident from the re-opening photos that Notre Dame will be different the next time we see it. But, like so many other aspects of life in France, the modern update is still enchanted with magic of the past. And we can't wait to see it and hear it again.
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