Will we rebuild an empty shell? A soulless appearance? A silhouette emptied of all substance? A movie set?
This is one of the questions now. The other big question being: Is still standing will hold? …
Our Lady collapses because she was empty. Our Lady of the 12th, 13th centuries was built by the fervor of an entire people. She is a pioneer in the construction of the West, this West which is dear to us because it carries an ideal,
Our Lady collapses because the Ideal is empty, faith is empty, the spiritual is empty. The spirit that once bore its construction, which raised the warheads to the sky, withdrew from Western civilization. (I speak of the spiritual and not only of the Catholic …). Good or bad, that’s not my point. The West is emptied of its heart and its heart collapses …
In this destruction a moment of grace: All united, shocked, stunned, sad.
A moment of union, a moment of soul. A moment suspended from time. A moment of communion. This communion which is so lacking in the West today. I do not speak specifically of Catholicism, I speak of communion of spirit. This moment when we realize that without a unifying symbol a community of men is nothing. A moment when we give thanks to the symbol that unites us.
We are witnessing the magic of a moment, to the grandiose lesson: The destruction of matter allows the spirit to act here below. The spirit that unites us at the top hovers for a few moments above the hot ashes … The West feels in him what makes him coherent. Which makes it western. What is its specificity, its purpose, its particular offering to the Earth.
For a very short time, because the Western offering is cooling down very quickly. The ardor that raised these vaults is no more. We now have the tourist where once was the momentum towards the unifying principle.
There remains a little glimmer, a little hope, that from these ashes, the West finds its self, its pride, its direction and its goal, in a word the ideal that drives it, irreducible and which remains the Star to reach : freedom, equality, fraternity are not words of national pride, but are the blood, the living water that we need to regenerate ourselves and give the world our true face.
