Notre Dame and Easter Sunday

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"The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
--Robert Frost

Working out the other day I glanced up at the television. I stopped. My hand went over my mouth. "I can't believe this,"  I said, "Notre Dame is burning!" People all over the world had the same reaction. Parisians and people from many places were kneeling, some praying, many crying. A whole lot of us know how the flowers felt. 

We stood in that wonderful place on Easter Sunday 2013. Easter Sunday at Notre Dame! It was the day that many of the great bells had been recast. Many of them had not rung since the middle ages. They were all in place and to stand there on that Sunday of Sundays, well it really did take our breath away. 

photo by Fraser Mummery / flickr

We've visited once since but that visit did not hold the power of that Easter Sunday morning when the bells began to toll. Somebody wrote as book some time ago entitled, "Things We Lost in the Fire." I thought about that as I watched that great cathedral burning and burning. We lost a lot. But not all was lost. Thanks to firemen and other brave people the two towers still stood. Many of the treasures that go back, seemingly forever were carefully taken from the charred embers and will one day be back in place.

There is nothing to say really except that we really do know how the flowers felt. Grief comes down our road in strange ways and even stranger times. Thank God on Easter we will look up as did those first disciples on Easter morning and after the charred embers of Friday and the tears that just kept flowing--we look up and know that the bells just might ring again.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com