After five years of restoration, the Notre Dame cathedral reopened in Paris! I don’t know that one exclamation point can signify the extraordinary feat. While most agreed that five years would be nearly impossible, the greater consensus was — “not on my watch…” It wasn’t whether it could be done, but that it had to be done. And it wasn’t just Catholics, or Parisians, the world seemed to be invested. For it isn’t just architecture, it is a story of our humanity. Some will call that faith. Fortitude. Survival. Pride. Celebration. Maybe it’s all of those things. But this building, this evidence of our living, this story that has stood for nearly a thousand years, all agreed that it couldn’t be lost to something so banal as a dropped cigarette or a loose wire. Not a war, not a natural disaster, nothing in all this time had taken it down. No one wanted to be the ones that let it go. 

Every detail was replicated. Details that most will never see, but all will feel. The voice of Notre Dame has been restored. Each rafter is aligned to the note. There is a sound that exits because of the building. It rings again. Still.

In my most humble of ways, I work each day on keeping my own “Notre Dame” alive. There is a voice to my Hvezdas. My Alexandria. My Van Dyke Road. My friends. My new French family. My Provence. My Paris. All rafters in the voice that is mine. Is ours. And I will do everything to keep that alive. It is my watch. It is my responsibility. 

And don’t we all have that? Aren’t we all keepers of the story? Isn’t it our joyful duty to do the work? To pass on the love? To keep it alive? To be the exclamation point of this time? This place? “Yes! Yes!!!” I shout, we shout, over the sound of ringing bells.