Notre Dame. . .

You can watch a very informative and enjoyable documentary of Notre Dame and especially the fire.  You can also find any number of videos online about the interior -- especially the changes that were done following the devastating fire.

What I found most interesting were the comments of one French woman who said that it was beautiful inside but it was not the Notre Dame she had come to know and love and the sanctuary in which she had prayed.  Her complaint were the interior finishes, especially the altar, font, pulpit, and other furnishings.  In the context of her thoughts, she said something telling.  The cathedral was not, in her opinion, a luxury hotel which required modernization in order to keep up its clientele.  It was a telling comment.

Indeed, Notre Dame represents what has gone wrong in churches today.  The exterior remains its old Gothic self but the interior has been modernized.  That is the problem.  It is one thing to modernize the exterior of the faith and to a certain amount that is unavoidable.  But to change the heart of the faith is to depart from it.  The woman was not denying that the building was still "pretty" but she was admitting that the changes inside detracted from the cathedral it had been.  Perhaps it was not easy for her to put her finger on but what she was saying is that when the church changes the interior of the faith, the faith is changed -- no matter how much the external remains.  Think of it this way, you can put new clothes on the body but the body underneath remains the same.  

There are things that form a unity within the externals of the Church.  This is certainly true of doctrine and practice.  The age old axiom lex orandi, lex credendi gives this aphorism a concise and clear statement of the relationship between how a thing looks and what it means.  When this unity fails, the Church becomes a mere mask and not something yesterday, today, and forever the same.  This was obvious to someone who looked at a building she had known as familiar place of faith and prayer only to see that the building had changed.  Its new interior furnishings represented a disconnect between the past and the future.  The altar was no longer a holy place representing the entrance of the eternal into the temporal but was merely a piece of furniture or art for the designer to use as canvas for his or her self-expression.  The focus was not upon the God of our fathers but the deity of human invention and imagination.  This is what is wrong with the Church today.  Overall, it is less reflective of Scripture and the voice of the eternal God and much more the expression of its people and a particular moment of time.  It is therefore a creature of the moment instead of a glimpse of the eternal.  This is not only Notre Dame's interior problem.  It is the problem of modern Christianity.