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Good morning. I cried on the day four years ago when Notre-Dame burnt, against the Paris skyline. So did my sister, which was odd, because she doesn’t have a religious bone in her body. This weekend we heard that the rebuilding is on schedule and hopes for the spire to be rise again by 2024 are more than dreams. I felt oddly emotional. So did my sister. Once again, I wondered why. I remember the first time I visited, age 6 – the sense of immensity, the colours of the stained-glass, and the arches that draw your eyes upwards, towards heaven. I also remember the words of our guide: every inch of this place was made with love and care; even in inaccessible parts of the roof, there are sculptures and statues that nobody would ever see apart from those who carved them. Notre-Dame wasn’t just a work of art, it was a work of love, and a work of faith. When it burnt, a proudly secular nation watched in horror and sadness, and remembered its history, and the faith and hope that gave rise to Notre-Dame as a cherished symbol of national identity. Remembered that Notre-Dame is more than stones and mortar, more than history, more than the sum of its parts, more than a utilitarian space for those of faith. It draws people’s eyes towards a reality beyond themselves, something bigger, which cannot easily be captured in words. Human beings are flesh and bone; we’re tethered to earth, to physical existence. It is easy to try and reduce everything to physicality, to what can be explained through logic or reason. Yet the most precious things of life cannot quite be reduced to what we can explain: love, beauty, friendship, courage, justice, right and wrong –these things connect us to something more than ourselves, and more than reason. The ancient philosopher who wrote the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, put it like this: ‘God made everything beautiful in its time; and God put eternity in the hearts of humanity’. Somehow human beings are finite and mortal, yet dream of eternity, of those things that say that they are more than flesh and blood, that the world is more than matter and atoms. I guess this is what my sister connected to – this sense of beauty, of a story that invites us to think about those things we struggle to articulate, because they are so far beyond ourselves. Maybe this is a sign that the builders of Notre-Dame achieved their aim: to draw eyes upwards, make us ponder humanity, eternity, and – for me, if not my sister, the God who, I believe, brings life out of death, so that fire, death and destruction are never the end.