Fly!

Bishop Robert Barron’s work, especially his website, is well known at Christ the King.  Many of us have come to appreciate the depth of his knowledge and experience.   One of his many books is his 2000 “Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Gothic Cathedrals” in which he said, “I came to realize the enormous evangelical power of these buildings.”  

One such cathedral has burned down representing tremendous loss.  That is the fabulous Notre-Dame expertly described by author Ken Follett in his 2019 book “A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals: Notre-Dame.”  Most of us are familiar with this great cathedral for Victor Hugo’s fictional hunchback.  

Barron wrote: “In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Satan is depicted as buried up to his waist in ice at the bottom of Hell.  His kingdom – that area over which he has immediate control – extends just as far as the limits of his own body.  Though he flaps his massive wings day and night, he goes nowhere and succeeds only in making the world around him colder.  This fallen and immobile angel beautifully evokes St. Augustine’s definition of sin as curvatus in se, being turned in on oneself. Sinners are those who make themselves undisputed lord and master of a very tiny realm: the kingdom of the ego.  

When Dante finishes his journey through Hell and Purgatory and arrives in Heaven, he begins to effortlessly fly, walking the sky from planet to planet.  This nimbleness and subtlety of movement is meant to contrast sharply with Satan’s icy immobility.  To be in sin is to live in one very small space, whereas to be in God’s grace is to course with abandon through myriad worlds, moving ever upward and onward.  “Why can the angels fly?” Chesterton asks.  “Because they take themselves so lightly.”  The Gothic cathedrals are designed to facilitate flight – away from the tiny, cramped room of the ego.”

Barron reminds us that we too must fly.  Christ the King isn’t a Gothic cathedral, but it is the place where we are supposed to spiritually fly as the Body of Christ.  For those of us hunch-backed over due to loss of spirit and hard-heartedness, it is time to straighten up and remove ourselves from the ice in which we are waist-deep buried.

Deacon David Pierce