A Cathedral and a Chapel

This is going to be a second post in my series of posts on thoughts and memories from my World Youth Day trip. For this post I would like to talk a little about some of my thoughts on a Cathedral and a Chapel. Notre Dame Cathedral and the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal both to be found in Paris. Both are beautiful but in completely different ways, and I think perhaps I liked the small chapel so full of light and beauty better than the famous awe inspiring gothic Cathedral.

As I search for sentences to describe Notre Dame I keep coming back to that one, it is awe inspiring. As you look up you feel small, little compared to that huge structure reaching up to the heavens. You are little. There is so much beauty, in the church architecture simply in how every small detail means something. Thought and symbolism was put into every inch of stone in the all of that large Cathedral, every detail was carefully planned and thought out in this building all reaching up to give glory to God, and yet, I couldn’t really like it.

Dark and cold, it seemed you could wander forever around and around without ever really getting to the heart of the Cathedral; the tabernacle. You lost somehow the sense of God’s presence amidst all the grandeur. It almost made you forget that you were in a church as you wandered on the sidelines gazing at the ancient artistry.

How very different from the Miraculous Medal Chapel that we also saw! Which’s very smallness was its very beauty. You entered it, and your eyes were instantly drawn to the front and the tabernacle. You were instantly aware that this was God’s house and his presence surrounds you especially in this place.

The very simplicity and light created such a calm peaceful atmosphere. It was so full of light! Light streamed through the windows and reflected off of the white and blue interior making it even brighter and lovelier. You felt that you were home. That’s the feeling all churches should create in one, the feeling that one is home. You are home in God’s house, and peace and serenity simply take you over in this knowledge of God’s love for you. A lot of this is your attitude, leaving all of those things creating havoc in your life behind you at the doors as you enter, but it is in the atmosphere also, and this was the atmosphere the Miraculous Medal Chapel created.

A Cathedral; a Chapel, each beautiful in its own special way but most beautiful because it is God’s house and He is truly present in the Eucharist that is found in the tabernacle in the very heart of both. The heart of the church,  both building and people, the heart of our beautiful beautiful Faith.

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society.”
- Pope John Paul II