The Crown of Thorns

With uncounted thousands of others online, I watched in horror as the spire crashed into the roof of Notre-Dame-de-Paris on Monday. 

I'm still working out some of what went into my reaction. I'm not French, much less Parisian. I'm not Roman Catholic. But I love Paris. By profession for thirty-eight years, I was a scholar of medieval languages and literature. I love medieval architecture, and I've seen for myself the craftsmanship of ancient wooden roofs something like the one the flames raced through. Just as importantly, I'm a queen who cries most of the way through Les Miz. 

And despite the vastly destructive aberrations of Christianity, I still find accessible within it a precious treasure of spritiual sustenance, like an unsullied diamond in the muck, in a tradition founded on the belief that the Divine inhabits and sanctifies our flesh, and is with us in the darkest moments of our despair and even in our death.

I felt relief and joy when it was clear the church would survive. The heroism of firefighters (hunky French firefighters) had saved the west towers. The three great rose windows were intact. And treasures of the cathedral had been removed by a human chain of rescuers while molten lead rained down around them from the roof.

Among those treasures, the Crown of Thorns.

I was vastly relieved that they'd saved the Crown of Thorns?

Number one: who knows where it first came from? If Jesus of Nazareth ever wore one during his humilation and torture--if it's not an invention of the first Christian communities around the Gospel writers--the chances that anyone took it with them from the site of the Crucifixion are pretty slim. Even if it had been possible to retrieve it, in the moment it would have been like someone saving a splinter from the electric chair their best friend has just been executed in. Number two: if you look at the gold-foil-wrapped wreath that's supposed to be the Real McCoy, it looks more like something Grace Jones would have worn in an '80s music video.

It arrived from Byzantium in Paris in 1241 during the reign of Louis IX, who built the Ste-Chapelle a little further west on the Île de la Cité to house it, along with other relics of the Crucifixion. It survived the French Revolution (during which Notre-Dame itself was first rededicated as a Temple of Reason and then converted to a warehouse).

Ultimately, it's not the historical veracity of its pedigree that matters. It's that veneration has made it holy. 

The working out of Spirit in the history of the Crown of Thorns isn't so different from the working out of Spirit in the deeper truth of Resurrection: that an unorthodox, countercultural rabbi of the first century, horribly murdered by the powers of his day, somehow lives on embodied in the assembly of his present-day followers who gather to eat a symbolic meal in his memory.