The cathedral of Notre Dame in Rheims is one of the most imposing in all of France, a country with many great churches. When you walk through the city streets, as I did recently, and turn the corner, it looms up before you in all the magnificence of its medieval Gothic architecture. A great façade with three portals leads the eye upward; more than 2300 stone statues adorn the church’s exterior, exhibiting figures and events from sacred history.

Inside, the height of the nave and its beautiful proportions lend a sense of awe to people who enter it. To walk around this interior space is to experience wonder at the artistry of architects and other artists who raised this building some eight centuries ago and have worked on the structure throughout its long history.

For boosting the spiritual life, sacred spaces play a vital role. Almost everyone needs contact with such spaces from time to time if the soul is to flourish. In order to appreciate the mystery of our world you must have the lift that comes from encounters with space that is out of the ordinary.

Three features of Notre Dame Cathedral stirred my soul and continue to provide me with inspiration in succeeding weeks. The first, already implied, is the way the interior space soars toward the heavens. Not only are one’s eyes drawn upward by the building’s sight lines, but one’s spirit too is lifted up toward God.

Of course, modern people do not believe that God lives up beyond the skies. However, we still associate both height and depth with the mystery of divine being. God is sublime, and spectacular movement upward can carry minds and hearts toward divinity. At least it works that way for me, especially when I enter a great high-vaulted church.

The second feature of this cathedral that moved me is surprisingly recent. In 1974, the great artist Marc Chagall designed blue stained-glass windows for the chapel at the east end of the building. Three sets of windows display figures from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, brought together in a surprising unity.

A striking fact is that Chagall was Jewish, and that the traditions of his faith were vividly alive to him. Working on art for a Christian cathedral, he illuminates and renews, in his own characteristic style, the great themes of Christian iconography, making us newly aware of their Jewishness.

Chagall’s medieval predecessors were well aware of the Hebrew Bible, and used its stories to foreshadow New Testament events. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the death of Jesus on the cross. The tree of Jesse, the father of King David, shows the forebears of Jesus.

Chagall treats these themes as well, but in a new way. The characters from the Hebrew Bible are not mere prototypes, but shine forth in their own right. At the same time, the artist treats New Testament figures with great sympathy. His tender radiant imaged of Jesus and Mary recall the spirit of medieval sculptors who adorned the portals of Rheims Cathedral with smiling angels and saints. The whole enterprise strikes me as a bold, innovative gesture toward reconciliation between the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Reconciliation is also the theme of the third feature that attracted my attention. Outside the front of the cathedral, a stone plaque is set in the pavement with words of great historical importance. On the plaque are engraved words that give the date and the exact hour and minute when two leaders with vision came together to establish lasting peace.

Konrad Adenauer, then the aged chancellor of West Germany, and Charles de Gaulle, the heroic president of France, celebrated that day in 1962 the coming together of their two nations after almost a century of destructive bitterness. When you recall the three terrible wars fought by the two nations in 1870, 1914, and 1939, the sealing of peace and friendship with a Mass at the Cathedral in Rheims has to be seen as a great moment.

This cathedral is indeed a sacred space, important for the life of the spirit. There three important human works – –  the soaring height of the interior, the brilliant blue windows of Chagall, and the reconciliation of two former enemy nations – – summon us to a more realized inner life.

Richard Griffin