Better

BETTER By: Melissa B. Carrasco

Egerton, McAfee, Armistead & Davis, P.C.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

In the middle of the Seine River, in the heart of Paris lies a tiny island known as the Íle de la Cité or “City Island.”1 It is connected to the rest of the city by nine bridges (one leads to another island, Íle SaintLouis), and it has been home to many different cultures since a small, Gallic tribe known as the Parisii moved onto the island in the third century B.C.2 In an effort to avoid invasion from another tribe (which apparently was rather common back in those days), they build a wall on the island, and it became known as “Paris.”3

As was common during that period of history, the tiny island was also home to people of different faiths, but the predominant religion was Christianity. And so, as people of faith often do, they build a church—a wooden structure that they called the Basilica of Sainte-Étienne, which was consecrated a little before 400 A.D.4 About four hundred years later, they built a second church—the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the first Bishop of Paris, who, according to history was beheaded for his faith.5 And there these two building stood, year after year, century after century, slowly slipping into history until 1160 A.D. when Maurice de Sully, then Bishop of Paris, decided to build a single, larger building between the two basilicas.6

By all accounts, there was no reason why Maurice de Sully should have been the one to take on a large building project. He was born into a family of peasants who lived at Sully-sur-Loire, about 100 miles outside of Paris.7 But, his parents managed to send him to school in Paris, and by the time he was twenty-seven, he was a professor of theology at the University of Paris.8 When Peter Lombard, then Bishop of Paris, died in 1160 A.D., Maurice was appointed his successor.9

Three years later, they broke ground on the new church, a Gothic style cathedral, with a cruciform layout, with flying buttresses, elevated nave, pointed arches and ribbed vaulting.10 And so, construction of the great Notre Dame Cathedral began in 1163 A.D., and it continued for the next one-hundred-eighty-two (182) years until it was completed in 1345 A.D.11

One-hundred-eighty-two years is a long time for a building project. Maurice de Sully who birthed the idea died thirty-six years later.12 He never saw the completed Cathedral. Pope Alexander III who laid the foundation stone never saw the completed Cathedral.13 In fact, generation after generation of people worked on the Cathedral, dedicated time and money to build the Cathedral, and left bequests in their wills to further the completion of the Cathedral.14 But, they did not see the finished Cathedral. But, they did not stop building, and they did not stop giving.

In 538 B.C., about two hundred years before the Parisii moved onto the Íle de la Cité, another group of people were on the move. This ancient group of people had been in exile for seventy years after their country had been overrun by the Chaldeans who forced about 10,000 of them to relocate to the city of Babylon.15 They called themselves the “Gola” (“exiles”) or “bene gola” (“children of the exiles”), and they longed for a home.16

So, after seventy years, when Cyrus the Persian conquered Chaldea and issued an order allowing the Gola to return home, many of them went.17 Cyrus had one instruction: rebuild the temple—the Beit haMikdash—that had stood in Jerusalem for four hundred years until it was destroyed by the Chaldeans.18 So they did. Under the direction of Zerubabbel, son of Shealtiel, Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, and Ezra, the temple was rebuilt.19

According to ancient literature, the work began on the second month of the second year after the Gola had returned home, and when the builders laid the foundation stones, the priests and the Levites played instruments and all of the people shouted for joy.20 Well, not all of the people. The book of Ezra records, “But many of the Cohanim (priests), L’ vi’ im (Levites), and heads of fathers’ clans, the old men who had seen the first house standing on its foundation, wept out loud when they saw this house; while others shouted out loud for joy – so that the people couldn’t distinguish the noise of the joyful shouting from the noise of the people’s weeping.”21

Why were they weeping? In the eyes of those who remembered Solomon’s temple, the second temple “seemed like nothing.”22 It was too small, too insignificant.

For the people who worked on the Cathedral at Notre Dame and Zerubbabel’s Temple in Jerusalem, it must have seemed like their work was meaningless. On the one hand, working on a building day after day, year after year, decade after decade is discouraging. Rebuilding amidst ruins is a painful reminder of what was lost. However, these two groups of people, separated by centuries, were not building for themselves. They were building for the future—for the people who would see the finished Cathedral one day and the people who would only know Zerubbabel’s Temple as their house of worship.

And so, do we. The practice of law is built upon the shoulders of those who practiced before us, but we must be careful to remember that we are building something that will outlast us. In that respect, the prophet Haggai’s admonition to the Gola rings true even today: “Take courage, all you people of the land . . . and get to work. . . . The glory of this new house will surpass that of the old.”23 We also must be willing to work to build something better.

1 Encyclopedia Britannica, Paris, available at https://www.britannica.com/place/Paris. 2 Id. 3 Id. 4 Id.; see also Nature History Heritage, Medieval Histories (Apr. 17, 2019), https:// www.medieval.eu/notre-dame-de-paris, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 5 Nature History Heritage, supra n. 4; see also Encyclopedia Britannica, St. Denis, available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Denis. For purposes of completion, in 502 A.D., Abbot Hilduin wrote that his decapitated corpse picked up his head and walked two miles to the location where the Benedictine abbey of St. Denis was founded. Id.; see also Anne-Marie Romero, Saint-Denis: Emerging Powers (Paris: Presses du CNRS 1992), excerpts available at https://ccnmtl. columbia.edu/projects/paris_map/popup/stdenis/saintdenis.html. This was a good bit before my time, and I have been unable to find anyone who could confirm or deny what the Abbot recorded. 6 Encyclopedia Britannica, Paris, supra n. 1. 7 Catholic Online, Maurice de Sully, https://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view. php?id=11148, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 8 Encyclopedia.com, Maurice of Sully, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/ encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/maurice-sully, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 9 Id. 10 European Architecture Series, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris, History and Gothic Architectural Design, http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/architecture/notre-dameparis.htm#architecture, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 11 Encyclopedia Britannica, supra n. 1. 12 Catholic Online, supra n. 7. 13 Encyclopedia Britannica, supra n. 1. 14 Figures and Facts about Notre Dame Cathedral, https://www.eutouring.com/ facts_notre_dame_cathedral.html, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 15 AICE, The Jewish Temples: The Babylonian Exile (597-538 BCE), https://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-babylonian-exile, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 16 Id. 17 Id. 18 Id.; see also AICE, The Jewish Temples: The First Temple – Solomon’s Temple, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-first-temple-solomon-s-temple, last visited Dec. 10, 2021. 19 Id. 20 Ezra 3:9-11 (CJB) 21 Ezra 3:12-13 (CJB). 22 Haggai 2:4 (CJB). 23 Haggai 2:4, 9 (CJB).