(CNN) I'll never forget an Easter Mass I attended at Notre Dame in the spring of 1969 -- 50 years ago, almost to the day. The tumultuous organ reverberated in the nave and aisles, and I had a sense of the walls themselves singing. The experience stays in my head: sitting in the pews with hundreds of worshippers and feeling lifted up toward the famous rose windows, through which morning sunlight pillared.

Jay Parini

I've been wrestling with the fact that I feel so upended by the fire at the cathedral. I've visited many times, but what does Notre Dame really mean to me, an Anglo-Catholic living in Vermont?

The timing was jarring. What a week for this fire to happen: a time when thousands of worshippers in France were readying themselves through penitence and prayer for the Passion, for Easter itself -- the celebration that comes on Resurrection Sunday.

There is always sorrow when a cultural artifact, a great work of architectural art, is damaged or destroyed. But Christians (like me) experienced the fire as a kind of body blow. Notre Dame is not only a cultural landmark, one of those monumental sites that defines a major city. More crucially, it's a gathering place for those who choose to come together to worship God in a particular way.

For those of us who follow the way of Jesus, it feels as though there is a deeper loss to consider here. The burning of Notre Dame was inadvertently symbolic, a devastation that stood in for the general loss of public worship in our time, the erosion of "We" into a billion little atoms, each of them singing and celebrating the individual in a self-indulgent, depressing and literal manner.

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