A young woman with shining eyes starts telling me the story. To begin there
was the city wall. The wall remained, but one part of it was used to build a
chapel. Many years passed, and the chapel became a church. Another century
passed, and the church became a Gothic cathedral. The cathedral had had its
moments of glory, there had been structural problems, for a time it had been
abandoned, the restoration work had distorted the whole shape of the building,
but each generation thought it had solved the problem and would rework the
original plans. Thus, in the centuries that followed, they raised a wall here,
took down a beam there, added a buttress over there, created or bricked up
stained-glass windows.

And the cathedral withstood it all.

I walk through the skeleton of the cathedral, studying the restoration work
currently being carried out: this time the architects guarantee that they have
found the perfect solution. Everywhere there are metal supports, scaffolding,
grand theories about what to do next and some criticism about what was done in
the past.

And suddenly, in the middle of the central nave, I realise something very
important: the cathedral is me, it is all of us. We are all growing and
changing shape, we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected, we
don't always choose the best solution, but we carry on regardless, trying to
remain upright and decent, in order to do honour not to the walls or the doors
or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and
venerate what is dearest and most important to us.


-Paulo Coelho, The Zahir