Au Revoir, Notre Dame de Paris

A replica of a Notre Dame

gargoyle watches over us 

at night. 

Here I use “au revoir” in the sense, “goodbye until we meet again,” as it literally means “to the seeing again.” I believe in Notre Dame’s resurrection, thanks to the commitment of the people of France to rebuild after the fire that devastated it weeks ago.

Until then, we will carry it in our hearts.

The first time I visited the cathedral, we had a very personal encounter. A close friend of mine in Los Angeles asked me on behalf of his father, struggling with cancer, to light a candle and say a prayer there before the Blessed Virgin for whom “Our Lady” is named. I was only too happy to do that.

When I happened to turn on the news while putting away groceries and learned of the fire, my legs wobbled, my heart sank, and tears came. My voice quavered when I later told Wade, who was working from home. On Facebook I wrote that it was the first time since 9/11 that I “lost it” watching the burning of a building, though, in that case, it was not so much the building as it was the loss of human life and the loss of life as we knew it that overwhelmed me.

My first long fiction piece, an unpublished novella titled Tommy that I wrote in college, described the great loss congregants experienced when their church burned down. I based it on my childhood experience of a fire in my home church, Vanowen Baptist. I had witnessed firsthand how emotional my mom and dad and other church members became, though it only damaged and did not destroy the structure. There is something very personal about a church.

In the dialogue between minister/journalist Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Moyers observes, “There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the—”

Campbell interrupts, “You can’t go that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame” [p 170].

While male gods have been associated with aggression, Campbell suggests, the Goddess is about compassion, which he declares as “the beginning of humanity” [p 174]. In a related context, Campbell says:

The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something ruling over and above a fallen nature. There was something of this spirit in the medieval cult of the Virgin, out of which all the beautiful thirteenth-century French cathedrals arose. However, our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us [p 99].

In the chapter, “The Gift of the Goddess,” Campbell explains:

From mere animal-like carnality, one may pass through a spiritual death and become reborn. The second birth is of an exalted, spiritually informed incarnation. And the Goddess is the one who brings this about. The second birth is through a spiritual mother. Notre Dame de Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres [which Campbell described as his “parish church”]—our Mother Church. We are reborn spiritually by entering and leaving a church [p 179].

It is after this last point that Moyers reminds Campbell that the Council of Ephesus proclaimed Mary as the Mother of God in 411, and Campbell explains that this had been argued long before in the church, adding, “there is a story that when the council was in session, discussing this point, the people of Ephesus formed picket lines and shouted in praise of Mary, ‘The Goddess, the Goddess, of course she’s the Goddess’” [p 180].

Campbell continues, “Jesus took over what is really the Goddess’ role in coming down in compassion. But when the Virgin acquiesces in being the vessel of the incarnation, she has herself already affected the redemption. It has become more and more apparent that the Virgin is equivalent in her suffering to the suffering of her son. In the Catholic Church now I think she is called the ‘co-savior’” [p 180].

Any of us who have contemplated Mary near the cross, or a Pietà of Mary holding her dead son, or witnessed any grieving mother who has lost a child, can bear witness to the intensity of such compassion, a word which Campbell defines as “shared suffering.”

To repeat Campbell’s maxim, “Our Mother Church. We are reborn spiritually by entering and leaving a church.”

No wonder emotions run high when we witness the burning of a church, whether Notre Dame de Paris, or Vanowen Baptist, or the black churches arsoned here in the South.

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

We'll Always Have Paris

Friday I finished helping with a week-long spiritual formation course and found myself reflecting on the instructor’s  explanation of Ignatian spirituality’s concept of “holding things loosely.” He learned this professionally as a church pastor and personally weathering a divorce and as the father of a daughter with a drug addiction.

After a Costco run, I retrieved Wade from the Atlanta airport, returning from a week out of town for work. Then we sat down for our usual evening PBS newscast and learned of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris. A Facebook friend posted that he and his wife had just visited the city two days earlier and found it gay and vibrant.

I wept, as I often do watching the news. I wept for those who lost their lives and the wounded and their loved ones, I wept for Paris and for France and for our world. Like most Westerners, I was oblivious to a pair of terrorist bombings that killed more than 40 innocent children, women and men in Beirut the day before.

On the subsequent newscasts and Saturday’s Democratic presidential candidates debate, no one was “holding things loosely”—everyone had either questions or plans on “what we should do” to prevent such violence.

As usually happens, one idea again emerged in the nonstop commentary, that Islamic moderates had to speak out forcefully to rein in Muslim extremists.

Easy to say, hard to do. I remember oh-too-well how little mainstream denominations in this country said or did to rein in religiously-motivated gay-bashing before LGBT people became respectable, or at least acceptable, in their eyes.

No matter your religion, if your god tells you to kill yourself or others, literally or figuratively, that god is what needs to be eliminated from your mind and your heart.

I once wrote on this blog that the young men being attracted to ISIS were as illiterate about the Qur’an as gay-bashers who quoted the Bible when brutalizing transgender people, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals.

But last March’s cover story in The Atlantic begs to differ. “What ISIS Really Wants and How to Stop It” by Graeme Wood asserts that the ISIS movement is very well-versed in the Qur’an. Its intent is to bring in an apocalypse, provoking the rest of the world to a violent confrontation and destroying the freedoms that make cities like Paris so gay and vibrant.

German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle once struck my survivor’s mentality to the core when she spoke on nuclear proliferation during an interfaith luncheon I attended when I lived in Los Angeles. She said that, in a nuclear war, she would rather be among the killed than among the killers. Why should she be provoked to change her non-violent nature?

I have the same beef with capital punishment. I oppose executions partly because they make us all killers. But I am not a pacifist. ISIS and terrorism of any kind must be confronted, if only because it’s usually the most vulnerable who suffer from their actions. Confrontation may have non-violent forms, which would be preferred, but it will require more, I believe—though we should never equate the “more” with the will of God.

In the Ignatian course we viewed the French film Of Gods and Men, the story of a household of Trappist monks ministering to the needs of Muslims in their Algerian village, ultimately slaughtered by fundamentalist revolutionaries that even their Muslim neighbors feared.  Warned to leave, they followed a discernment process that led them to the “aha” that this was their home, that this was their calling, to serve this neighborhood materially and medically—and so they stayed, despite their peril. They held their own lives “loosely.”

Jesus too knew the risk of “moving into our neighborhood” to proclaim a spiritual commonwealth, not a caliphate, which welcomes us all equally and voluntarily, a commonwealth of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

At the end of the film Casablanca, Rick urges Ilsa to go with her husband to aid him in his vital work of resisting Nazis, despite the great love they had found earlier in Paris. “Ilsa,” he explains, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

“We’ll always have Paris,” he reminds her.

We’ll always have Paris. It will always be gay and vibrant. And it will always risk the crazies who want to diminish its shine and glow, because liberty to be liberty must hold everything loosely.

Relevant columns:

“Ted Cruz and the Anti-Gay Pastor” by Katherine Stewart

“Finding Peace within the Holy Texts” by David Brooks

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.