Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Notre Dame de Paris

 

On this day, sunshine is streaming into the body of Notre-Dame in Paris, illuminating the walls and floors inside, now drenched with water from courageous efforts of firefighters to save her. This influx of light hasn’t happened since the cathedral was finished in 1260… 759 years of internal darkness now exploded open to the sky…

She is a powerful symbol and, as is true of symbols, each of us sees them from our own place of meaning.

Symbols are so potent exactly because they operate at a level deeper than statistics and historical facts. British anthropologist Victor Turner once described a symbol as “a blaze or landmark, something that connects the unknown with the known.” In a symbol we feel a part of ourselves reflected deeply by something in the world.

In the burning of Notre-Dame, so many things can be seen and felt. And what is seen and felt depends so much on who we are and what our people have experienced.

In this day and age of social media posts that are as ephemeral as the wind, perhaps we long for something as enduring as Notre-Dame, an edifice that took 100 years to build and stood the test of time for more than 850 years. I notice that in the writing of this piece, which I am doing barely 24 hours after the last flames were extinguished, already thousands of people have written thousands of words about this, shared back and forth on sites like Facebook and most of which will be forgotten tomorrow.  Maybe we yearn for that monumental level of human handmade effort and timeless magnificence, so absent in this disposable age we live in.

As a person of European descent, I long for something unique and beautiful to reflect my culture, which has been so assimilated into ‘white America.’ Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Paris was this for me and so many others, a space of sacred reflection, an architectural gem.

From yet another perspective, the people of France may feel this burning of their beloved cathedral, literally in the heart of the city, as symbolic of a country that is currently being pulled apart by social and political forces.

 

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Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Notre Dame de Paris

 

I come from a family steeped in Catholicism and even though it is no longer my spiritual path, there is a way in which it’s still very much with me. (A bit like another artifact from my personal history, that old Eagles song Hotel California: “You can check out, but you can never leave…”)

Our Lady, in her many forms, permeates my own upbringing. My birth name, Maria, was chosen to honor Our Lady, Mother Mary — a fact that my mother never let me forget when I was growing up, much to my annoyance until honestly right up to this moment as I write this piece and finally begin to understand the deeper way that her archetype has impacted my being.

I grew up just outside the City of Angels, protected by Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. The parish we were members of consisted of the big church downtown – St. Andrews – but there was also the small chapel of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, just a few blocks from us. This tiny church was mostly attended by the Mexican parishioners, and mass was said in Spanish every Sunday. Every once in a while we went there instead of St. Andrews. It was such a different feeling from the large church – intimate, loud and joyful, and all about community with a standing-room-only crowd for most masses.

In my teens, the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe burned down. A few years later the diocese deemed it wasn’t worth re-building, sold the land, and an office building went up where it used to be.

For four years, I studied French in high school (yes, Catholic high school!). Every French text book we had was highlighted with photos of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. After graduation, I was lucky enough to go to Paris with my French class. The 18-year-old me remembers stepping inside Notre-Dame and sitting in the silent reverence of that space. I shall never forget that experience. As I watched the cathedral burn, my heart burned with grief and loss as I realized how much that moment meant to me.

 

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Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Notre Dame de Paris

 

Because it’s not going to get much coverage anywhere else, I want to amplify one more perspective.

This tragedy is perceived quite differently among many Indigenous people. It resonates with the destruction of so many of their own sacred places, often at the hands of the Catholic Church, a destruction that most of us white folks have been oblivious to.

For Native people, the Church symbolizes an oppressive force, a shadow that fell on their homelands beginning in 1492 and continues to this day. The Church, then merged with the Spanish monarchy intent on discovery and conquest, became the primary weapon of that destructive conquest.

Today the power of the Church in that way has faded, and over time the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the relentless pillaging of capitalism took its place. But the impact is the same. Homelands stolen, children sent to boarding schools in order to “kill the Indian and save the man,” lands and waters poisoned.

And it is not over. To this day, in the region where I live, residents of the Pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara live literally downstream from Los Alamos National Laboratory, dealing with contamination of their water sources. The very site of the lab is on land stolen from the Tewa people by the U.S. government as the Manhattan Project was being set up. This land – finger-like plateaus coming down from the Jemez mountain range – is sacred to the Tewa people. As one of my friends from Kha’p’o (Santa Clara Pueblo) says, ‘This is our cathedral.’

And this is just one example of many. Please take time to read this piece from Diné writer Jourdan Bennett-Begay, “‘Shock and dismay’ for Notre Dame (so should it be for Chaco Canyon)”.

Is it any wonder, then, that from a Native point of view, the burning of Notre-Dame might symbolize something very different.

Yet this is very difficult for some white folks to understand. In interacting with others about this on social media, I ran into more than one white person who was offended that not everyone was feeling as they felt and that some were ‘trying to make this about identity politics’ and ‘push their agenda.’

Please know I am not telling you how to feel or not to feel about this – or anything. I am simply inviting you (and reminding myself) to be aware that other people may be feeling something quite different. And for very good reason. To tell them to be quiet and center ‘our’ culture, our tradition, our feelings, is to, even if unknowingly, reinforce centuries of oppression and violence. If we listen deeply, if we lean into it a bit more and keep our hearts open, we might find that they are offering us empathy as well as a teaching moment.

Casey Douma, an attorney from Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, reflected:

“The concern and dismay is being felt by many around the world. Now imagine that the damage to this historic and religious site was caused by a pipeline running through it, by fracking, or due to development. This shock and dismay is the type of feeling Indigenous people feel when our lands when our lands and sacred sites are damaged and threatened.”

This is what it means to live in our highly interconnected and hyper speedy world and it is, perhaps, the core challenge we all face: how to find a way to live in mutual respect and peace alongside those who have a vastly different experience than ourselves. How to, perhaps, even learn from each other and deepen our own sense of what it means to be a human being.

I have a great deal of faith that we can hold multiple truths, though it does take practice. I am certain that we can feel our own grief at this loss while at the same time listening to the grief that is triggered for others.

 

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Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Notre Dame de Paris

 

Our Lady, as I have come to understand her over the years, is about deep compassion, about boundless empathy, about mercy.

I now know that she is not confined to Catholicism, that the archetype of powerful feminist spirituality is found in all cultures (and far predates Christianity). I believe her heart would be gladdened to know that this physical catastrophe is actually a portal to let in the sunshine that may finally illuminate our hearts and minds to living in true Love with each other.

It’s up to us.

May it be so.

 

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