We are meditating on the meaning of the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral at this time. 

Henry Adams reminds us that Mary, after whom the Cathedral is named, represented the energy “of love and of matter.” Mary is a protector and living intercessor between mankind as individuals and “the perils of law, whether human or divine.” 

A carved-wood depiction of Mary — unusual in that here, the infant Jesus is directly facing her, rather than towards the viewer, and both appear completely adoring of each other. Location unknown. Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash.

A martial religion of “predominate masculine energy” ruled in the 11th century, but Mary represented “the assertion of the supremacy of love over force” with the Gothic reality of the 12th and 13th centuries. She represented “boundless sympathy” and “not even the weakest human frailty could fear to approach her.” 

As Adams puts it, she represented the Buddhist sense of compassion, “the first of all virtues.” 

She represented a new civilization which included a whole new creation of education, when the university movement in the cities displaced the monastic hold on education in the countryside. And “university” originally meant a place to go to find one’s place in the universe. (Not just one’s place in a man-made work world, which is what it has come to mean during the modern era.)

The Virgin of the twelfth and thirteenth century had not only the powers of Eve and Demeter and Venus; she was also the mistress of all the arts and sciences, was afraid of none of them, and did nothing, ever, to stunt any of them…She was Queen by divine right and compassion and understanding, not by law and formula. She was “the practice of the true balance of powers, with the individual always tilting the balance.” 

Highlights from the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris on December 7th, 2024. Video by CBS Sunday Morning. You can also watch the replay of the entire opening ceremony HERE.

She was a “personal presence” and a “saving grace” [and] the personal equation at the heart of law and justice.” She gave birth to “fresh creations of order.”* 

The very word “cathedral” derives from the word for throne (as does the Goddess Isis, the original Black Madonna). So another aspect to Notre Dame Cathedrals is that they honor the Goddess who sits ruling a city (or a country) with compassion and justice for the poor, not for the rich. And for the celebration of life. (Again, anthropocentric and patriarchal religion have reduced the “throne” in the cathedral to a place where a bishop sits, but that leaves out the cosmos and the divine feminine that are so central to the deeper meaning of cathedra.) 

Such a building offers a fine reminder for our time of a new cosmology, a cosmogenesis story of how our Earth and our species made the 13.8-billion-year journey to be here.

The South Rose Window in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Photo by jmvnoos in Paris on Flickr.

And to be grateful for being here. Which is religion’s task, to spread the thanks. As Thomas Aquinas (who was in Paris at the time the rose windows were being installed in Notre Dame cathedral) put it: “Religion is supreme thankfulness or gratitude.” And that is what the Sabbath is about, he says: giving thanks and first and foremost for creation.

It seems the Divine Feminine might have something needed and necessary to say to our times. Maybe the resurrection of Notre Dame de Paris might assist us in taking in that wisdom. If we choose to listen.