When I first heard that Notre Dame was burning, it was mid-afternoon in California and I had arrived home after my lunch shift at the restaurant. I set my keys on the counter. My mom was sitting in the living room, amazed, and showed me the video. I watched the billowing smoke rise from the skyline of Paris as the cathedral of Notre Dame burned.
And as I looked at those pictures, I felt emptied. Because this was not just a cathedral that is burning. This was history. This was the library of Alexandria lost to hungry flames again. It was a reminder that even the most majestic beauty does not last forever. Even the eternal can die.
Holy Week is the time of the season of Lent when we become familiar with our own mortality again. And even during Holy Week—especially during Holy Week—we need to be reminded that cathedrals burn; we also need to be reminded that they can be reborn.
Even in this tragedy, even in the destruction of a masterpiece, we still see light come out of the darkness. We see the world mourn—and by mourning, we realize humanity’s recognition of beauty, our sorrow to lose history. We see a collective outpouring of donations: a billion dollars raised in two days. We see the promises: we will rebuild.
Death and rebirth. This is the story we’ve lived a thousand times, again and again. We see it in our superhero films, our ancient mythologies, our favorite fantasies. And even as I mourn with the rest of the world, I can’t help but think how poignant it is that this week, of all weeks, we are reminded what it means to truly lose something magnificent.
Maybe in the burning of an eternal cathedral, we glimpse an echo of our heartbreak for the loss of the eternal. Maybe in the moment we all saw the smoke for ourselves, in that heartbeat of fear, the stories became true for us. We glimpsed how terrible a thing it is that a crowd gathered to watch the Son of God crucified on the hills of Jerusalem.
We know how the story ends. We know the light will dawn again on Sunday morning. We know that whether it takes months, years, or decades, the cathedral will be rebuilt.
But as the world mourned, as Holy Week began, remember that in that moment, we saw no stars rising in the east but smoke from the city of light.
<3 Olivia Grace
