Notre Dame is Burning: Clearing the Way for a New Emergence

Zero Point – Paris By Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33980822

The live stream of Notre Dame on fire was at the top of my Facebook newsfeed on April 15. My stomach sank as the tears began streaming down my face. I remembered the awe and wonder I felt on that day so many years ago when I first visited the cathedral.

I went downstairs and turned on CNN. Wolf Blitzer was speaking with a Parisian reporter as she stood near the burning church. But, I was having trouble hearing her, because my attention was being drawn to the faint sound of singing in the background. I strained to listen past her words, longing for her to stop talking. Wolf obviously felt the same way. He asked her to be quiet and to turn the camera toward the crowd. Their song arose, in unison, in harmony, their grief palpable in their sombre voices. My hair stood on end as I watched the cathedral dedicated to Our Lady burn.

I couldn’t stop weeping. Like others I heard speak with Wolf, I was caught off guard by my tears. Some grief was triggered deep inside that my mind couldn’t quite comprehend. We watched orange flames dance against the black night sky. The French wept and we wept with them. Their loss somehow also felt like ours. It was coming to our attention that we cared more than we knew and prayed, regardless of our religious affiliations, for the building to stand strong. For the towers to hold fast to those bells and not let them go. For the art to be saved.

Once the tears passed, as a depth psychologist, searching for meaning in the seemingly meaningless, and sense in the senseless, I sat quietly to learn what I could. The fire was a cleansing of the inside of the church, and we were witnessing, like Lot’s wife, the destruction of an outdated view of the feminine in Christianity. We were mourning the loss of something we couldn’t name, believing this was a tragedy, afraid we were losing an important icon to the feminine.

We have witnessed the inner destruction of the old version of the feminine in Christianity. And now…

The space has been created, within an old religious structure, for something new to be built. A fresh state of consciousness is emerging as an old story is transforming, and the divine feminine is rising right into the heart of Christianity. Where?

The words of the French ambassador came back to me. He told Wolf, as the cathedral burned, the zero point of Paris is right in front of Notre Dame. It’s the center point from which everything in Paris, and even France, is measured. Right there, in the heart of the City of Love, a new divine feminine is coming to consciousness.

We’ve witnessed the Assumption of Mary as an honoring of the mother of Jesus. Then there was the elevation of Mary Magdalene as the bride, mother, and heir to the spiritual legacy of Jesus. What then is coming to consciousness now? The transformation of the stories of the Marys has paved the way for the next version of the story.

It’s taken me until now to grasp the full significance of what is emerging.

I can see from my own dreams and symbolic work that that in order to shift from the physical to the spiritual, and a new story, that we must transform our perception of what we are. If we experience ourselves as defined by the body, then we remain caught in duality and separation. The correlation is that Mary is the mother, but Jesus said, he was in the world, not of it. If we see ourselves as embodied spiritual beings, which is what he was referring to, then we identify with the transcendent aspect of ourselves, the ground of our being. Then, the spiritual mother of Jesus is the divine feminine, Sophia.

As such, the new story for Notre Dame, the cathedral dedicated to Our Lady, Our Mother, is centered on Sophia, Wisdom. The divine feminine is being elevated to a place of equality with the Father. She is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity–Father, Mother, and Christ–and must be returned to her rightful place as the Mother of All.

I am standing on a huge map of the state I was born in. I’m pointing to where the capital is and say, “That’s where I was born.” I walk away and encounter another guy. He looks at me and throws and eclipse at me. It hits me between the eyes.

I awake from the dream feeling perplexed. As I process the dream I realize I’m being told that I wasn’t born in the physical world, but it was a spiritual union that gave birth to me. Not the story of me, but to the essence that is the truth of who I am, the ground of my being. When I researched the eclipse and sixth chakra, I discovered that it was associated with birth.

The cleansing fire of Notre Dame was witnessed by the world. It’s deeper meaning was intuited by the soul, which is why the tears fell for so many of us. The space has been created for a the emergence of a new story of Sophia, the divine feminine. A seed has been planted at the Zero Point in the City of Love. We all are being called to play a part in remembering and resurrecting unconditional love and returning to an awareness of the sanctity of all life.