Working on a paper on Heidegger’s Being and Time, I take a break and pop over to the news and see an article about Parisians singing Ave Maria in grief as Our Lady of Paris burns. Nothing to do, but I have to Google “Ave Maria” and listen to a rendition on YouTube.
I’ve never been to Notre Dame or even Paris. I’m not Catholic. Hell, I’m not even Christian. But I’m human, and I’m crying my heart out, uncontrollably, for reasons I don’t quite understand myself.
It’s as though the conflagration opens up a space, an expansive nave in the great Cathedral of humanity; The great Buddha hall, the great Mosque, the great Forest of humanity. Heidegger would say, a clearing in which we disclose ourselves to ourselves. A space, this time, of grief, as before the surviving Pieta at the Notre Dame alter where Our Lady grieves over her executed son.
Can you feel a mother’s blinding grief over the death of a beloved child? The conflagration is her grieving over her son, our Lord; over humanity, ourselves.
A Buddhist living a Buddhist country, I would not have known if not for news surrounding the conflagration, that this is Holy Week, the re-enactment of our Lord’s, Our, execution and resurrection. Mary weeps, rent by grief, flaming grief. Yet there is implicit hope of resurrection.
Our very grief, the sanctuary of our grief, as at other times of joy, is the proof of our humanity, that we are not crushed (by Trump, by Duterte, by the parody that we cannot help but dance of ourselves), that we may, that we will, rise and press forward in the quest that is our humanity.