“Behold thy mother”

Today, God is dying. He is there, hanging on the cross, while his mother burns with love for him, willing herself to suffer his pain.

His body carries wounds from the scourge. His head bleeds from the crown of thorns. His legs and shoulders are weary from carrying the cross to the place of his execution.

He is dying the most humiliating death that the Roman state could inflict upon him. And all of his followers, save his mother, her companion Marys, and his beloved John, have run away.

It is hard not to be angry.

On Monday, it was not just the roof of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris that caught fire. It was the entire tradition of Western Christendom—as all those celebrating the fire on social media knew.

They knew that to see Notre Dame of Paris go up in flames was the religious equivalent of watching the Twin Towers fall.

They knew that to see the church burn was to see the destruction of Christianity as it has developed in the West.

They wanted it to burn—so that it might be replaced with a purer, monotheistic faith in the will of Allah, Woman, and/or the World.

“Avoid using the term civilization, and especially western civilization,” one of my academic colleagues warned her fellow medievalists this week. “Avoid making this about Catholicism and or [sic] Christianity. Also, avoid the French nationalism angle.” Above all, don’t talk about “revival or restoration” or “even resurrecting” the cathedral to its “original medieval” form.

“So, work on counternarratives people [sic],” my colleague concluded.* Translation: Don’t make this a story about Christ.

“Woman,” Jesus told his mother from the cross, “behold thy son,” meaning not himself, but his beloved disciple. “Behold thy mother,” he told John.

Muslims do not see Mary as the Virgin Mother of God. They tell Christians that they revere her, but the Koran emphatically rejects that she gave birth to the Son of God. “Isa” (the Arabic for “Jesus”) may have been a prophet, but “Christ, the son of Mary, was no more than an apostle.” According to the Koran: “They do blaspheme, that say: ‘God is one of three.’”

Feminists do not see motherhood as sacred. They claim to care about women, but they emphatically do not care about children—particularly those in the womb. They see children as impediments to women’s “freedom,” and they shout their abortions as a way of celebrating their liberation from their own wombs.

The globalist Left (however you define it**) cannot bear the existence of the family if it conflicts in any way with the dominance of the State. Leftists talk about the importance of the individual, but only the individual cut off from the authority and care of the family so as to become a slave of the State. This is why the Left is so keen on State-controlled education, not to mention “diversity” as a form of ideological control.

All of the above had reason to celebrate the fire.

All of the above could see it as a sign of punishment for believing in Christ as Lord and in Mary as the Mother of God.

All of the above know nothing about what the crucifixion means.

Ever since the Enlightenment, Europeans have felt embarrassed about their ancestral faith in Christ.

The philosophes made it gauche by claiming it was anti-Reason. Then the Romantics came along and made it all about feelings, while artists madly tried to convince themselves that their own art could replace the divine as an object of worship. Marxists, Darwinists, and Freudians made it “anti-science.” The Nazis, like their white supremacist followers today, saw it as “Semitic” and weak, much better replaced with worship of the Old Gods of conquest and war. Feminists and postmodernists simply followed in their wake, helped along by the anti-Christian ambitions of the State.

And so Christ dies on the cross, almost entirely alone.

Except for his mother. Except for the Marys and John.

Notre Dame the cathedral was built at a time when Christians understood the importance of the cross. That is why the cathedral has the floor plan that it does. As art historian Matthew Milliner pointed out earlier this week:

For the great medieval commentator William Durandus (d. 1296), the Gothic church took the shape of Christ’s body: the chancel the head, the transepts the arms, the altar the heart. And if the Gothic church symbolizes the body of Christ, to see Notre Dame burn this Monday was to experience Good Friday early.

Muslims, feminists, and Leftists may have celebrated the burning of the cathedral of Our Lady, but that is only because they do not have the courage to stand with Mary under the cross.

They do not have the courage to recognize God in the broken and humiliated man to whom Mary gave birth.

They do not have the courage to worship a god who loved his creatures so much as to become incarnate and die for them.

They do not have the courage to acknowledge that it is their pride in their own purity that Christ rebukes from the cross.

They do not have the courage to confront God in his willingness to humiliate himself even unto death on the cross because they, like Satan, think it better to rule on earth than to serve Him in heaven.

“My kingdom,” Jesus told Pilate, “is not of this world.”

Could you not see Satan dancing in the flames?

For further reflections on the worship of Mary and her Son, go here. On the antipathy of many of my academic colleagues to Christianity, go here.

*For my academic colleague’s instructions to her fellow medievalists on how (not) to talk to the media, see my Facebook profile status posted on April 18, 2019, at 8:43 am: “I agree with Addendum 2! Notre Dame in Paris is a CHRISTIAN cathedral, not a synagogue.” This Addendum (since removed from her post) read: “Also avoid ‘Judeo-Christian’ ... seriously... talk about living spaces of use, about the complexities of upkeep, about governments not giving money to make sure things can be maintained, safe, secure, etc. Just do not make your discussion, your piece, your interview into far right cat nip.”

**Better: Globalist Secularists.