By Erin Byrne

I never stopped feeling support coming from up there.

–Philippe Villaneuve, Chief Architect, Restoration of Notre Dame

My diaphragm contracts and releases, creating spacious arches as my lungs expand. Oxygen spreads throughout my body and toxins are released into the air of the Seattle night.

I breathe in again. Somewhere in my lungs, traces of my history: a cinder of secondhand 1964 cigarette smoke from my dad's Kool Classic dangling from his mouth as he manned the tiller of our sailboat, a microscopic remnant of a 1970 beach fire my sister and I huddled around roasting marshmallows as sweet burntness rose in the air, and the tiniest possible particle of the lead of the incinerated spire of Notre Dame cathedral as my friends and I stood watching her burn in 2019.

This lead wafted its way into my chest and forever linked me to Our Lady, who has been ravaged and exalted through the centuries. After the fire, Monsignor Patrick Chauvet said that Notre Dame was in pain. She is alive for the French, as she has endured for much of their long history. Her pain is their pain.

After the fire, her roof had caved in, and what was left of it was a tangle of twisted brambles: iron melted into daggers and jagged stalks of incinerated timber. Her exterior was trapped within iron scaffolding (there for repairs) that had melded into heavy knots. It was uncertain whether she would survive.

No singular person knew how she could be restored. It seemed impossible: In the remnants of her decimated rafters, ashen arms of broken beams reached out to contorted metal skeletons, and to remove one small stick might have brought it all crashing down. Her floor was covered in crushed stone and blackened wood. Statues were singed, their marble blemished with dark markings. She was helpless, and could not heal herself.

A team of specialists was assembled. Philippe Villaneuve, Chief Architect for Historic Monuments, would oversee her conservation. With sparse silver hair, a confident stance, and direct gaze, he was tormented after the fire, "as destroyed as the cathedral was," he said, as he set about restoring what he called "the heart of France."

An international effort began to assemble the highest quality artisans, carpenters, stone masons and metal workers; experts in organs, mosaics, frescoes, and bells. Techniques and materials of the original construction of more than 850 years ago would be used.

It took two years just to secure her structure. Every part of her had to be examined: her spire and towers, façade, buttresses, and high altar. The enormous Rose Windows and other stained glass had to be meticulously checked, every stone, each column and vault.

One architect said it was like open heart surgery. Lead and toxic dust was removed by workers in hazmat suits and full face masks, art and glass gingerly carried out. Nets were tossed across vast spaces to catch pieces of the beams and curled metal. Any move could have triggered a chain reaction, causing her demise.

Now, I feel as threatened as she was, because my country is burning from within. Our system is being razed to the ground in order for its leader to enforce blind submission to authority and concentrate power at the top. He's joining the ranks of dictators—Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Xi Xingping, and others—betraying our closest allies.

As an American, I am ill-equipped to grasp this current inferno. In our 250-year history, it's our first experience with a leader who aims to be an all-out authoritarian. In some ways I have the mindset of two-and-a-half-year-old who cannot face reality.

I am shocked at the trampling of the rights of immigrants, special needs children, government workers who spent lifetimes acquiring expertise, and so many others. My own liberties are at risk too, but I am naïve: Those who have, over decades, been marginalized many more times than I have say, as I heard a Black South Carolina congressman sigh yesterday, "Here we go again."

Some of us want to stop this. We post Ukrainian flags as personal disclaimers, which does not save any of the people killed by Russian strikes as the U.S. yanks away, then resumes, military aid and intelligence reports. We hope that we can, by marching in streets, stop a crazed billionaire from knee-capping our service agencies and shredding our social safety nets. We insist that the chief of our Health Department communicate facts that will save lives even as he spouts conspiracy theories. The legislature, meant to check the executive, has ceded its role, and the power of the courts depends upon a leader who heeds the law.

I boil with a rage that was sparked nearly a decade ago when I began writing a novel which I've recently completed. It's the first in a series of books about occupied Paris, and I spent eight years in the lived-in dimension of its setting, which includes Germany in the 1920s and '30s. In my writing room, I mentally existed in a realm where Nazis tore down the existing order and replaced it with the fear and violence of fascism. At the end of the workday, I stepped into a world where the outgoing President instigated an insurrection and got away with it. Many seemed mesmerized by this man who praised Hitler and threatened retribution and costly tariffs.

By summer of 2024, he was again a candidate whose inhumane plans were articulated endlessly in interviews and speeches in which he used Nazi-inspired language. His followers began to wave signs that said "Mass Deportations Now," clamoring for a regime clearly advertised as authoritarianism. The threshold between my writing life and reality blurred and finally vanished, leaving me disturbed and frightened on the eve of the election.

Now, after only a few months, this leader has flown through most of what half of us considered threats, the other half promises. He's currently ticking off the "Destroy Justice System" box, prompting a Supreme Court Justice to say, "History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation's system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise."

As I begin the second book in the series, which is about Jewish children being hidden in occupied Paris, hunted by those intent on deporting them to Auschwitz, or Dachau or Buchenwald, here in my own country, the President has dismantled policies that prevented deportation agents from entering schools and churches, and they are doing so. For public relations, the administration posts videos of shackled immigrants boarding military planes. This feels as upside down as that Bible this man held the day he asked the country's top military official to "just shoot" peaceful protestors.

Some of us need rejuvenation on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

I know where to look for it. Our Lady of Paris, my goddess of rebirth, will show the way.

To rebuild Notre Dame as she once was, workers and experts first had to study her original construction, to go back to the ideas that first formed her. They put their hands on wood, frescoes, and mosaics to feel their authentic character, and set about cleansing statues and paintings with cotton swabs, extracting her 21 bronze bells and 800 pipe organs. They climbed and dangled, straining to reach hidden corners to take out the bent iron, the crumbling beams.

Notre Dame has been fêted many times, but throughout her history her sacred self has also been violated by the powerful.

In 1794 the common people had rebelled after years of oppression and hunger. The King himself had gone to the guillotine, and it was time for Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité to take a bow. But Maximilien Robespierre grabbed the reins of power, and The Terror began. He had dulled the consciences of his followers with a potent combination of alarm and hatred, and they no longer distinguished between good and evil. Their thirst for revenge needed such quenching that in one month alone, 1,366 were executed. Vengeance escalated until there were so many guillotined that blood contaminated the drinking water.

The Incorruptible's vicious mob mutilated Notre Dame's statues of medieval saints, as Robespierre's atheism made her a target, and she was also used as a wine warehouse. Then, in a bizarre reversal, the leader created The Cult of the Supreme Being. He used a common tool of tyrants throughout time, renaming the cathedral The Temple of Reason.

I've always wondered if people still secretly referred to her as Notre Dame.

The next thing Our Lady knew, she was hosting Napoleon's coronation in 1804. He imposed his masculine will upon her appearance, hiding her façade with a cardboard Gothic exterior, whitewashing her interior walls to his taste, and covering her windows with draperies. He had browbeaten the elderly Pope into coming, and in a startling display of hubris, grabbed the crown from him and crowned himself, and next, Josephine. The Napoleonic wars caused desperate petitioners to file through Our Lady's aisles to entreat on behalf of husbands and sons killed on battlefields.

In 1844, Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame turned the cathedral into a national icon, and Viollet-le-Duc gave her a twenty-five year long makeover.

Soon after, Haussmann's redesigned architecture sprang up. Flâneurs strolled the boulevards, new paintings captured fleeting light. This was The Beautiful Age, The Belle Epoque, when many people prospered. The white glass of Notre Dame's windows was replaced with stained glass, and her façade cleaned, so that the natural ivory tones of her stone shone through.

But the wheel of fortune descended during World War 1, and after rising briefly, scraped bottom again when the Nazis invaded Paris. Against all odds, Our Lady survived, and through good times and bad, her doors remained opened.

Today, I'm often tempted to lock mine, watch reruns of The West Wing, and shield myself from the here and now. My values are violated repeatedly throughout the day, with the executive flagrantly going after judges who protect all of us, and conducting foreign policy carelessly, endangering the country. US aid to those fleeing violence and famine in places like Darfur is gutted.

And it's personal. My sister died in 2006, and a dear friend just two weeks ago, and cancer research that was saving lives like theirs has been halted. Studies for diabetes and dementia are slashed: My elderly mother struggles to form thoughts, a sweet young relative wrestles with diabetes. I have a congenital heart defect and my care is through a university system, which is under siege.

Family and friends initially from other countries are too many to count, and the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal is slowly being erased. Just this weekend, three children who were American citizens were deported without process.

No one I know is unharmed, many more so than I.

When night falls, I'm tormented by images of schoolchildren dizzy from hunger because their school no longer serves them lunch, patients turned away from lifesaving treatment, immigrants torn from their homes. They shuffle around inside of me along with dear friends in Denmark and my family in Canada, the recipients of actual threats of war over Greenland and the proposed 51st state.

Inside of me, worries and fears scatter like burnt debris. The walls darken.

I am a lapsed Catholic, one who is spiritual but not religious. I eschew thoughts and prayers tossed around ostentatiously, and prayer-hands emojis accompanied by flexed muscles and fists seem to me far removed from any kind of communication with the divine. Increasingly, people's actions oppose the very things they claim to pray for, as with a senator in the pocket of the NRA voicing concern for victims of school shootings, supporters of this current administration on their knees about the price of eggs, and those cheering the golden chainsaw hacking other people's careers begging not to lose their own.

The newly appointed leader of the U.S. Faith Office sells a "supernatural blessing package," and the Chief Executive hawks his signature edition of The Holy Bible—each for only $1000.

These ethics have no connection with mine. The philosophy that most resonates with me is Celtic spirituality as described by an Irish ex-communicated now-deceased priest, John O'Donohue in his book, Anam Ċara.

O'Donohue urges us to let the soul find and care for us in the candlelight of its glow. When that happens, he says, nothing destructive can touch us.

He goes further in specifying that the body is in the soul, instead of the other way around, as we have been used to thinking of it. Perhaps our souls themselves are cathedrals (in various states of ruin or renewal) with our bodies and spirits inside of them.

My own such cathedral emulates Our Lady of Paris.

By 2023, action to bring her back was in full force. Pipe by pipe, her organ was replaced. Fleck by fleck, grime adhered to her glass was wiped away to let illumination in from above. In her ceiling, new beams were hoisted.

Fire detection and suppression systems were installed, as well as thermal cameras, smoke detectors, and water-misting systems. After being utterly destroyed, she would be stronger than before.

During this time, Philippe Villaneuve slowly started to see the silhouette of Our Lady, and to feel rebuilt himself. "A wound closed," he said in an interview, rolling up his sleeve to display a tattoo of the cathedral's spire on his forearm while confiding that he also has a rosary tattooed on his chest.

When they were finished, the debutante of December 8 gleamed. The blue and white pattern on her marble floor reflected like a mirror. The stone of her walls, rid of the ravages of time as well as fire residue, shone. Her stained glass windows shimmered in sky blues, bold reds, pale greens. Radiant organ pipes lined up symmetrically with an immense Rose Window behind them. Her arches stretched in dignified majesty to the newly reinforced ceiling beams to create a feeling of expansion, resonating every note sung, each word spoken. She was whole again.

Before her unveiling, Emmanuel Macron had said Notre Dame was a kind of metaphor "for what our societies and especially our democracies need. To make possible the unthinkable."

Now, as throughout her many lives, as is the nature of a cathedral, she welcomes all without reservation—to gather in community, celebrate lives and deaths, light candles and kneel. People venture in, carrying with them their cares and heartaches, their illnesses and fears, their triumphs and their griefs, all of it swirling in the sparkling air of her nave, wafting into her apse, past her kaleidoscoping Rose Windows, into her wooden rafters and up to the heavens.

This night as the Seattle sky dims to dusk, I envision, inside the sanctuary that is my soul, innocent victims who crowd in along with people I love who abhor this, their angst mingling with mine.

In this imagined dimension, I hear my own footsteps tapping the marble floor, raise my eyes to the clerestory, and do something I haven't done in years. I lift it all up—those suffering from each cruel act, this country and its inexperience, the entire roiling state of my being. I think that means I pray.

There are as many different ways to pray as there are people in the world. Some are awakened by the intonations of muezzins echoing though a tinny loudspeaker, others practice meditation and mindfulness in the mode of the Buddha, and there are those who genuflect, crossing themselves. People pray in mosques, on mountaintops, in homes and synagogues and Shinto or Hindu temples, around stupas and food-laden tables. We pray over the sick and dying, during births and deaths, in moments of shock or contentment. But prayer must be accompanied by something else.

Anam Ċara, my own bible, dog-eared, underlined, and asterisked, repeatedly urges compassion and says that when we act, the invisible within us finds a form and comes to expression.

This inspires me to write to my congressman and to protest, to form coalitions and to donate time and money to groups that assist the helpless and protect the weak. To object to the government assuming what has been referred to as "God-like powers" over the Social Security recipients to declare specific people dead, thus robbing them of benefits.

In this moment, our actions reveal who we are. Do we cheer at the sight of immigrants in chains whom, without due process remain unproven to be illegal, criminal, or anything else, or do we demand liberty and justice for all, not merely some?

And if we pray with our actions, what do our involvements, our donations, and our vote mean? Nearly half the people in this country prayed/voted for this current well-advertised, pre-planned scenario, the other half prayed/voted for the opposite. This has happened throughout history in many places on earth. One half prays on behalf of the current policies, the other prays for them to cease. Do our conflicting prayers joust each other on the way up?

Of all the things I'd rather not bring up, prayer is at the top of the list. To write of it seems a conceit. I've always thought of it as something one does while dancing on the sand at the edge of the Mediterranean, or meandering alone in the ethereal Sahara, or gazing out over a wheat field in Idaho—not in a religious building. I wonder if I've burned a bridge I now need to cross, because I've become inexperienced in this world of prayer rugs and prayer shawls and rosaries, of bronze Buddhas and icons and statues.

But at the end of a day during which events have left me feeling wrecked and tarnished, when I need to conjure the energy to resist, I think of Notre Dame in all her soaring, pristine glory, and houses of worship for other religions. I imagine voices raised in song—ululations and chanting, weeping for joy or sorrow, choirs singing and bells ringing and soothing silence—and feel a dawning awareness of my own hopes and those of others, the longings and desires of humanity swirling together and rising in the dust-moted light of love.

O'Donohue specifies that love is the nature of the soul. Each of us defines love in our own way. To me, it means inclusion, equality, peace, diversity, reducing poverty, providing sanctuary to those escaping oppression … but others think of it as taking those things away. They follow a leader who I've only heard mention love on two occasions. One was on January 6, 2021, when he asked vicious marauders to go home at the end of a long day of beating police officers, terrorizing congresspeople, and chasing down the Vice President so they could hang him.

"We love you," he said. "You're very special."

And again, during his campaign when he promised to pardon them, he said that they'd had "love in their hearts" on that day, which he called beautiful. And many of those rioters, along with their Camp Auschwitz logos, wore shirts and carried signs brandishing crosses and religious symbols.

As well as planning to pardon them, the candidate specified that he'd deport millions of people, keep billionaires wealthy, and punish his personal enemies with violent retribution. It wasn't as if the people who prayed with their vote did not know that their action would bring images like the ones of the Secretary of Homeland Security posing in front of shirtless men in cages with shaved heads, three to a bunk, criminals and innocents alike deported, admittedly, either "by accident" or because of tattoos (autism ribbons, hummingbirds, a clock, none of which are gang symbols). It can't be a surprise to them that our President is reaping millions through crypto currency or building new towers bearing his name in places like Saudi Arabia. Undignified remarks by the executive when asked about his actions ( "Who the hell cares?") don't seem to disturb these people.

In this new nationalism in America, where the one vowing to prevent harm from dangerous criminals is a convicted felon himself, there is a even a push to eradicate empathy, an emotion declared "civilizational suicide" by those at the top. The rest of the world sees this. Democracies recoil.

We have landed in a place far from the ideas that formed us. We've veered off before, in times of deportations, internment camps, and segregation, but now we are a country of opposing prayers and divergent definitions of love, clashing with each other and feeling anything but united. There is no nexus between us, and we view each other across a widening chasm. To see people I know so far away on the other side is agonizing.

At night, when all is still, I'm visited by images of a six-month-old gripped by measles, a single mother who can no longer afford childcare, and my dear friend with Parkinson's losing the strength he might gain from ongoing research. From the floor of my gut to the rafters of my ribs, I'm engulfed by scorching anxiety.

When there is great pain in your life, my ex-communicated departed priest says, you need sanctuary in the shelter of your own soul.

He tells me that on my outward breath I can envision exhaling an inner charcoal residue. So, in my soul darkened by evil events let loose upon a weary world, I follow his guidance and breathe out the pain of people known and unknown. I breathe in and light infuses them all inside of me, whitening stone walls, clearing dust and ash off of colorful windows, transforming burnt and twisted detritus into reinforced strength that will survive future disasters.

Notre Dame knows. She whispers to me across the centuries and miles that when you are incinerated from the outside in, and nothing remains but scattered rubble, defaced artwork, and statues that weep gray lines of soot, that each of us can act, maybe even collectively, to make possible the unthinkable. We can receive the power and possibility to wipe away the ashes, put together that which has been shattered, act with love and, like Our Lady of Renewal, once again gleam.