A sacred temple, a house of worship, a sight of brutal witch burnings and massacres. Seeing the flames engulf this globally recognized monument was surreal but it felt divine to me. I felt a great rush of liberation and many oppressed energies leaving the earth from the portal that exists at that apex where there is such immense history. of death and resurrection.

I felt a torch being ignited. I heard these words from Spirit:

“The wood must burn for the Light to pour forth from the torch.”

What does this sacred site represent in our modern-day consciousness? What has it meant throughout history? We are witnessing a great transformation take place during the Catholic Holy Week of Resurrection and Easter.  It is a time when the Christian faith celebrates resurrection and rebirth. This massive monument going up in flames at such a symbolic time of year is like a torch that can represent the resurrection of our own consciousness. We are coming out of the darkness of what religion has meant in it’s looming shadows of separation and oppression into the illumination of Love and Oneness.

Many years ago, Notre Dame gave me a powerful message of self-love that changed my life. It was a dark lonely night, I was looking up at the full moon positioned right directly in between the two towers. It was a raw vulnerable moment in my life where I had traveled to Europe with a friend who was really suffering through a divorce and a broken heart. She had become very bitter during this trip and I kept trying to help her gently and compassionately deal with her loss and grief. She turned her anger and resentment towards me and was projecting all of her pain. After days of accepting it in an effort to help her heal, I broke away for a little night time stroll to clear my energy field.

I walked onto the cathedral courtyard and looked up at the full moon, closed my eyes and started to cry for all the pain I felt in my friend, in my own life and in all those who had stood in this spot before. The witch burnings, the massacres, the betrayals, the corruption and greed of the establishment, it had all taken place here. I could feel it in a eerie haunting way, the immense darkness that was shrouded by an elaborate architectural display of grandeur, the stained glass covering the blood stains. I wept with closed eyes feeling the grief flowing up from the earth, from the ley lines that converge here, from the history, and from the present moment and all the suffering that exists in our modern day human consciousness. 

After a long while and a really good cry, the energy subsided and I opened my eyes to find someone had placed a big bouquet of red roses in front of me on the ground. I took the petals off of all of the roses and made a big heart out of them right at ground zero point where I was standing. I stood inside the rose petal heart and held an intention to send the healing energy of the rose into the earth. The Sacred Sisterhood of the Rose and the Spirit of Mother Mary, Magdalena and Isis joined me sending love into the Cathedral and rippling it out through the grid ley-lines to all those who were suffering. I felt waves and waves of healing energy passing through me as I stood surrounded by the rose petals. Then I heard Spirit say very clearly to me….

“Like this Cathedral, you are a sacred Temple, honor yourself.”

“Never be in service to another person to the degree that you allow them to abuse you.” 

I wept again. Waves of relief passed through me. I was trying so hard to help my grieving friend, I was accepting all her projections of pain, her abusive energy toward me, her lashing out because she was suffering. I thought I was doing the right thing, having compassion, understanding, and being kind. Then Spirit said. …

”What about compassion, understanding and kindness for yourself?”

Oh the tears really flowed, I had never thought of it this way. I just wanted to help. I want to live my life in service, helping people. I had not ever thought of having compassion for myself until this moment. Then I realized I had been putting myself aside to help someone else who was suffering. This was causing me sufferrring and I was actually contributing to the suffering in the world.

The most loving thing that I could do is love myself and not allow anyone to abuse me. Then I would be demonstrating and creating love for the collective. The ripple effects of this experience took me deep into all the times in my life where I had put myself aside. As I stood in the rose petal heart that I had made on the earth, I experienced eruptions of memories and grieved deeply at how I had denied myself love and compassion in such an effort to give it to everyone else. 

At this moment a man with a quitar in the courtyard began playing “Hallalujah” a very personal sacred song for me. The lyrics began cascading through my consciousness along with with the waves of healing energy…

”Ive seen your flag on the marble arch and love is not a victory march, it is a cold and it is a broken Hallalujah”

My heart burst open for humanity and how we have fought and hurt each other through the belief that we are separate. We have all known that cold and broken place inside, that place where we were taken to our knees in defeat. That feeling that my friend was feeling, that the witches and the pagans must have felt, that the Knights Templar and that the ancient Egyptians before them felt. And, on some level, what Catholics of today are feeling. Defeat. I imagined the many broken-hearted lovers and cast-out sinners that must have felt it standing in this courtyard before me.

“Remember when I moved in you and the Holy dove was moving too and every breath we drew was Hallalujah”

As the song continued, I felt grace wash over me, the Holy Spirit and the remembrace of Oneness emerged and comforted me. Then this knowing arose that it is the “broken hallalujah” that liberates us from the illusion. It is the surrender to the pain that allows the wound to be addressed, that accepts defeat fully and embraces the vulnerability to be healed. It is that surrendered willingness to let go and focus inward that bestows the grace of transformation. The outward projections of pain have caused so much more suffering, judgement and separation. We can stop blaming, shaming, and judging and ask for sweet surrender and liberation that says “Hallalujah, I too can be resurected from this illusion of separation.”

As the song finished I felt myself washed clean by Grace.

Hallalujah.

I knew I could not finish the trip, this was going to be a big shift in my consciousness. I had a deep knowing inside that I needed to go and focus in quiet solitude and stillness to let myself fully experience this great gift of The Notre Dame Cathedral. I knew that my friend was not ready to surrender and face her pain, she would want to keep fighting, denying and projecting it. I had to give her that space to sit in her transformation fires alone until she was ready to stop batling and give in to her own resurrection.

I left Europe the next morning on a flight home by myself. I canceled the next three weeks of my European trip and went back to a sacred place in Asheville, NC where I could focus deeply on my own healing process. For those next three weeks, I took a solitude retreat for Oneness. I focused on Self-Love. I refined my perspective on what it means to be in service. I healed and forgave myself in ways that allow me to demonstrate Self-love to others who have not embraced it yet in their lives. I forgave my friend and had a new degree of compassion for her, compassion without co-dependency or martyrdom in it.

The message of the Cathedral continued to ripple through me peeling away the layers until I found my center and entered the sacred temple of self-love inside myself. I was illuminated. I was free.

To this day, I have no regrets that I left Europe early. It changed my life in immense ways to make that decision and to follow through on what was best for me. Now a days, when I am feeling that I am giving too much, when I let my desire to help or to be in service take me into unhealthy circumstance, I remember Notre Dame Cathedral. It looms in my memory as a beacon of remembrace of my own resurrection out of the darkness into the light.

I am sure it is no mistake that it is burning at this time of the Holy Week of Ressurection. The flames can hopefully wash clean the blood stains. With the rebuild, we have the opportunity for a fresh start, to purify that which looms as an oppressing force and ressurect it as a sacred temple again. Regardless of what the church organization decides to do in it’s own rebirth and resurrection, the burning torch or Notre Dame can represent to all of us our own liberation and personal transformation.

For me, Notre Dame freed my own oppression and showed me that

I Am the Temple.

As it burns, I rejoice that fires of transformation are a torch of resurrection for all of us. We are all the same. We are the same in our pain. We are the same in our glory. It is the same story, that “marbled arched victory march” that resides in all of us. We are the enduring Christ Lights, the heroic Knights, the enchanted witches, the earth-loving pagans and the mystical ancient ones who have been betrayed and burned at the stake, crucified, by the church and by life. Through accepting this, we are beginning to recognize our Oneness and that in order to evolve out of separation, the torch that WE must bear among US is….Love.

As Notre-Dame taught me, it begins within each of us. We have to ignite our own torchlight and shine it upon our world. May we all be freed to love self, to honor self, to have compassion for self, and then to share these things with humanity. May we ignite the light of Self Love and illuminate the temple within again. May we all bear this burning torch of transformation with a proclamation that we are One. We are Love.

Thank you, Notre-Dame, for showing me the way to my Sacred Temple and the torch that I am to carry, a torch of Oneness and Love.