The Cathedral That Rose from Ashes

On April 15, 2019, Parisians stood along the Seine and wept as flames devoured the roof of Notre-Dame. Eight hundred years of prayers seemed to dissolve into smoke. The iconic spire collapsed at 7:50 p.m., and a collective groan rose from the crowd as if the city itself had been wounded. People knelt on cobblestones and sang hymns while embers drifted overhead.

For five years, Notre-Dame sat behind scaffolding — gutted, silent, closed. Tourists pressed against barricades, peering at what felt like an open wound. But inside, unseen by the watching world, craftsmen were at work. Stonemasons carved replacement blocks by hand. Artisans cleaned centuries of soot from stained glass until colors no one alive had ever seen blazed again in the light.

On December 7, 2024, the doors reopened. When sunlight poured through those restored windows for the first time, witnesses described it as though the building itself had turned its face back toward them.

That is the cry of Psalm 80. Israel stands before a God whose face seems hidden, whose presence feels shuttered behind scaffolding. Three times the psalmist pleads the same desperate refrain: "Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved." It is the prayer of every soul who has knelt in the ashes and dared to believe that the light will return — not because we deserve it, but because the Shepherd of Israel neither slumbers nor forgets.