Saint Joan

It's been two and a half weeks since I first started talking about this again, and no, I haven't stopped.

Hey y'all. How's it been? I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I guess I feel like I don't have a ton to say, but I do, I'm just really lazy. Let's see if I can't do something about that.

I have a lot of thoughts to share. I'll try to order them at least a little bit. We'll start with life stuff.

Good news, all six of my short essays have now officially passed on low but passing marks. So it's just my dissertation now. Which is... very very slow work. But I've got something. It's not a dissertation yet but it's something. I've been having a lot of trouble forcing myself to work on it tho. More on that later I guess.

Second, Lent. I've kind of done Lent before once but... I didn't really "do" lent I guess if you know what I mean? Like I nominally gave up something but it wasn't like a prayerful thing. This year is the first time I really want to try this as a spiritual practice. I've chosen to not do anything food related but instead re-structure my mornings, by basically giving up sleeping in. Those of you who've known me for a while will be shocked to hear that this is even an issue for me, as I used to be up at 6:30-7:30 every morning without any problem. But recently I've been allowing myself to just lay in bed for hours after I wake up, and so for Lent I am putting a stop to that, and trying to wake up and get out of bed early. I think it's been good for me so far.

Winter is ending, which is very nice, but it's still not warm enough to really just sit outside for the most part. Still I'm glad to see much more sun. I need to get outside more.

Okay time to stop delaying and talk about the thing that's been holding my mind hostage of late. You may or may not have known that in the last year of my undergrad, I did a church history course that was supposed to cover stuff after the protestant reformation. I somehow convinced my professor that, despite the fact that I was assigned to write on something to do with this reformation, which started in the early 1500s, I could TOTALLY write an essay on the death of a Roman Catholic Saint in 1431, and it would definitely count. And so, I wrote a short research paper on the trial and death of Joan of Arc. If I remember correctly, I wrote the whole thing from scratch in a matter of about 7-10 hours, sitting on my friend Rachel's bed. It wasn't by any means a good essay. I shudder to think what any of the history professors would think of it. But I seem to have made a pattern of these papers - I've written one on the death and trial of Socrates as well. In any case, it first got me interested in Joan and her story. I think I may actually have cried while reading for this essay.

Fast forward a few years. I've moved across an ocean. Last summer I got the chance to visit Paris. By far my favorite part of that three day visit was Notre Dame. I remember seeing the statue there of Joan. I don't think she ever actually set foot in that cathedral, but still. I cried. Not just at the statue of course, at the whole cathedral. On my last day in Paris I also went slightly out of my way on the metro just to see an equestrian statue of Joan I happened to have found on my map of the city. Travelling alone is great because you can do stuff like that.

And fast forward a few months again. About two and a half weeks ago, I got to see the NTLive screening of Saint Joan, a play by George Bernard Shaw. And I just.... fell in love with it. In fact that night I went home and just in case but expecting nothing, checked to see if they were still performing live and if there were any tickets. The Donmar Warehouse is a very small, intimate theatre, so I didn't expect much. They were performing for two more days, giving them three more shows. There was exactly one seat left available. I bought it immediately, and so, two days after I had seen it on the screen, I found myself on the train to London to watch Saint Joan again in person. I even got to shake hands with the actress and one of the actors afterwards. That was just over two weeks ago. Tomorrow there is a theater here in town doing an encore screening, and I am going to go see this play again. A few people have asked me why, so I wanted to write a post giving a few of my thoughts.

This won't be a full account because - oh! How did I fail to mention this in the section on my life? Me and two of my friends, Hannah and Hannah, have started making a podcast together! I've become very interested in and into podcasts recently, and we thought why not? We are interesting funny people who like chatting about interesting and funny things, why not make this a group project? It's been difficult, with us living in three time zones on two continents and having very different work/life schedules. But anyway, I will be giving a much fuller account of my thoughts on Joan via that podcast, eventually. It will take a while. I have a lot of thoughts. But this blog post will be the more personal side.

Joan of Arc has become more than an academic interest to me. My interest in her has been in a way academic - I have four books on Joan checked out from the history faculty library at the moment, have read a full book length biography online, and most of the original records of her trial (translated to English of course). I have put together a ~5000 word biography/timeline/story myself, for the podcast, and it's only going to get longer. Studying Joan's story has started to take over from my real work, which should be to study video games. BUT the reason for this is that Joan is of much more than academic interest to me.

I don' know how to say this in a way which people won't think is weird or perhaps even bad or dangerous. But encountering Joan's story, and doing so at the point at my life that I am at, has had a really significant impact on my spiritual life. It's made me rethink a lot of stuff, including my relationship to the Church, and to God.

First I have to make plain: I don't know how much you know about Joan or her story or what you think she was up to, but I do, unlike most historians, actually believe Joan, that she was a prophet and heard from God. I don't know all the details but I am much readier to trust Joan's word on this than I am to make up excuses for her.

Now let me be clear, I am not a Roman Catholic, nor am I becoming one. I do not mean to revere the Saint in the sense that a Catholic might. But Joan has got me thinking a lot more about the importance of the history of the church - making me want to connect with church tradition, making me think more seriously about "high" church tradition and about the importance of the sacraments. Growing up in the Baptist church, I feel there is a lot of liturgy and stuff I was never taught the meaning of. There is so little history there, and there is such a very rich history of the church to connect to. I'm starting to realize that that is important to me.

Joan has also really changed the way I think about prayer and talking to God. One of the reasons Joan attracts me so much is her pure conviction that God had spoken to her, and instructed her, and made her a promise. And as such, that was that, this isn't a question, it WILL happen. I don't think I had ever before, until very recently, ever prayed with the mindset that I might actually hear back from God. I pray God teach me his promises, and give me a mission, and make it that plain to me. I want that conviction and direction. I pray God commission my life - and actually tell me and promise me what I am to do. Because his instructions seem far far too vague most of the time. This desire has got me reading his word more, as I think the only thing I have heard from him myself so far is that he HAS spoken and given promises, and I need to read them first. So I am doing that, slowly.

I really don't know what it is about Joan that has me so captivated. She is the foundation of the archetype of most of my favorite characters in fiction, I think. And I have fallen in love with fictional characters before, but never with a real person who really lived, whom I will meet in heaven or the new earth.

I am also very interested in how Joan has been portrayed in art - Shaw's play not least of all. It is a very very good play but I do of course have critiques. Any play about such a Christ-centered person written by a non-christian is going to have some shortcomings, and I think mainly one which effects all stories of that description, that that is that while the author is clearly astounded by the character's faith, they place little importance on what that faith is IN, which is, in reality, key. Joan was not made great through her faith in faith, but through her faith in God, a God who spoke to her, and it really does matter who this God is. Another work that I love which Joan heavily influenced falls into the exact same trap. The Dragon Age game series features a fictional religion clearly based on Christianity, but made deistic, so that it is the faith that matters, while the being whom this faith is in is nondescript, faceless, impersonal, as if it doesn't matter WHO God is. But it does. It matters a lot.

I am sure that I have more to say, but I need to get started on my day. I just wanted to share some of these thoughts, to get them out there and out of my head, and maybe to give a little explanation for those wondering at my new obsession. I am drawn to the story of Jehanne d'Arc by something very very deep within me, and I cannot quite explain why or how.

Thanks for reading
Rissa

P.S. Please do look up our podcast! It is entitled The Liberal Aren'ts, and you can find it on iTunes or at theliberalarents.com Thanks!