Can you just choose a patron saint?

Kat Valentine, Joan of Arc

I'm a Mormon. I don't know how this stuff works. Not that I've ever been much of a stickler for playing Christianity by the rules.

I've been a bit hard on the synchronicity fairies of late, resenting the way they've commandeered my blog for their political rannygazoo. Through it all I've never questioned their basic goodness, though, and now they've more than compensated me for my troubles by introducing me to one of the most perfect human beings that ever lived. All is forgiven.

I've been reading up a bit on Joan, trying to enter her world -- and then she unexpectedly entered mine. Twice today I've felt her presence around me so powerfully that I was reduced to uncontrollable tears (and I'm the kind of person who cries a few times a decade, if that). I believe she has taken an interest in us mortals now, in our darkest hour, and has begun working behind the scenes. God knows we need her.

Mark Twain captures her essence beautifully:

[T]he character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.

When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.

She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. . . . And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned, stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.

A saint for our time, in other words.

So this January 6, Epiphany, when you are celebrating the coming of the Magicians to Jesus Christ -- or, more likely, being distracted by the showdown in Washington -- take a moment to remember Jehanne of Domrémy. Not her death, which is remembered on May 30, but the miracle of her birth -- the birth of a pure soul into a brutal, wicked, rotten world. There is always hope.

By the way, some of my readers have expressed the opinion that my "synchronicity fairies" are God. They are not. They're just people; good people, not exactly human I think, but in the end just people. Once you've experienced the presence of someone genuinely divine, the difference is unmistakable. Fairies are fairies, angels are angels, gods are gods.

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!