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One of my students (in real life), a Taiwanese schoolchild, happens to have a name that sounds like "the war is won" in another language. I never noticed that before, but in the dream I did. She arrived at my school, and I showed her upstairs to her classroom -- only it wasn't a classroom; it was my study at home, the same study that was so recently hallowed by the presence of Joan the Maid.
The room was cold (it's been an unusually cold winter here by Taiwanese standards), and I asked if she wanted me to turn on the space heater. She did, and I did so. Then the student sort of disappeared from the dream as my focus turned to the heater itself. I was touched by its simple, selfless act of radiating heat into a cold room, and so I spoke the secret name of the soul animating that heater, and she appeared in human form -- as a calm, dark-haired European woman sitting at my desk. I kissed her (chastely!), this personification of my space heater, and she murmured something in French.
Was it she that murmured it? At any rate, I floated up into the waking world with an indistinct French phrase in my mind. At first I thought it might be objet d'art, but it soon resolved itself into something more intriguing: épée d'Arc.
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The crowned sword (l'épée couronnée) as the sign of Joan of Arc has already been discussed on this blog. So has the homophony of dark/d'Arc. And as someone who used to do a bit of fencing, I know there is but scant difference between an épée and a sabre. Thus it was that I suddenly remembered this Babylon Bee story from a few weeks back:
I have to take back some of what I just said about Google. When you search for trump darksaber babylon bee, the story comes right up as the first hit. But I used DuckDuckGo, which just couldn't find it at all! I ended up having to scroll through the Bee's "latest news" page until I found it -- but first I found this:
There's that word dark again, and illustrated with a picture of a young woman holding a sword. Number 7 on the list is the day The Last Jedi hit theatres, and the woman must be a character from that movie. And number one?
That day some rando Trump supporters ran around the Capitol for a few hours - We're honestly not sure if this was actually the darkest day or not, but we might get canceled if we don't put it at the top and Mark Zuckerberg is watching. Long live Zuck!
I looked up the Last Jedi lady. I had thought her name might by Kylo Ren, but it turns out that's a dude. She is called simply Rey.
Back on January 7, S. K. Orr left this comment on one of my Joan of Arc posts.
My wife and I were listening to the reports of the donnybrook taking place at the US Capitol in the wake of the electoral college mess. We watched some of the footage of this extraordinary event, and then my wife said, "Why don't we watch or listen to something peaceful?" I agreed, and she decided to continue watching a DVD she had been watching last night.The DVD was "The Sound of Music," and the scene that started when she resumed the DVD was the famous "Do Re Mi" scene. I picked up my laptop and started noodling around. I decided to read some more about St. Joan of Arc. When I went to a biographical site, I saw the name of the town where the Maid was born.The town is called Domremey.I plugged this word into a program that audibly pronounces foreign words. This town, spoken aloud in French, sounds EXACTLY like "Do Re Mi."
In my reply, I linked to my post "The white doe," noting that I had already connected Joan of Arc to "doe, a deer, a female deer."
Well, what comes next in the song? Just what we need in our darkest hour: Rey, a drop of golden sun.
Maid of Heaven, pray for us!
6 comments:
In the morning, I was browsing Vox Popoli, and one of the commenters had written “Viva Christo Rey” — meaning “Long live Christ the King.” The misspelling of Cristo makes it unlikely that this person is fluent in Spanish, so the choice of that language, in which Rey means “king,” was a serendipitous one.
After posting this, I went back to sleep and had another dream about one of my students, a teenager I taught long ago. She was doing some English homework in which she had to fill in a blank in a sentence with an appropriate word. She had written "monkey" in the blank, and I was trying to explain to her why that didn't make any sense and why the correct word was "set."
(Possible interpretation: Not monkey, set. Not buffoonery, the Egyptian god of evil.)
Upon waking, I remembered how the student's name ("the war is won") had seemed significant in my first dream, so I tried to remember the name of the student in the second dream -- but I just couldn't. I could see her face clearly, and I could remember her mother's name and her brother's, but her own name just wouldn't come back to me.
Hours later, I finally remembered it: Dawn. You know, the moment which the darkest hour proverbially comes just before. Also, in many American dialects, a homophone of Don.
The recounting of your experience with Joan of Arc and the subsequent dream is very beautiful and inspiring.
I was in prayer the morning of January 6—prior to the sad news of what transpired at the Capitol—and I'm pretty sure I heard the Lord say to me, "WAIT." I heard "WAIT" several times in my spirit, and then it kind of flowed into Isaiah 40:31, as I felt my spirit strengthened. It's hard to describe. At the time I interpreted it as waiting on the Lord being a source of strength, but maybe the Lord was actually giving me a heads up that things were going to get crazy and that I needed to wait. I am not the sort of person that claims to regularly have these sorts of experiences. They are extraordinary for me.
Also: you are a strange Mormon/Christian, but I can dig it. :-)
I know you don't like anonymous comments. My name is Drew.
Thanks for the comment, Drew. "WAIT" is what I currently feel the need to do as well. I don't know if that means something is about to happen, or if I just need to disengage for a bit and "build soil."
By the way, I have another regular commenter here who goes by "Mr. Andrew," so you might want to post as "Drew" to avoid confusion.
It occurred to me last night—and I'm sure you're aware of this already, but I haven't seen you explicitly mention it in your writing—that Joan of Arc saved France from a false (or disputed) claimant to the French throne. Indeed, the English king Henry V and his heir Henry VI (in his minority) possessed the French throne for nine years after the treaty of Troyes in 1420.
The connections to our present difficulties, our disputed "throne," are even more pronounced.
Forgive me if this is obvious to everyone. It wasn't immediately obvious to me.
Yes, I was aware of that, and it was one of my reasons for thinking the Maid’s involvement in our world would take a political form — which so far it has not observably done.
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