“The time cometh,” he had warned earlier, “that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2). He wasn't talking about Nero and Diocletian; he didn't say "their gods," but "God." As Lord Byron put it in one of his clever rhymes,
Christians have burnt each other, quite persuadedThat all the Apostles would have done as they did.
Five hundred and ninety-one years ago today, a band of Christians, thinking they did God a service, took a young Christian girl, a true servant of Jesus Christ and confidante of the angels, and bound her fast to a stake. They heaped dry wood around her, set it on fire, and stood around watching as she died of smoke inhalation and her body burned.
It was, according to Tacitus, a form of execution pioneered by Nero himself when he lit "Christian candlesticks" in retaliation for the Great Fire of Rome. Centuries later, the same church that had burned her made her a saint.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, "If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets" (Matt. 23:29-30).
We may wonder if we would have had the courage of Joan if we had been in her position. We might also ask if we would have been any better than those who killed her and consented to her death. They were Christians, after all, following their church leaders.
Some of Joan's own words have come down to us, preserved in the official record of her trial. To those who would dissuade her from giving her life for her "heretical" beliefs, she is reported to have replied,
Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Some believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives for that little or nothing. One life is all we have. We live it as we believe in living it, and it is gone.
This Saint Joan's Day, instead of building the tombs of the prophets and garnishing the sepulchres of the righteous, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what, day by day and hour by hour, you are giving your life for -- not the beliefs you verbally profess, but the true beliefs you reveal in the way you live your life. Answer the question as honestly as you can -- and then repent.
My sins were ghastly, but the InfiniteGoodness has arms so wide that It acceptswho ever would return, imploring It.. . .Despite the Church’s curse, there is no oneso lost that the eternal love cannotreturn — as long as hope shows something green.
— Purgatorio iii. 121-23, 133-35
6 comments:
Good post. I had not read that quote from Joan before; it's a good one.
I am not sure yet, despite being on the brink a few times.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NnYrAXaMHPA
Life is all about inversion lately, including a million reasons 'not to die'.
Given the uncertainty that attends to traditional, received understandings of monumental historical events--whether Christ's rumored virgin birth, say, or Joan's alleged martyrdom and sainthood--coupled with the fallen state of Christian churches in the present age, one can't help but wonder what confusions might arise in future.
Might it be possible, for instance, that some five-hundred and ninety-one years or so hence, Osama bin Laden will have been canonized a saint by some church or other--perhaps even the Roman church--along with a correspondent narrative that he was unjustly persecuted by Christians falsely-so-called?
Might a blogger (or his nearest equivalent) in the year 2613 have a sensitive experience of the presence of the spirit of "Saint Osama" and remind his readers not to re-commit the sins of their forebears in persecuting the just?
Or is such a scenario simply out of the question?
I’m sure Osama is already considered a “saint” by some, though the possibility that his Muslim-ness might one day be forgotten and he might be made a *Christian* saint certainly seems a remote one.
In a general sense, though, what you suggest is certainly possible. Mona Rudao, whose chief claim to fame is orchestrating a massacre at an elementary school, is considered a hero in Taiwan, and his face is on money. There are people, known to me personally, who still revere Charles Manson as a second Jesus Christ. George Floyd died just two years ago, and yet his elevation to sainthood is nearly complete.
It all comes down to personal discernment. I am extremely confident in my judgment that the person I have encountered is a good and holy one, and is who she presents herself as, but I don’t expect anyone else, least of all strangers, to take my word for it.
Allow me to approach this from a completely different vector.
It seems that the spirit of Saint Joan is doing rather well for herself. She would appear to be happily flitting about the universe, touching people's lives and even blessing them.
So why fret about her execution some six-hundred years ago? It looks like she was released into a positive existence. Where's the harm?
Now if she had died and simply been annihilated--consigned to cosmic oblivion--then her death might be invested with the sort of tragic significance that your piece intones. But by your own account, she's living a fully realized life.
@Wade
An even clearer example of the point you are making would be Jesus himself. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” loses a lot of its power when you realize that the man who said it knew in advance that he was only going to be “dead” for a weekend and that in fact death was his ticket to a higher form of life.
There is room for tragedy in the Christian worldview (damnation is often tragic in the classical sense), but it is extremely hard to justify our natural feeling that a martyr’s death is tragic, or that the murder of an innocent person is a particularly grave sin.
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