Think of Joan at the Stake

I was told not just to read books but to look at “religious lives.”  Receiving an honorary degree from a small Catholic liberal arts college, I spoke about Joan of Arc.  She had the most well-documented life of anyone in history up to her time.  We still have the records from her two trials.  She had been convicted of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen as a result of a trial rigged by her English captors.  Some years after her death, a new trial was held, which exonerated her.  Both trials took evidence from people who had known her since childhood.  In the twentieth century, she was canonized.

“Lord, what can I learn from Joan of Arc?”

Think of Joan on the stake.  What are her feelings?

This is what came to me:  “Glory to God, blessed savior and lord, redeemer, I love God and am happy to sacrifice all for Him; a feeling of joy and triumph over this world, a rapture and sense of rising to heaven, to join God, to be received and welcomed by a chorus of angels; a peace, calm, inner togetherness, centeredness, kindness to mankind, to their suffering, to their burden of sin, smiling also in triumph.  They ‘know not what they do’ to their own souls!  They do not know they are the losers.  They are the ‘fools’ who do not know what’s really going on.  Radiant love sweeping out over the world, embracing the world, as soul-like awareness of the pain of the body and its frailty and vulnerability and impermanence, a deep understanding of the nature of reality, an immersion in the really real, a closing of the old eyes and opening of the new ones, a succumbing, a resignation, a withdrawal.”

 

“They shook your faith.”

One morning I started to ask some trivial question and was interrupted.

You stopped asking about Me because some of the answers disturbed you. They shook your faith.

That was true. When answers upset me, I would start thinking that, surely, this was not the voice of God. “Lord, why is faith like that? Why is Your interaction with us so tenuous and subject to doubt?”

First, it is not. During most times, people have not had trouble believing. Believing in Me or in some gods was—is—the most natural thing in the world.

Second, my “invisibility” has to do with the kind of Being I am. It’s like asking why we can’t see neutrinos. Nobody can see your “mind.” You believe in “other minds” with no greater “evidence.”

God was alluding to the topic of my doctoral dissertation. One of the great philosophical puzzles concerns skepticism with regard to knowledge of other minds. The problem arises from the fact that we do not have direct access to other people’s thoughts and feelings. We only observe their outer behavior. In fact, we do not have any proof that others really have inner thoughts and feelings at all. Yet it is reasonable to believe they do. Is God any more elusive than minds? Well, He certainly seems so.

 

“Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today?”

How God Comes To Different People:

I had been told that culture is a factor in divine revelations.

“Lord, why is culture so important?”

That’s like saying, why language?  If I am going to communicate with people, they need a language.  For the same reason, they need a culture.

“They need a culture, but why such a variety of cultures?”

There are many ways of realizing (actualizing) the human story.  Culture enables lives of different (types of) significance (meaning).

“But why, in terms of Your story?”

I need to come to people in all their particularity, not to mankind-as-such.  The Chinese is one way of being.  The primitive is one way of being.  I come to each in its own terms.  Each enables Me to show a different side of Myself.

Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today? to you?

Learn more about how God comes to different people.