Hendrik Schaefer
1843
Novelist Lidia Yuknavitch recounted a story from her youth: “Joan of Arc appeared to me in a dream. In the dream, I was standing in my front yard and my house was on fire. She came out of the burning house and said, ‘Nobody is coming to save you.'”
Joan appears to us in our dreams, she can do it.
And that phrase. Well, if anyone knew that phrase, it would be Joan.
May 30th is celebrated as the feast day of Joan of Arc, her sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. The story of how she received this honor is widely known: she was a “proper peasant,” which would mean something like middle class today.
She was born in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War; in one of history’s ironies, the Norman French conquest of England ultimately led to the English occupation of much of France. As a young woman, Joan began to have visions of the Archangel Michael, the martyrs St. Margaret of Antioch, and St. Catherine of Alexandria. Inspired by their words to her, Joan donned armor and rallied her followers to fight against the English occupying forces. After some early victories, there were devastating defeats.
She was captured by the English and, interestingly enough, put on trial for heresy. From our perspective, an interesting twist is that one of the charges against her was that she was cross-dressing. Found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake, she became a folk hero in France. Eventually, the Church decided it was better to care about who was on the inside than what was on the outside, and they made her a saint.
And now, May 30th is the day to remember her.
Who she really was, what she believed, what she had been through – all of that was reduced to ashes in the bonfire.
There’s been a resurgence of sorts. The flesh and blood human has become a symbol. The dream. The person who can actually visit other people in their dreams. And there are a lot of dreams.
I think of Lidia Yuknavitch and her dream: “Joan of Arc came to me in a dream. I dreamed that I was standing in my front yard and my house was on fire. She came out of the burning house and said, ‘No one is coming to save you.'”
Who will save us?
I wonder how we become dreams. All of us. Some by passion, some by tragedy, some by age and love. We are all part body and part dream. A new paradigm may be inevitable. But…
Who will save us? How will the new paradigm come about?
And I think about how, in that world that connects us all, we can and sometimes do visit each other…
And we see the answer to our dreams…
