On the Feast of Saint Joan of Arc

Yesterday was stifling hot, so Rose and I went to the beach– the sandy shore of the muddy lake at Raccoon Creek.

It was also the feast of Saint Joan of Arc, one of my favorites.

I love the saints who are signs of contradiction best. I love explaining to my tenacious, feisty tomboy daughter that there is a saint who was excommunicated and murdered by people who thought they were glorifying God for doing so, and now she’s the patron saint of France.

I always wanted to be a saint.

This is one of those things that I insist on. I think everyone is supposed to be a saint. When I hear Catholics joke “oh I’ll never be a saint” or “I’ll be turning the lights out in Purgatory,” it makes me angry. You’re not supposed to think that way. You’re supposed to want to be a saint. That’s the whole game. That’s the reason we’re here. We’re supposed to permit God to instill heroic virtue in us, and permit it to grow, and ride it all the way to Paradise. That’s what a human is: a thing that was created to be a saint. That’s what a saint is: a human whose purpose is fulfilled.

I thought about all of this as I drove Rosie to the lake beach on the first swimming day of the year, a boiling hot Memorial Day. Rose was in her flowered bathing suit that she hates with a passion. She wants a rash guard and shorts because she hates all clothes that code as feminine. She wants to look androgynous. Most of her t-shirts are bought from the “boy” section and she finds jeans that fit her hips in the “girl” section, but an androgynous bathing suit for a young girl’s body is harder to fudge. We’ll find her one. As for me, I was in my new bathing suit, a one-piece without shorts or a ruffle. It was something I would’ve thought was immodest a few years ago, but I wanted to try something new. I wanted to try wearing comfortable clothes in the summer and not caring what anyone thought.

Joan wore boy’s clothes because it was God’s will, and because it was easier to ride a horse that way. She fought in battles because it was God’s will, and in order to unite and save her country. Men saw her breasts and legs but didn’t think to lust after her, because she just wasn’t that type. For this, Joan was excommunicated and burned at the stake, and if the clergy who did that to her were the perfect instruments of God they imagined themselves to be, she would have gone directly to hell. Instead, she is the patron saint of France.

I always wanted to be the patron saint of something.

It was Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romee, who saw to it that Joan’s name was cleared. She lived to see her daughter exonerated. Joan’s other mother, the Catholic Church, had been in the wrong. They had burned a saint to death.

I wonder how many other saints the Catholic Church has murdered.

I wonder how many more they have humiliated and turned away, and forced to go be saints somewhere else.

Our mother the Church is so capricious and cruel.

Yes, she is. I can’t pretend it’s otherwise anymore. If the Catholic Church is a mother at all she is a neglectful, narcissistic mother. She abandons some of her children feral to fend for themselves. Others she pampers and spoils, protecting them from every consequence of their actions. Others she murders. Sometimes she realizes her mistake and canonizes them saints, as if that could make up for her abuse.

But I’ve come to see the whole thing differently. I’ve come to see that Jesus Christ is my mother. What the Church is, I’m not sure. I’m still in communion with her, but I don’t know what to think of her anymore.

For Jesus, though, I hope I could be brave like Saint Joan.

For that Holy Trinity of which Jesus is one Person, I hope Rose and I can be saints.

I don’t know what that looks like anymore. I used to think it had to do with being modest, picketing abortion clinics, hating yourself and desperately fighting to ignore the things that made you happy. But I don’t think that’s the way anymore.

I think becoming a saint is to do with becoming your own self– yourself one with God, yourself perfected, yourself generous, yourself courageous, yourself loving, yourself life-giving, yourself and not anybody else. Unite and rescue as many people as you can. Change the course of history. Be a sign of contradiction. And if the gates of Hell or the Church with a stake and a stack of firewood stand against you, stand firm. You were born to do this.

This is what I thought about as I played in the lake with my daughter. Rose, clever, beautiful, androgynous, an inexhaustible ball of energy, impossibly tenacious, with a sense of justice that would shake the world to its foundations rather than let the unjust get away with anything. Me, neurotic, anxious, barren, a failure at everything I’ve tried to do, queer in both the archaic and the modern sense of the word, too old to be so hopeful, somehow certain that things can still be right. Both of us paddling in a muddy lake on the last Monday of May, in a world that is burning itself to death. We can be saints.

You can be a saint too.

No one can stop us, not even the Church.