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<\/a>This moment gets at the essence of this show and why we care about saints, too. For this moment, a saint is not a story from a book, not even a real person whose exploits are too far above modern-day Joan to matter. For this moment, the saint is Joan\u2019s sister. The saint is Joan, the saint is Joan herself. <\/p>\nThis is why the saints matter. This is why this silly melodrama about a teenage girl who talks to God still matters to me.<\/p>\n
I suspect this episode (\u201cSt. Joan\u201d) or the one before it (\u201cThe Devil Made Me Do It\u201d) ran during November sweeps. Because with these two stories, the series really hit its stride, taking on questions too serious for most family-night TV watching in contemporary America. What a pity.<\/p>\n
In episode 8 (\u201cThe Devil Made Me Do It\u201d), God poses an impossible dilemma for Joan. Appearing as a power-walking woman whom Joan meets on her way to school, God tells Joan to help out with the high school art show. The reason seems harmless enough: \u201cBe more physically active!\u201d God chirps. \u201cA happy outlook is all about endorphins.\u201d The Sermon on the Mount it\u2019s not. But when Joan walks into the art room, God walks in, this time as a security guard, and says He would rather Adam\u2019s art was not part of the show.<\/p>\n
Adam is Joan\u2019s lovable friend, a talented abstract sculptor whose precocious work is all done in memory of his late mother. God asks Joan to see that Adam\u2019s work is not part of the show? <\/i>How could that be just? Why would God do that? For the remainder of the show\u2014which includes a surprise encounter with Grace\u2019s rabbi (!) <\/i>father (who knew Grace was Jewish?!<\/i>)\u2014Joan has to wrestle with a key question: Would God ever tell her to do something evil? If not, how can Joan know that God is God, and not the devil in disguise?<\/p>\n
The rabbi gives one answer : Our own inclination to evil, he says, comes between us and God. This inclination thrives on \u201cmoral confusion.\u201d What to do? \u201cConfuse the confuser.\u201d <\/p>\n
The priest who has been counseling Joan\u2019s mother has a different take: <\/p>\n
Joan: So the devil really exists?<\/i>
Priest: Yes, but one of his tricks is to get people to believe he doesn\u2019t exist. Or to take on the guise of our Lord.\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: The devil imitates God?<\/i>
Priest: In essence.\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: Is he any good?<\/i>
Priest: Very good. In fact, in the Book of Revelation it tells us that when the Antichrist first appears, the godly may be fooled.\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: Yeah, like when you first hear Dave Matthews and think he might be good, but he\u2019s not.\u00a0<\/i>
Priest: I don\u2019t know who that is.\u00a0<\/i>
<\/i>
In the end, Joan simply does not know how to follow God\u2019s directive. When Adam wins the art show and sells his piece for $500, he decides to use the prize as seed money to leave school for a full-time art career. Joan realizes this is a terrible mistake, that Adam is not mature enough yet, that he will be lost. She goes to the art room and smashes Adam\u2019s sculpture. <\/i>Adam remains in school (good), but Adam says he will never be Joan\u2019s friend again, if he ever was (bad).
<\/i>
<\/i>A final encounter with God (the power-walker again) provides the complex moral of the story:<\/p>\n
Joan: I\u2019m having second thoughts about you.<\/i>
God: It\u2019s called a crisis of faith. It\u2019s all right. It\u2019s not really faith if there\u2019s no crisis. Faith is an act of will, not a feeling.<\/i>
Joan: How do I know you\u2019re not the devil? . . .<\/i>
God: I understand you\u2019re confused, but there are no dilemmas without confusion, there\u2019s no free will without dilemmas, and there\u2019s no humanity without free will.\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: You know, I don\u2019t understand what you\u2019re saying. It\u2019s all just blah, blah, blah. . . .\u00a0<\/i>
God: You\u2019re confused because I asked you to do something you thought was wrong.<\/i>
Joan:\u00a0 I tried talking Adam out of it. I tried buying it. I tried stealing it. What else is there? You wanted me to smash it?<\/i>
God: Don\u2019t blame me for your failure of imagination. What you have to ask yourself is, what are you going to do now? Every new decision is another chance to do the right thing. You don\u2019t get that from the other side.<\/i><\/p>\n
Episode 9 (\u201cSt. Joan\u201d) presents another central question in our search for God\u2014not what if God is the devil in disguise, but what if faith is delusional? Joan\u2019s history teacher asserts that while legend has it that Joan of Arc talked to God, \u201cSigmund Freud would have given Joan\u2019s parents a different explanation: paranoid schizophrenia with a messianic complex.\u201d For the rest of the episode, while a plot involving the history teacher unfolds, Joan will repeatedly ask herself, \u201cI\u2019m not crazy, am I?\u201d<\/p>\n
Tree-surgeon God tells Joan, a C student, to get an A on her next history test. As usual, Joan takes God at his word and reads several books on Joan of Arc to prepare. When Joan gets an A+, evil vice principal Gavin Price demands that she retake the test, because she must have cheated. Grace Polk (feminist firebrand, daughter of Rabbi Polanski) takes Joan\u2019s case to the barricades, organizing a student strike over this terrible injustice. Joan gets swept up in the strike\u2014until God intervenes.<\/p>\n
God: About this revolution, cut it out. This wasn\u2019t part of the plan.<\/i>
Joan: What do you mean? I\u2019m taking a stand. It\u2019s perfect.\u00a0<\/i>
God: You do know the end of Joan\u2019s story. . . .\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: They don\u2019t burn people anymore, do they? Especially not kids?<\/i>
God: I\u2019m not really here to discuss martyrdom with you, Joan. Like most things having to do with me, it\u2019s complicated. Retake the test.\u00a0<\/i>
Joan: What?!<\/i>
God: Retake the test. . . . Here\u2019s the thing you need to learn from the martyrs, Joan: They did it the hard way. That\u2019s what I\u2019m asking of you.<\/i><\/p>\n
God\u2019s intervention makes for a minor miracle. Joan\u2019s history teacher, we learn, gave up a promising music career to go into education, but he began \u201cmailing it in\u201d years ago, \u201ca teacher\u2019s greatest fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Teacher: Before this event, I was going to quit. This was going to be my last year. It was causing me a lot of pain. I was surrendering in defeat, like the French at Agincourt, floundering in the mud of my students\u2019 indifference. But I made you care about history, Miss Girardi. I don\u2019t know how I did it, but I did, and that\u2019s the whole point! You inspired me to take back my crown. I thank you.<\/i>
Joan<\/i>: You have no idea how incredibly cool this is.\u00a0<\/i>
Teacher: Oh, yes I do.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
Next week: \u201cDrive, He Said\u201d and \u201cThe Uncertainty Principle\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a moment in season 1, episode 9 of \u201cJoan of Arcadia\u201d that chills me to the bone. Joan is in history class; the subject is the Hundred Years War; the teacher flashes an image of Joan of Arc on the screen. Joan Girardi, typical teen, looks up with a sudden shock of recognition: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n