an ode to joan

she lives inside of me

“—But to surrender who you are and live without belief is more terrible than dying— even more terrible than dying young.” -Saint Joan of Arc

Everything that was once in her is now instilled in me. Oh prophet girl, how your life was once changed when destiny was bestowed down upon you that fateful night. In the same rite, I was given a journey, too.

Joan wasn’t at a crossroads, no, unlike the pessimism of Tolstoy and the indifference of Nietzsche as noticed by Mr. Chesterton, she embraced a singular calling of passage. The image of our warrior girl burning from the souls of her feet instilled in me like a new religion entirely. Her eyes plastered to the sky in search of further guidance, her faith strapped to her chest like several pounds of dynamite, and always her father repeated in her head.

She was sentenced to death in a stranger’s clothes— long removed from the garments of steel that had embraced her divine message. In the dawn of summer, Joan dressed in men’s clothes, questioned by her captors as to why she continue if she dare come face to face with death. She replied simply that she presented herself as god had mad her: at the will of her mission in the presence of a higher power. Of her accord scribbled in medieval prison logs, “only through fear of the fire that I would rather do penance by dying, than bear any longer the agony of imprisonment— never meaning to revoke anything.”

Male martyrs don’t lend themselves to explanation. In their glory, they’re constantly adorned by their mothers, nurses, angels Biblically accurate or not. Those unlucky to be murdered in the Earthly body of an aged woman or young girl appear tattered, covered in scars, ripped at the bodice missing any such element of autonomy. Even in death, there is no escaping the perilous nature of womanhood.

You will not find Joan in the Bible, nor your local Catholic resource store. She is nowhere and everywhere and everything that exists in the spite of courage. Stranger than scripture and a labyrinth of Christian mythology, she haunts the very narrative of god’s path for us all. She waits for the prayers of wronged women, of ambitious girls, of misbehaved pariahs. And even on days where the alien Abraham barely crosses my brain, I still find myself entwined in hand sending a telegraph of prayer to my warrior in the sky.