I'm rereading one of my favorite books, Mark Twain's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc". How I love this book. It was Twain's favorite of his own works, and very rightly so. It is the most personal of his books, the closest to his heart. Twain writes in the first person, taking on the persona of "the Sieur Louis De Conte", one of Joan's childhood friends who is with her as her scribe throughout her endeavors. It is obvious to me that Twain has inserted himself into the story as this loyal and loving friend, signing his name "SLC", which are the same initials as his own (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Joan is dear and intimate to him. She is not merely a subject. As such, he brings the peasant girl to such vivid life... he understands Joan, from the inside out. He has such a sense of her faith, her convictions, that I assumed he must be a believer himself. A quick google search showed that, outwardly at least, Mark Twain was very critical and resistant to formalized religion. But in Joan, his muse... he understood. It rings with every word, every vivid description. There's no way he could portray her as he does without comprehending in very sharp detail her true inspiration; her true motivation wasn't France (in the larger picture)… it was God.
I am horrified by the modern representations of Joan as some kind of proto-lesbian feminist schizophrenic. That wasn't who she was. That is modern people stealing her history to apply it to their own causes, and it makes me sick every time I see it. Twain, though, captures her as I know she was, because her testimony during her trial shows it, and it rings so true. Twain describes Joan as a study of contradictions - a small girl with a powerful purpose; humble but undeterred and confident. Bashful but brazen. Gentle, and yet a fierce warrior. Honest to a fault, and yet cunning. Uneducated and illiterate, but brilliant. It is seeing the tenderness and meekness of who she is at her core that we can see the work of God in her. That fascinates me. And seems wholly accurate and true.
As I'm reading this portrait of Joan, I'm drawn to know more about her. I wonder about the actual words she spoke, recorded in her trial transcript. I wonder where her sword is, her helmet, her armor. Given that she was burned to death (except her heart and her intestines, and possibly one fragment of bone that did not burn), and her ashes thrown in to the Rhine, there is no grave site to visit. But there is this desire to see, to touch, to be in the same place, to know that she is true, to know what she was like, what her world was. There's this desire to have something tangible to link our time to hers, to link across the ages something concrete. In Joan's case, tragically, the French Revolutionists largely destroyed the artifacts that had been saved and treasured for centuries, in their anti-religion zeal. But my desire to see such things remains, and I realize that for all of Christian history, this has been the case. It is why we have relics.
Christianity, more than any other world religion, is TANGIBLE. It is CONCRETE, because Jesus was tangible and concrete. God came down to earth as someone we could see, and touch, and hear. A man that we could break bread with, and left his mark upon the planet, in verifiable ways. God gave us our senses, created us to experience reality through seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling and feeling. And then He came to us, in time and space, so that we could interact with Him in just the way He created us to be. God is pure spirit, but for US, He came as a child, who grew to a man. And for those generations who got to be in His presence, how did they pass on this experience? Not just with words in a book, as important as those are. But also with concrete things. "Here, child. These were the nails. This was his cross. This is where he was buried. These were the cloths that He was buried in. See, remember, and believe." Just as a family heirloom gets handed down from generation to generation, so did these tangible bits of the greatest story ever told. And as the story continues into the present day, as the work of salvation takes fruit in Christ's bride the Church, those palpable things provide the illustrations. They are the perceptible bridges that link us to our own heritage. They ground us in time, place, reality. And that is a powerful, powerful gift.
Relics seem to be a very Catholic phenomenon, and at times rather morbid or superstitious. But truly understanding human nature, it can be seen why we crave them, why we need them.
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