About SAINT JOAN OF NEW YORK
Just before I started writing this novel, I had a conversation with a Catholic friar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I spotted him one afternoon on Amsterdam Avenue: a middle-aged man wearing glasses, a baseball cap, and a gray, ankle-length religious habit, bound at the waist with corded rope.
It was a pretty unusual sight for the neighborhood, which has its fair share of churches and synagogues but isn’t particularly religious. What made it even more striking, for me at least, was that I’d just spent several days reading about the history of the Catholic Church. My planned novel was going to tell the story of a modern-day Joan of Arc, and I’d fallen into the trap of doing way too much research for the book. I’d gotten sidetracked by the stories of the medieval saints, especially St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi. And now here on the street was an embodiment of the subject I was exploring, an honest-to-goodness Franciscan friar on a New York City sidewalk, strolling past a pizzeria and an eyebrow threading salon.
I couldn’t help but stare. Luckily, he didn’t take offense. He just smiled and said, “Hello! Would you like to ask me a question?” My answer was yes. I had a million questions for him.
After a few minutes, I told him about my idea for a novel. I thought the friar might be horrified, but instead he was encouraging. He suggested that I read Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. He also recommended that I see the Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, which is especially good at dramatizing Joan’s trial and execution. (The fine actress Condola Rashad starred in that production, while Walter Bobbie played the role of the traitorous French bishop Pierre Cauchon.)
Last but not least, the friar recommended A Still, Small Voice by Benedict J. Groeschel, one of the founders of the New York-based Community of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. This book provides practical guidance on how to evaluate the claims of people who say they’ve received divine revelations. As I wrote my novel about a modern-day Joan of Arc, I began to see similarities between my heroine’s strange visions and those described in Groeschel’s book.
Before we wrapped up our conversation on Amsterdam Avenue, the friar offered to say a prayer for me. I said yes again; although I’m not Catholic, how could I turn down such a nice gesture? It was a great prayer, really heartfelt, and at the end of it the friar invoked Saint Joan, asking her to bless my project.
If Joan does still exist somewhere -- who knows? -- I hope I haven’t let her down. As I worked on my novel, I sometimes imagined her looking over my shoulder and scowling at all the heretical things I was writing. But I also imagined that she would be patient with me. Surely, someone who was put to death for her intransigence, her brave refusal to back down from her idiosyncratic beliefs, would forgive a writer for envisioning a metaphysics that’s a bit different from the usual depictions.
That’s my hope at least.