-2 Corinthians 3:6He has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit produces life.
Despite the example of Jesus Christ, many of his immediate disciples, and countless saints, the Christian church has reproduced the very thing that the spirit of Christ so powerfully rebels against. And so, the beautiful multiplicitous human experience with God is reduced to the cold, immobile, and inhuman word of law. when the word cannot move, and when the law becomes idol, direct and earnest Human experience with the holy spirit and God becomes heresy. For though the spirit produces life, the letter seeks to kill it.
-1 Corinthians 3:18-21No one should deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks he is wise in this age, he must become foolish so that he can become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, since it is written: He catches the wise in their craftiness; and again, The Lord knows that the reasonings of the wise are meaningless. So no one should boast in human leaders, for everything is yours.
By stringently defining what becomes a good Christian, we trap our understanding inside of our time, our context, our biases, and we deny our own inherent ignorance to truth of the paradoxes of God. This delicate walk of wisdom through humility is the great challenge of Christianity, and it can hardly be managed by even the most faithful and dedicated. Our Christian institutions that are supposedly built on the idea honoring this seemingly inevitably devolve into rewarding mechanical adherence to a sanded down lifeless interpretation of the letter of tradition. And so, in the motion of a seemingly perpetual cycle of revolutionary suffering, God works with both left and right hands. Adam reborn as Job reborn as Jesus reborn as Joan reborn as You. Humanity as the hanged man made a martyr by an uncaring reality And its own culture, screaming out: I exist! I am a weapon of god too! I am the word defacing the word! I am the truth you avert your eyes from!
-Acts 13:41Look, you scoffers, marvel and vanish away, because I am doing a work in your days, a work that you will never believe, even if someone were to explain it to you.
The focus on facial performance here is shocking and incredible to this day. The imagery of the wide-eyed androgyne, spirit-filled and enraptured by emotion, while being tortuously manipulated and interrogated by sneering and cold theologians is incredibly powerful and timeless. In heresy, Joan imitates Christ: immortalized by the legend of a death in service of a contradictory truth no one else would believe even if it were explained to them. The truth of faith, in perfect love.
(11-24-2025)