Looking Both Ways Through the Window.

I remember hearing once that they burned Jeanne d’Arc twice – first to kill her, and then to reduce her body to ash so there would be no grave for people to venerate as a shrine.

*  *  *

I was talking to another woman the other day. I said:

‘I don’t see any point in trying to make the world a better place. It seems to me that it’s supposed to be bad, as some kind of testing ground, maybe.’

‘But that’s the point,’ she replied. ‘We need to try in order to promote our own spiritual growth.’

‘Maybe you’re right, but I’m not convinced there’s any such thing as spiritual growth. I’m tending to the view these days that we only come here because we enjoy the experience of being physical.’

‘So why would we volunteer to be born into a life full of sorrow and suffering, as some people are?’

‘I don’t know. It’s like everything else in life: it doesn’t make any sense once you step outside the circle and look back in. Maybe even souls like white knuckle rides.’

*  *  *

And yet oddly enough, I still think of Jeanne d’Arc as a rather splendid woman.