Joan of Arcadia
—Review
—Second Season Review
—Episode Summaries
—About this Series
—Spirital Connections
At the end of the first season of Joan of Arcadia, Joan had been diagnosed with Lyme disease and Joan had come to believe that her conversations with God had all been a matter of “impaired perceptions.� This has led to a rough time, a crisis of faith if you will, as Joan reassesses what it means to believe in God, or whether she even does. Her faith is so fundamental to who she is?she probably didn’t realize how much herself?that even her boyfriend, Adam, noticed that something about her was different.
The spiritual struggles aren’t limited to Joan, however. Joan’s mom, Helen, is tentatively reaching out to explore her Catholicism and her faith. She has begun a conversation about Catholicism and God with a (former) nun (Constance Zimmer). This is especially ironic considering that as the season opens, no one in the family seems capable of carrying on a conversation with each other. The crux point of one of her struggles is her wrestling with her own theodicy, her justification of God. In her heart, she believes that God is punishing her, thus explaining why He allowed Joan’s brother, Kevin, to be paralyzed and Joan to have to go to “crazy camp.� The family is all undergoing much soul searching due to Andrew Baker?the drunk driver responsible for Kevin’s paralysis?coming back into their lives via a lawsuit against the family. On the one hand, the whole family wrestles with the idea that we are all accountable for our own actions. On the other hand, many of them blame God (or a random, meaningless universe) for what has happened to them.
“She understood me, but now she’s gone. I’m all yours.� The wife of the bookstore owner where Joan works suffers from true mental illness. She’s a symbol of the madness that mankind is prone to when they feel abandoned by God. That is the real mental anguish that Joan suffers from: abandonment by God. St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic, called this the “dark night of the soul,� those dark circumstances that God uses to transform people and draw them even nearer to Him.
During this dark night, we feel that God is gone and we’re all alone. We reach the limit of our ability to be in control of things. The familiar spiritual practices that we’d come to depend on, that comforted us, now seem hollow and ineffective. But it is God’s silence that comes with unanswered prayer, that feeling that He has abandoned us, that causes us the greatest pain. Joan’s “dark night of the soul� plays out much like a break up, with all the attendant heartache and depression. God is almost like an ex-boyfriend that she doesn’t want to see anymore.
Joan and her family struggle for answers. People have gotten it into their heads that religious people are supposed to always be happy, after all, they’re supposed to have all the answers. This happens when you preach a message that proclaims that you have the answers for everything, forgetting that if you have all the answers, what do you need God for? In a lot of ways, we’ve made an idol of answers. We must face the fact that we often learn more looking for an answer and not finding it than we do from having an answer handed to us. But that’s too scary a place to be. Too often we have a “fair weather faith,� such that when a real crisis arises, it is exposed as empty. Prolonged sadness, prolonged struggle, prolonged questioning has been made to be seen as a lack of faith. Instead, these struggles can serve to grow us.
Asking the questions, struggling with the “why?� and the “what did I do to deserve this?� isn’t bad in itself, but one shouldn’t become obsessed by the search for answers, especially where none exist. We need to be willing to live with the questions. There are 288 question marks in the book of Job as Job and his friends wrestle with the issue of “why bad things happen to good people.� God deals with their questions by asking questions of His own: 78 of those 288 questions are His. Joan of Arcadia seems to know this. It asks all the right questions and doesn’t answer them. The characters grow by wrestling with the questions not by discovering answers.
As for Joan, nothing seems to be working for her any more. Not her faith, as it was, and not her relationships. She has a Spiritus Virtininis, a “dizzy spirit,� that errs in everything. She is trapped in the tyranny of doing things for the sake of simply doing something. Her relationship with Adam sputters along without direction or focus. A friend of hers from “crazy camp,� Judith Montgomery (Sprague Grayden), exerts a bad influence in her life. But even her party girl attitude doesn’t fill that gnawing void within her. She’s angry at God because nothing makes sense anymore. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but there’s a certain dark amusement to realizing how little it might bother God for people to keep telling Him that He doesn’t exist.
Crises of faith will make us either bitter or better: they either break us and cause us to abandon God or break us down and draw us nearer to Him. They are messy and there are no pat steps on how to get through them. All you can do is hold on to the tether of your faith until things hurt less. But ‘God’ (on the show) honored her unbelief, her struggles, her questions, her doubts. He showed her grace, mercy, and acceptance in the face of her anger. And He loved her while she was broken. By going to Him without pretending, being broken and terrified, she exposed and dealt with her doubts and ended up back in His arms.
One of the things that makes this show work is its honest treatment of faithfulness. It constantly teeters on being overwhelmed with its earnestness, but is saved by its sense of humor, being seasoned with an edge of darkness, and, above all, its relevance.
***********************
Barbara Hall, the creator of Joan of Arcadia, wrote a list of guidelines for the writers, which she called “The Ten Commandments of Joan of Arcadia�:
1. God cannot directly intervene.
2. Good and evil exist.
3. God can never identify one religion as being right.
4. The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature.
5. Everyone is allowed to say “no� to God, including Joan.
6. God is not bound by time. This is a human concept.
7. God is not a person and does not possess a human personality.
8. God talks to everyone all the time in different ways.
9. God's plan is what is good for us, not what is good for Him.
10. God's purpose for talking to Joan, and everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things?i.e., you cannot hurt a person without hurting yourself; all of your actions have consequences; God can be found in the smallest actions; God expects us to learn and grow from all our experiences. However, the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved.
—Second Season Review
—Episode Summaries
—About this Series
—Spirital Connections
At the end of the first season of Joan of Arcadia, Joan had been diagnosed with Lyme disease and Joan had come to believe that her conversations with God had all been a matter of “impaired perceptions.� This has led to a rough time, a crisis of faith if you will, as Joan reassesses what it means to believe in God, or whether she even does. Her faith is so fundamental to who she is?she probably didn’t realize how much herself?that even her boyfriend, Adam, noticed that something about her was different.
The spiritual struggles aren’t limited to Joan, however. Joan’s mom, Helen, is tentatively reaching out to explore her Catholicism and her faith. She has begun a conversation about Catholicism and God with a (former) nun (Constance Zimmer). This is especially ironic considering that as the season opens, no one in the family seems capable of carrying on a conversation with each other. The crux point of one of her struggles is her wrestling with her own theodicy, her justification of God. In her heart, she believes that God is punishing her, thus explaining why He allowed Joan’s brother, Kevin, to be paralyzed and Joan to have to go to “crazy camp.� The family is all undergoing much soul searching due to Andrew Baker?the drunk driver responsible for Kevin’s paralysis?coming back into their lives via a lawsuit against the family. On the one hand, the whole family wrestles with the idea that we are all accountable for our own actions. On the other hand, many of them blame God (or a random, meaningless universe) for what has happened to them.
“She understood me, but now she’s gone. I’m all yours.� The wife of the bookstore owner where Joan works suffers from true mental illness. She’s a symbol of the madness that mankind is prone to when they feel abandoned by God. That is the real mental anguish that Joan suffers from: abandonment by God. St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic, called this the “dark night of the soul,� those dark circumstances that God uses to transform people and draw them even nearer to Him.
During this dark night, we feel that God is gone and we’re all alone. We reach the limit of our ability to be in control of things. The familiar spiritual practices that we’d come to depend on, that comforted us, now seem hollow and ineffective. But it is God’s silence that comes with unanswered prayer, that feeling that He has abandoned us, that causes us the greatest pain. Joan’s “dark night of the soul� plays out much like a break up, with all the attendant heartache and depression. God is almost like an ex-boyfriend that she doesn’t want to see anymore.
Joan and her family struggle for answers. People have gotten it into their heads that religious people are supposed to always be happy, after all, they’re supposed to have all the answers. This happens when you preach a message that proclaims that you have the answers for everything, forgetting that if you have all the answers, what do you need God for? In a lot of ways, we’ve made an idol of answers. We must face the fact that we often learn more looking for an answer and not finding it than we do from having an answer handed to us. But that’s too scary a place to be. Too often we have a “fair weather faith,� such that when a real crisis arises, it is exposed as empty. Prolonged sadness, prolonged struggle, prolonged questioning has been made to be seen as a lack of faith. Instead, these struggles can serve to grow us.
Asking the questions, struggling with the “why?� and the “what did I do to deserve this?� isn’t bad in itself, but one shouldn’t become obsessed by the search for answers, especially where none exist. We need to be willing to live with the questions. There are 288 question marks in the book of Job as Job and his friends wrestle with the issue of “why bad things happen to good people.� God deals with their questions by asking questions of His own: 78 of those 288 questions are His. Joan of Arcadia seems to know this. It asks all the right questions and doesn’t answer them. The characters grow by wrestling with the questions not by discovering answers.
As for Joan, nothing seems to be working for her any more. Not her faith, as it was, and not her relationships. She has a Spiritus Virtininis, a “dizzy spirit,� that errs in everything. She is trapped in the tyranny of doing things for the sake of simply doing something. Her relationship with Adam sputters along without direction or focus. A friend of hers from “crazy camp,� Judith Montgomery (Sprague Grayden), exerts a bad influence in her life. But even her party girl attitude doesn’t fill that gnawing void within her. She’s angry at God because nothing makes sense anymore. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but there’s a certain dark amusement to realizing how little it might bother God for people to keep telling Him that He doesn’t exist.
Crises of faith will make us either bitter or better: they either break us and cause us to abandon God or break us down and draw us nearer to Him. They are messy and there are no pat steps on how to get through them. All you can do is hold on to the tether of your faith until things hurt less. But ‘God’ (on the show) honored her unbelief, her struggles, her questions, her doubts. He showed her grace, mercy, and acceptance in the face of her anger. And He loved her while she was broken. By going to Him without pretending, being broken and terrified, she exposed and dealt with her doubts and ended up back in His arms.
One of the things that makes this show work is its honest treatment of faithfulness. It constantly teeters on being overwhelmed with its earnestness, but is saved by its sense of humor, being seasoned with an edge of darkness, and, above all, its relevance.
***********************
Barbara Hall, the creator of Joan of Arcadia, wrote a list of guidelines for the writers, which she called “The Ten Commandments of Joan of Arcadia�:
1. God cannot directly intervene.
2. Good and evil exist.
3. God can never identify one religion as being right.
4. The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature.
5. Everyone is allowed to say “no� to God, including Joan.
6. God is not bound by time. This is a human concept.
7. God is not a person and does not possess a human personality.
8. God talks to everyone all the time in different ways.
9. God's plan is what is good for us, not what is good for Him.
10. God's purpose for talking to Joan, and everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things?i.e., you cannot hurt a person without hurting yourself; all of your actions have consequences; God can be found in the smallest actions; God expects us to learn and grow from all our experiences. However, the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved.
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