Beginning with the words "France, outside of Jargeau, the Loire Valley, June 1429," a Kingdom I later would call Royaume France descended in majestic silence from the Heavens on to my notepad in the Fall of 2008. I had no idea at the time what just happened. When I sat down to write,  I intended to accomplish only a much more modest and much less dramatic outcome -  to write a simple spiritual autobiography of my life. However, unknown to me at the time, I had stirred a celestial relationship that connected my soul to those Heavens. That relationship has consumed my every day on this earth since.

Through those words and the ones immediately following them, "Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, prepares her devoted troops," Royaume France inspired in me a vast spiritual journey. Rather, and more accurately, Joan of Arc, the efficient cause and celestial guide on this journey, inspired in me the revelation that actually, I had been on this spiritual journey my entire life. Through Joan's influence, I made the first observation into this mystery. In the language of the philosopher and saint Edith Stein, I sensed that "there is something over there." Overwhelmed by a Jehannian-driven motivation deep within, I instantaneously made a decisive act of goodwill by subconsciously asking the one question necessary - "What is it?"  That observation, combined with that question constitutes what we know as "spirituality." (Edith Stein, Potency and Act)

"There is something over there. What is it?"

Over the course of a decade, I pursued this "What is it" on what I call The Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, both co-secondary patronesses of France. The more intimately I sensed the approaching "What," the more questions I had, the more resources I consulted, and the more systematic and ordered became the structure through which I recorded it.  

Initially, I believed "what" to be a system - religious, philosophical, and socio-political in nature - focusing on Catholic and Royal France as a pedagogical model serving as a "temporal analogy pointing to an eternal reality" (paraphrased Edith Stein). Whereas I do believe this to be true, I now realize that beyond the system, "what" is a novel - a novel manifesting the story of true Heavenly France as accessed empathically (Stein) through the heart of St. Joan of Arc.

Royaume France is not a work of philosophy, theology, or politics. It is a novel of France, of Joan of Arc's France, encompassing all three. When this "what" fell from the Heavens to my notepad, I began, without realizing it,  to live out the prayer Our Lord taught us, "Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven." Over the years, my desire grew to bring this beautiful Kingdom representing  Mary's love for us down to earth as expressed through the French royal hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse

Royaume France, in its totality consisting of six separate books written over ten years, is in reality a story, a novel, on true France that exists as a form in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is, in my mind, a novel expressed in the genre of 'witness literature,' as one reporting what he heard and what he saw, through his impoverished faculties functioning in very weak and broken vessel.