Hello, my friend.
I've missed you. Come sit with me a while --- I've been waiting.
Last time, you remember, we were in Damascus, in the quiet company of Umm al-Darda the Younger, watching a woman teach scholars twice her size in learning and never once lower her eyes to do it. I loved that one. I still think of her voice carrying through those rooms.
Today I want to take you somewhere colder, greener, and much further west. A city built on a lake, at the foot of mountains, where an argument once broke out over who gets to hold a book --- the same book everyone claimed to love.
I know this place well. I've stood here more times than I could count, watching the seasons turn over the same stone. And there is one name here I always go to first.
Come. Let me show you.
I'm standing in Parc des Bastions, in the heart of Geneva, and the wall rises in front of me the way it always has --- a hundred meters of pale stone, cut into the old university's ramparts.
Four men tower here, carved larger than life. Calvin, stern and reading. Farel, mid-shout, one arm flung out as if still trying to convince a room. Beza. Knox. Robes carved so deep into the stone they look like they're moving. Above them, cut in letters you can read from across the park: Post Tenebras Lux. After darkness, light.
Students cut across the gravel behind me with bags on their shoulders, half-looking at their phones. Two old men bend over a giant outdoor chessboard near the fountain, arguing quietly about a rook. Nobody else stops at the wall. Why would they? It's just stone. It's always just stone, until you know what you're looking at.
I don't stop at the four men. I never do.
I walk past Calvin, past Farel, down to the far end where the wall grows plainer, and there --- set apart, on its own separate block, added a hundred years after everyone else --- is a name half the size of the others.
Marie Dentière.
The only woman on this entire wall. Almost hidden, if you didn't know to look.
People walk past her every day without a glance. But I come here for her. Of everyone carved into this stone --- the shouting men, the famous ones, the ones with statues twice their height --- I think she's the one who understood best what this wall was actually supposed to mean.
Let me tell you who she was.
I knew her before Geneva. Before any of this.
She was born around 1495, in Tournai --- a cloth town, now just across the border in Belgium, though borders meant different things then. Her family, the d'Ennetières, were nobility, but the lesser kind --- well-off enough to matter, not grand enough to matter much. And like so many daughters of families like that, Marie wasn't asked what she wanted. At around thirteen, she was given to the Augustinian convent of Saint-Nicolas-des-Prés, and there she stayed, learning the rhythms of prayer and silence and obedience so well that by 1521 --- she was still a young woman --- they made her abbess.
I remember her in those years. Careful. Devout. Good at the life she'd been handed.
But 1521 was not a quiet year to be a young abbess. Four years earlier, a German monk had nailed his complaints to a door in Wittenberg, and by the time Marie held the keys to her own convent, his words had crossed half of Europe. He said the monastic life was a cage dressed up as a calling. He said faith didn't need an abbess, or a pope, standing between a soul and its God.
I watched her read those words. I watched something in her face change --- not all at once. Slowly, the way ice starts to go at the edges before anyone notices the lake is moving.
By 1524, she was gone. Fled the convent, fled Tournai, fled everything that had built her --- and ran for Strasbourg, one of the only cities in Europe where a woman like her, having abandoned her vows and her old faith both, might not be burned for it.
She was not alone for long. In Strasbourg she met Simon Robert, a young priest who had made his own crossing out of the old Church. They married in 1528. They had five children together, and they didn't stay still --- moving from town to town along the Swiss borderlands, preaching a reform that was still being invented as they went. Robert died in 1533, and Marie, widowed with children, married again --- this time to Antoine Froment, a preacher already working in the thick of it, in a lake city that hadn't yet decided what it was going to become.
In 1535, they came to Geneva.
I was there when they arrived. The city was still raw --- a Duke on one side, a Bishop on the other, a citizenry caught in between, and reformers like Farel trying to drag the whole place toward something new. Marie didn't come to Geneva to keep her head down.
She never once, in her whole life, chose the easier road when a harder, less certain one was standing open in front of her.
Here is what she believed, under everything else: that the book --- the sacred book, the one everyone in that city was fighting over --- did not belong only to the men who'd been given permission to open it.
Think about what that meant, in 1539. A priest could read Scripture. A trained theologian could read it. Even the new reformers, breaking from Rome, still mostly agreed that women should listen, not interpret --- should receive the meaning secondhand, filtered through a man in a pulpit, rather than go looking for it themselves.
Marie disagreed. Not loudly, not first --- but she disagreed with her whole life.
She wrote a letter that year. Not a private one --- a real, printed letter, addressed to Marguerite de Navarre, sister to the King of France, a woman with enough power to protect ideas that would get an ordinary person killed. Marie called it A Very Useful Epistle, and in it she said something that must have felt, to some ears, almost unbearable: that what God had given women to understand, women had no obligation to bury in the ground and hand over to someone else to explain back to them.
I remember the ink still wet on those pages. I remember thinking --- she knows what this will cost her.
It cost her plenty. The letter went to print, and before long the authorities came for the man who'd printed it. Most copies were seized and destroyed before they ever reached a reader. Somewhere in Geneva, right now, there is probably still a widow or a mother who never got to hold that letter in her hands, because someone decided the risk of her reading it was too great.
But here is what I want you to notice, because I think it's the real heart of it. Marie didn't wait for anyone's blessing to go looking. She didn't petition the men in charge and ask, politely, whether she might be permitted to understand her own faith. She went and looked for herself --- read, studied, argued, wrote --- and only afterward did the world get the chance to tell her she wasn't allowed.
That's a particular kind of courage. Not the courage of the battlefield. The quieter, stubborner courage of deciding that truth is something you're entitled to go find, rather than something you're required to wait for, hands folded, until it's handed down to you.
I've watched that kind of courage before. I would watch it again, not long after, in a very different corner of Europe --- from a man who never met Marie, never read a word she wrote, working entirely alone with a pen, a set of tables, and the sky.
But that part of the story comes next.
Four years after Marie's letter went to press --- 1543 --- a book appeared in Nuremberg that had nothing to do with Geneva, nothing to do with Scripture, nothing to do with her at all. Its author was a Polish canon named Nicolaus Copernicus, and he was dying as it was printed --- some say he received the first bound copy on his deathbed, and never truly knew what it would become.
The book was called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium --- On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. And what it proposed, carefully, almost apologetically, was this: that the Earth was not the still center of everything. That it moved. That the sun sat at the center instead, and we simply hadn't been looking at the sky correctly.
For fourteen hundred years, nearly everyone who studied the heavens had trusted one man's account of them --- a Greek astronomer named Ptolemy, dead long before, whose model of the universe had become less a theory than an inheritance. You didn't investigate the sky. You studied the master's account of the sky, and you found new ways to make your observations fit what he'd already said.
Copernicus did something quieter and, I think, braver than it sounds now. He looked up. He did the mathematics himself. And when the numbers didn't agree with Ptolemy, he didn't spend his life bending the numbers back into place. He let them lead him somewhere new.
I want you to sit with how close together these two things happened. Marie, in Geneva, in 1539, insisting that a woman didn't need permission to open Scripture and find something true in it. Copernicus, four years later and hundreds of miles away, insisting that a scholar didn't need permission to look at the sky and find something true in it, even if it disagreed with everyone who'd come before.
They never met. They likely never heard each other's names. And yet they were doing the exact same thing, in two entirely different languages of truth --- one sacred, one measured in the movement of planets. Both of them had stopped asking, first, what the old masters had already decided. Both had started asking, instead: what happens if I go and look for myself?
I don't think this was a coincidence, exactly --- though I don't think it was planned, either. I think it was simply an age deciding, in a hundred small acts of courage across a hundred different towns, that understanding was allowed to keep moving. That the last word hadn't been said yet --- not about the heavens, and not about the soul.
Marie's letter was seized. Copernicus's book, in time, would be too --- banned by the Church for the better part of a century after his death.
Being right, it turns out, has never been the same thing as being believed. Not right away. Sometimes not for a very long while.
Here is the part I keep coming back to, every time I stand at that wall.
Neither Marie nor Copernicus was trying to overturn the world. They were only doing something much smaller and much stranger --- they were choosing to look forward instead of back. For all of human memory before them, understanding had mostly worked the same way: you found the masters, you studied what they'd already concluded, and your task was to receive it faithfully, not to add to it. The sky had been mapped. The sacred text had been explained. The work, as far as most people were told, was finished.
And then, in the very same years, in two places that never spoke to each other, that stopped being true. Not because anyone declared it so --- because ordinary, particular people quietly decided that truth was still being discovered, not just guarded. That understanding could grow. That what we knew yesterday was a floor to stand on, not a ceiling to stop beneath.
I think you already live inside that decision, whether you've ever named it or not. You don't think of knowledge --- spiritual or otherwise --- as a locked box someone finished filling centuries ago. You expect it to keep opening. You expect the astronomers to still be looking up, the way Copernicus did, and finding things his tables could never have shown him. And some quiet part of you expects the same of the soul --- that what we understand about meaning, and justice, and each other, isn't done being discovered either. That there's still more light to come, the way there was more sky than Ptolemy ever mapped.
That expectation didn't arrive by accident. Someone had to go first. Someone had to risk being wrong, or being punished for being right too soon, so that going-forward could become the ordinary way of things instead of the dangerous one.
Here's what I'd ask you to notice, though, because it matters: new understanding has never once arrived and been believed on the spot. Marie's letter was seized before most of Geneva ever read it. Copernicus's book sat banned for the better part of a hundred years. Even her name --- carved onto a wall that was supposed to honor exactly what she did --- waited four hundred and fifty years for its own small stone. That's not a flaw in how truth moves through the world. That is how truth moves through the world. Slowly. Unevenly. Tested, resisted, set aside, and taken up again by people who weren't even born when it was first spoken.
The work was not finished in 1539, or in 1543, and it is not finished now. It doesn't need to be --- that was never really the promise. The promise was only that it keeps moving forward, and that we are each, in our own small corner of it, allowed to keep looking.
section seven please
I wonder, sometimes, where you've been waiting for permission.
Not permission from a person, necessarily --- though sometimes that too. I mean the quieter kind: the moment you already sensed something for yourself, but held it back because it hadn't been said first by someone with more letters after their name, more years behind them, more right, you assumed, to have an opinion. The moment you looked up at your own sky and noticed the numbers didn't quite add up to what you'd been taught --- and instead of trusting what you saw, you filed it away and kept the old map.
I'm not asking you to distrust everyone who came before you. Marie didn't discard the whole of her faith --- she went looking inside it, more closely than most people ever bothered to. Copernicus didn't throw out the sky --- he studied it more carefully than the men who'd stopped looking up at all. Going forward was never about tearing down what came first. It was about refusing to believe the looking was over.
So here's what I'd leave you with, gently, and without any need to answer me out loud. Is there something in your own life --- a belief, a question, a small stubborn observation --- that you've been quietly holding onto, waiting for someone else to say it's allowed? What would it mean to trust that you're permitted to keep investigating, the way she did, the way he did --- not to arrive at certainty, necessarily, but just to keep looking honestly at what's actually in front of you?
You don't have to know the answer today. Neither did she.
If you're ever in Geneva, my friend, go find her. Walk past the four tall men without feeling obligated to linger --- they have plenty of admirers already. Walk to the far end, where the wall grows plainer, and stand where I stood. Read her name slowly. Think about how long it waited there in the dark before anyone thought to carve it in.
Next time, I want to take you back further still --- to Rome, over a thousand years earlier, to a woman named Melania the Elder. She was born into more wealth than most of us could imagine, widowed young, and expected to spend the rest of her life quietly managing an estate. Instead, she gave almost all of it away, sailed for the Egyptian desert, and put on the clothes of a slave so she could slip past soldiers and visit imprisoned monks by night. I'll tell you what she found out there, and why an empire full of senators thought she'd lost her mind.
I love this wall. I love what it almost got right, and what it took four hundred and fifty years to finish saying. I think that's true of most worthwhile things --- they arrive slowly, and they're worth the wait.
Go gently until I see you again.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.