Star Wars, theology, and submission

A couple posts back, I explored some connections between scripture and Christianity.  Before I continue this line of thinking, I think I ought to say that I don’t know how many of these connections are intentional.  And it’s clear that were many other sources for these movies beyond Christianity.  In terms of religions, Buddhism and Taoism are clear influences.  I’m not a Buddhist or a Taoist, though, so these are not the influences I’m interested in, here.

Last post I explored a few connections between Anakin and Adam.  Anakin was tempted and brought about a fall for himself and the world.  At the end of the movie, he is a perversion of what he was meant to be.

There are of course connections  between Anakin and Jesus.  One I mentioned in that last post: both Jesus and Anakin are the result of immaculate conceptions.  A second connection: Prophesies linger around both figures.  People thought that they interpreted these prophecies correctly and they thought they new what to expect.  They were wrong.

It seems to me that Luke is more of a Jesus figure than Anakin.   As with Anakin, there is a name connection to Luke’s paralell figure.  The “other” Luke wrote one of the Gospels.  And scripture calls Jesus “son of Adam”.  If in fact Anakin is Adam, then Luke obviously is the son of the Adam figure.

Luke’s childhood in the unremarkable dessert under the domination of a tremendous and powerful empire evoke images of Jesus childhood, in his own unremarkable world, under the domination of the Roman Empire.

I think the deepest spiritual truths, the most Christian themes in these movies, is around submission and sacrifice as a path to glory and redemption.  Ben Kenobi sets the stage early in the films by sacrificing himself in the lightsabre duel with Darth Vader.  When Luke completes his training, he demonstrates that he understands this.  In Return of the Jedi, he just gives himself up at Darth Vader’s doorstep.

This is sort-of a fascinating contrast: Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi.  Halfway through the former, Anakin is grasping at power that is not his.  It doesn’t seem that he’s doing this so much out of love that Amidala should be around for her own sake as out of his belief that he should be more powerful than death.  On the other hand, Luke, about halway through Jedi, is submitting himself.  He is willing to sacrifice his own life for a chance at appealing to the basic humanity of Anakin… he wants to awaken something in him that was lost after Anakin’s fall. 

Perhaps I’m overintellectualizing here, but consider the changes within just that one movie.  Darth’s strong hold isn’t the first enemy base he attacked.  At the beginning of the movie, he invades Jaba’s palace to rescue Han.  But he engaged in this invasion with an elaborate plan, with his allies in place, with a great show of his own power.  This is quite different than how he arrives at the Imperial base.

Luke’s ploy pays off.  Darth Vader ultimately does more than participate in his own rescue.  He rescue Luke.

Jesus awakens our humanity.  Our awakening does not rescue Him from His fate.  But it does prove the logic of his original submission to it.

Miss

There is this pain that runs so narrow and deep

That I understand how the canyons are etched out by a trickle…

Because that trickle

Has etched out this canyon

In me.

 

And there is this sorrow

That is not this season to be walked through

But a thing that lives at the core of me.

I love you.

Though I never had a chance.

I love you though I had a chance.

 

And I

I have so little of you.

How could I ever want to exorcise this…

 

I have no school pictures

No first words

No first steps.

No finger paintings.

 

We did not have our years together.

We did not have even those ten months

That it’s easy to think we’re promised.

 

We had only this knowledge that you were coming to be.

And we had the changes in your mothers body.

And we had these hopes and these prayers and then

You were

Not.

 

I feel like I should tell you

That I think of you all the time.

But I love you.

And I have to believe that you live in the truth now.

And you must know how it is with me.

 

There are days and weeks and perhaps a month sometimes,

When you do not cross

 the parts of my thoughts that I remember to think about

but you are with me

I am glad you are with me

I wish

I wish it had just been so different

How could I ever want to exorcise this?

 

I have so little of you

How could I want to shed myself of this

Mourning-sickness, sadness, sadness

 

 

 

This poem was submitted to Watercooler Wednesdays, Randy Elrod’s blog carnival.

Theology and Sith

There are all these Christian themes running through the Star Wars movies.  People have written bazillions of books.  I didn’t think any were all that impressive.   I’m feeling kind-of nerdy (and arrogant) tonight.  I think I’ll blog about them.

I think that these become more obvious in the more recent movies.  The most obvious connections are cosmetic ones. There are these little explicit nods to Christianity that are hard to miss.  For example, Anakin is a product of an immaculate conception.  The number for the plan that will destroy the jedi is order 66– only, of course, pretty close to the number made famous in revelations as the number of the beast.  In the most recent movies, the force is even sometimes referred to as “the living force”– reminiscent of Christians referring to the “living God.”

Slightly deeper is ideas that run a little deeper than mere nods.   The favoring of the spiritual over the material for example.  The Star Wars movies paved the way for The Matrix in their declaration that the physical world is much less important than the spiritual reality which lies beneath it.   Consider, for example, Yoda’s chiding of Luke when his lack of faith leads to his failure to rise the X-Wing fighter out of the muck.  Or consider Ben Kenobi’s victory through surrender.  (More on this in the next post about this topic.)

(Just for the record, I have some misgivings about the understanding of the physical world vs the spiritual world.  Nonetheless, the orthodox Christian position has usually taken this route.)

A second paralell, also on this deeper level, occured to me recently.  One of my favorite scenes in all six movies is the one in “Revenge of the Sith” where Palpatine is talking to Anakin in that bizzare opera house.  He’s laying the ground work for his eventual corruption of Anakin, planting some seeds of doubt about the Jedi, some seeds of faith in the Sith.

I don’t know if this is why I liked the scene before I consciously realized it.   Here’s what I do know about that scene, and really, the whole series of movies.

It’s really about the fall from the Garden of Eden.

Like Adam, Anakin is tempted.  (Interestingly,two of the first three letters are the same of both names.)  Clear parameters have been lain out for him.  (In Anakin’s case, by the Jedi.  In Adam’s case, by God.)  The temptations of both Anakin and Adam are closely related to the God-like power of immortality.  (Remember the tree of life in the Garden of Eden?)  Both Adam and Anakin are tempted by a figure that takes advantage of greed, pride, and fear.

Like Adam, Anakin loses what he most sought.  Vincent Antonucci, in his excellent “I became a Christian and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” observes that Adam’s crushed community with God is the obvious ramification of the fall.  But his crushed relationship with Eve is also worth noticing.  Anakin, of course, loses his Amidala just as Adam loses the community he once had with Eve.  (We see this in Genesis by the way he tries to throw Eve under the bus as soon as God comes ’round.)  The God- Jedi paralell is here, too: Anakin loses the Jedi just as Adam lost his close connection with God.

I think there’s all sorts of interesting paralells between Luke and Jesus just as there are between Anakin and Adam.  I’ll probably “go there” in my next post.

 

A second wierd little experiment

Last post, I mentioned this interesting online tool: babelfish.  Babelfish is a translator.  I was curious about this because it seems like you need a human touch to be an effective translator.  I was also intruiged by this because sometimes randomness turns out interesting things.

This time, I decided to begin with a Spanish version of Genesis 1.  I choose the version at “Bible Gateway” that basically looked like the Spanish words for “New International Version” I then clicked the button so that this would be translated into English.

This is what it came up with:

God, in the principle, it created the skies and the Earth. 2 the Earth was a total chaos, the darknesses covered the abyss, and the Spirit [to] of God went and came on the surface of waters. 3 and God said: “That the light exists” And the light got to exist. 4 God considered that the light was good it separated and it of the darknesses. 5 To the light it called “day”, and to the darknesses, “night”. And the night came, and arrived the morning: that one was the first day.

This is the actual English language version of Genesis 1:

 ”1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

 2 Now the earth was ^[a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. “

Is it just because the words in the first version are fresh and new that I find them cooler than the actual words in Genesis 1?  “God, in the principle…” I love that.  Of course the clunky “it” in the next line has to go, but the image of the Earth being a “total chaos” is so much more interesting than “empty” and that the light “got to exist” after God said it did, it makes me think of light like a happy five year old, happy to get an extra snack.

I know that there’s probably some grump somewhere who finds this irreverant.  I realize that error could creep in here.  I’d never advise a person live their life according to words that were translated by a computer. 

But there is some things that we’ll never have good words for.  There are some ideas that every translation will always fail.  I think anything that allows us to interact with scripture, and explore it, and view it in new ways is a really cool thing.  I’m really looking foreward to playing with this new toy.

 

A wierd little experiment

So, if you click here, you end up at something called Babelfish.

Babelfish is this translation tool.  You input words in a certain language.  It outputs them in a wide variety of other languages.

My geekiness, curioisty, and poetic nature all conspired.  (Maybe these are all the same thing.)

I was curious how good it was.  Among the practical problems, translating is as much an art as a science.  There are so many words which don’t have a direct equivalent.  Particularly abstract ones.

If I was fluent in any language it would be fairly easy to check this.  Much to my discredit, I am monolingual.  I have a brain like a black whole for languages.  It occured to me, though, that I might begin with a certain phrase, have the site do it’s work, and then take that phrase, translate it into a third language, and then translate this back into English.

Presumably any errors picked up along the way wouldn’t be corrected, with each generation mistranslations would only grow.  For this reason, it’s a pretty big challenge. 

It occured to me that the things that result might end up being kind-of interesting in their own right.  I have this love for what Sting (in the song “Shape of my heart”) Called “the aesthetics of chance”.  I decided I’d start with something well known, and full of abstractions.  Perhaps because Memorial Day is only a few days ago, I settled on The Pledge of Allegience.

I took it line by line.  I subjected each to translations in 3 languages before translating it back into English.  This is what I ended up with:

I connect loyally ; for that; S flag.

And in republic for which it is

A nation under God

Indivisible correctly for everyone

 

Considering the difficulty of the challenge, I’d say that’s actually pretty good fidelity to the original.

My next projects:

Choose a poem, perhaps something by Frost, and run it through this process.

Take a non-English translation of the bible and use babel fish to translate it, and compare to the English translation of the bible.

Choose some of my own writing, and run it through and see what happens.

 

I’d like to invite you to post any cool things you discover while playing around with this rather cool little thing.

 

The truth

If somebody claimed “I am the Queelebegooten” or “The queelebegooten will set you free” It would be natural to want to know just what the word “Qeelebegooten” means… Even if we had a tenative, working definition of the word, we’d probably be quite curious, especially if one (or both) of these statements didn’t really connect with what we thought it was supposed to mean.

Jesus, of course, did not say “I am the Queelebegooten.”  Nor did he claim that the queelebegooten would set us free.  He claimed that he was the truth, though, and that the truth would set us free.

When we look at these claims with fresh eyes the first thing that we notice is that they are bold, striking, and provocative.  The seond thing is that he seems to be using the word “truth” in an unusual way.  Whole books have been written, whole courses have been taught, whole academic careers have been built on the question that was asked by a man who didn’t know what to do with Jesus.  “What is truth?”

I want to sidestep some of those questions.  I don’t think that I’ll establish some sort of noncontroversial epistemology right here and now.  Instead, I’d like to take a look at what we seem to generally mean by the word “truth” in our everyday lives.  I’d like to then compare this view with what Jesus said about it.

Usually, we use the word “truth” to point to some form of knowledge that is objective.  Something that can be verified outside of us, something that is independent of us.  If I was trying to determine which student cheated on a test where two kids came up with identical answers, I would tell them “I want the truth.”  Either Fred or Barney looked on the other’s paper.  This reality– this truth– wouldn’t change regardless of what I thought or said.  Truth, according to the way we normally use the word, is not something invented by us.  Nor is it something dependent on us.  Two plus two equals four.  That is the truth.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t normally say “What is the true interpretation of that poem” Because there may be more than one.  In framing the question that way, it implies that I think there is only one correct interpretation, and that this interpretation is not dependent on what I bring to the poem.

People who know more about sociology and history than I do say that this is a fairly new development.  We did not always define truth so narrowly.  Goings on in science and culture have lead us to where we are now.

Science has been incredibly succesful in the last couple hundred years in ways that are really easy to see.  We can now do things that we could never do before.  The every day lives of people in the first world today does not much resemble the lives of their grand parents.  It’s easy to see how we can go from “Scientific truth is one sort-of truth” to “Scientific knowledge is the best kind of truth” to “Scientific knowledge is the only kind of truth.”

Though science might have changed our lives, and though some of these are for the better, they don’t use the word “truth” the same way Jesus did.  No scientist can say “I am the truth.” He has only discovered it.  No idea can say “I am the truth” because, of course, ideas can not talk.  The best a scientist could do is to speak about her discoveries.  She might say “I have discovered a truth.”

And though a scientific idea might set us free from one thing, it will nearly inevitably enslave us to do something else.  Elictricity set us free from from depending on gas-based lamps but enslaved us to power plants and oil dependence and green houses gasses.  Lawn mowers and washing machines set us free from some types of household work but enslaved us to laziness. 

In setting us free from everything else Jesus (in Paul’s words) enslaves us to Him.  And this is as it should be. 

 Jesus view of truth is incredibly personal.  We can only find it in terms of relationship.  This is the very heart of why I think the post moderns are on to something.   Christianity has been living with this disconnect for atleast a couple hundred years.  Truth is not only objective and outside of us.  A relationship is not something that can be proven.  We can’t justify our faith as if it were some sort of geometric proof.

 

Where is time

So I’m on this retreat with the rest of the lead team of Fellowship Church.

It’s amazing. 

This is a ski resort in the Winter, I guess.  It is blanketed in green and tucked in by this perfect sky blue.  A river winds through this place, providing this lovely little chatter wherever you go.  People stroll about, with smiles on their faces.  Later I’ll put some links in here with more of the nuts and bolts about this place, or maybe I’ll just add a post of description.  Right now, though, this is not where my heart is.

I woke up early (it’s 5:30 as I write this.) and went for a walk.  I asked God to just fill me up with whatever it was I needed.  I’m going to share what that walk was like.  I was, indeed, filled up with stuff.  I believe it came from God.  Maybe it didn’t.  Doesn’t really matter.  I think it’s likely that our whole idea about what ideas come from God and what ideas come from us are silly and simplistic. 

At any rate, I began with this gentle sense of reverence.  I realized that the whole idea of a spiritual retreat, it’s a bit like a days-long prayer.  The ground I walked upon was hallowed just by virtue of my intent upon it… but that’s not exactly right, either.  The ground I walked upon was hallowed by virtue of God’s actions based on my intent.

As I write this now, I am reminded of the burning bush, and how Noah (oops, I mean) Moses was told to take off his sandals.

At that time, I was mindful of something Martin Buber said “Prayer does not exist in time.  Time exists in prayer.”  Somebody else– maybe it was Madeline L’Engle– distinguished between two types of time.  Chronos and Karios (Can some of you Greek speaking folks help me with the spelling here?)

Chronos is the sort of time that our watches keep.  Karios is the sort of time that God’s watch keeps.  It is squishy, maybe… It doesn’t just travel horizentally, at a constant rate, like Chronos does.  Karios sometimes just goes straight up.  Time doesn’t exactly stop passing, but eternity just fills up a moment.

Remember your first kiss?  Or the time you new a (literal or metaphoric) car wreck was fast approaching, and nothing could be done about it?  In some sense it seems to go on forever, but the funny thing is you probably could have given a pretty good guess around how long the whole thing took.  Eternity is not only outside time, it is also inside the moments.   Perhaps this connected to the fact that the kingdom of heaven is among us.

And so my first realization this morning, on my brief, brisk walk was that time itself is in prayer.  The world thinks that prayer is this thing we do.  I suspect prayer is this massive thing, a where house or better yet is a forest.  One little meadow is asking God for stuff.  A giant field is dropping to our knees and listening to God.  It is the source of time itself.

Intimately connected to this was this little glimpse about God’s fullness.  An understanding of what it means to fear God, a concept that I always struggle with.  A feeling that God is love but he is not to be trifled with, at the same time.  My random theologion quote here would be C.S. Lewis’, from the Narnia books about Aslan (his Jesus figure) being good but far from tame.

I can’t explain how, exactly, these were connected.  And as I try to think back and put words to it I’m getting further away not closer.  So I guess this is as good a place as any.

Wishing you peace and God’s presence,

Jeff

 

This blog was my submission to Watercooler Wednesdays.  A blog carnival.  Click the link for more cool entries to Watercooler Wednesdays.

My happy place

     The breeze ruffles the curtains.  It carries the smell of the sea and salt.  It lands on my skin. 

     The room is long and narrowish and light and high.  Ten rows of bnenches fill up the majority of the space in the room, but mostly they escape notice.  The butt and back of the benches are lined with thin burgundy cushions.

     The stage is half a step above the rest of the room.  The cross is bigger than life, which is as it should be.  The sunlight comes in through the skylight and casts a rectangular, God-made spotlight on it.

      This rectangle is echoed across the room by six rectangles of light which fall on the pews and into the aisles.  There are 3 on each side; the long windows let more than just the breeze in.

      It is modest, this place, and some would say small.  I smile as I walk out the front door and take it in from the outside.

       The white paint on the outside is not brand new but the church carries a well-loved air about itself.  It’s the sort of place, that if you put any thought into it, you would just know that it’ll get repainted before the whiteness begins to actually chip.

     The building has a minty green trim.  The shape of it is close to the shape of a capital “L”, except that the horizontal, lower portion is a bit to small and stubby.  This added on room– the horizontal part of the “L”– has no door from the outside but it does have large windows.

      I could walk across the green (but not perfectally manicured) lawn and step between the bushes that hug the perimeter of the building.  I could look through the window and peer at the simple wooden table that dominates the room.    There is a copper platter just to the left of the center of the table.

      Two-thirds of a loaf of French bread sits on the platter.  The reflection of the simple overhead light on the platter is broken by the few crumbs gathered by the open end of the bread.  A mostly-full bottle of wine sits close to the right edge of the table.  The sun has dried most of the condensation that once clung to the bottle.  Only a few drops remain where the neck widens.

 

The above was this image, incredibly clear, and powerful, that just popped into my head.  I decided to get it out of my head and write it down.  It’s a place I’ve never been to, but I love it there.  It’s my happy place, this little perfect church in my heart.  I’ve gone back there, every now and again, to get away from everything. 

Do you have a “happy place?”

 

Freedom

O.K., but why?

There are very few things we do or feel that we can’t ask that question of.  The toddler “Why” game is annoying partially because it is nearly endless.  Nearly every single thing we do, we don’t do for it’s own sake.  We do it because it leads to something else which leads to something else which leads to…

I can’t say that things are even all that different in the spiritual realm. 

We read the bible.

Why?

So we can learn things about God, for example that he wants us to pray.  Once we learn this, we begin to pray.

Why?

Sometimes, we pray to share our sorrow with God.

Why?

Because God wants us to.

Why?

You get the picture.

Perhaps this is why Galations 5:1 grabbed me today.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Christ set us free?

why?

For freedom.

Isn’t this circular?

Yes, it is.  And what’s the problem with that, exactly?

There is something about freedom that is just so inherently good that being free can’t be explained.  It’s so basic that it doesn’t boil down to anything else.  There is no why.

How often do we feel set free by Christ?

Early on in our walk with Christ, probably so very often.  Later on… maybe not so much.  This is a natural time to ask what has became the refrain of this post:

Why?

Is it because there are buildings and organizations that call themselves churches, and these buildings sometimes are only distantly related to what they were supposed to be?  Do these human, fallen, imperfect organizations masquerade as Christ himself and burden us with the yolk of slavery?

Do we simply forget what our lives were like before Christ?

I don’t know.  But I’d be hard pressed to find many other claims, even in the bible, that a thing is so inherently good that we don’t need words to explain it’s basic goodness.  There are so many means, and so few ends, it seems like we ought to cling to them, hold on to them, because if we lose what we’re doing things for, everything else is a moot point.

On ducks and peer pressure

The school I teach at: Two days ago, a gaggle of seniors engaged in the time-honored tradition of The Senior Prank.   Police officers then engaged in the time-honored job of catching them.  The principal engaged in the time honored tradition of suspending them.  In my opinion, every body pretty much did what they were supposed to do. 

The kids were kids, the police did their best to cut down on mischief, the principal did his best to mantain safety, order, and compliance in “his” school.

A few more specifics: There is a small pond outside the school.  The students apparently had thousands of rubber ducks.  The plan was to populate the pond, I guess.  They all ran off when the officers arrived.  A k9 unit flushed several of them out.  The suspension was 5 days, barring the kids from the end-of-the year activities.  The kids were not arrested but it appears they’ll have to explain themselves to a judge.

The student body pretty much did its job.  They found a cause and (pardon the pun) flocked to it.  In an astounding show of unity and organization, a staggering number of them came dressed in yellow today as a show of unity with the mallards at the root of the whole thing.  Many of them wore specially designed shirts with slogans like “What the duck” and “you have got to be ducking kidding me” or “free ____” (Where ____ is one of the caught kids names… Since ____ is free, I’m a little unclear about the meaning of that one.)  They had duck buttons, duck stickers, duck pictures taped to them…

Again, everything I’ve reported thus far is not anything I really have a problem with.  Everybody pretty much did what they were supposed to do.

My problem is that over half my co-workers wore yellow, sported buttons, and all the rest.

Because I work with emotionally disturbed adolescents, I am keenly aware of the importance of mantaining boundaries between myself and the kids.  This does not mean that I dislike them, don’t interact with them, etc.  But it does mean I constantly mantain a mindfulness that they are students and I am a teacher.

Because I have worked in places that were a bit dangerous and always hovered on the edge of quite dangerous, I feel strongly about mantaining a united front with the other adults, unless the other adults are quite clearly engaging in abuse or neglect.  Behind closed doors I am all for yelling, screaming, and fighting for the kids.  But when the kids are watching, I am determined to support my colleauges and I expect that in return.

Maybe my experiences aren’t helpful preparation for where I am now.  But this isn’t really the point.  My point isn’t so much about my disagreement with other people.  It’s about my feelings about myself.

Because what happened is I found that two groups had been created, among the faculty.  I found myself being measured up, assessed by everyone I was meeting.  Was I wearing yellow?  Did I have a duck button?  What’s worse is I found myself doing that same thing: looking around wherever I went, to see where everybody around me stood.

And it’s not about the principal of the school.  It’s about the principle of the matter.

I had concocted this rather absurd fear that somebody was going to offer me a button or a feather or something to wear.  I was afraid I was going to be put on the spot.

I am not proud of my fear.

This is all hard on me because, despite what this post might imply, I am not a rule follower.  I hate being “that guy” I want to be on the forefront of the protest, I want to be fighting for the opressed and down trodden, I get itchy at the idea that I might actually be part of the establishment.

Even before I was a Christian I got half the truth: Jesus is not a convervative (in the American Political sense) He’s not a Republican.  

I’m struggling a lot more with the other half the truth.  He is not a liberal, either.  (In the American Political Sense.) He’s not a member of either the Green or Democratic parties.

It cost me a little something to follow Jesus today.  I had this oppurtunity to take up my cross and follow him.  In this little tiny way I did it.   I wish it came with a warm and fuzzy joy. 

This post was submitted to Watercooler Wednesday, a weekly blog carnival.  Click on this link and get in on the action.  You know you want to, and all the cool kids are doing it.