We Are All Wrapped Up In This Mystery

I am greatly in love with symbols. I love to think about the great mysteries through analogies, using intuitive, easy and fun to grasp images to help understand the images which are much more complex to understand. My former post titled Catholic Jedi is a good example of this. Lately the idea of us Catholics being very similar to Jedi has been on my mind a lot...and I was blown away today, meditating on it, of indeed how much more we are. As Fr. Richard Rohr often says, we must not ever get too caught up in our images, remembering that God and his mysteries will always surpass them - hence, the word mystery.

I've been reading a Star Wars book, and much of my discernment has been guided by it. I've been searching, for my life, something translates within Catholicism directly to the Jedi order. This has been a challenge. For a few days I've found this translation in a Missionary Order called Pime. Then for a few days, rather, in a Lay Missionary Order whose name I forgot. Then, after that, I started to think about becoming a member of the Knights of Columbus, as that has a lot of parallels.

As usually, when I struggle to make a decision, and nothing really feels perfect, I get pretty stressed out. So I spent a night looking at all different volunteer corps within the Catholic Church to find one that would best satisfy my SciFi fantasies. This might seem like an odd method of discerning the Lord's call for my life, but as my spiritual director told me, God knows that I love symbols, and so that is certainly a way he chooses to speak to me. So I took that to the extreme.

But this morning, in meditation, trying to figure this all out, I was sort of complaining that the Church was so big, had so many people, so many diverse orders...it was really bogging down my Jedi analogy, which is just one, simple order.

Then it was like...oh yeah, duh. That's a good thing. The Church is better than the Jedi order. It's way bigger. It does way more good work because it is so darn diverse; instead of having just one mission, of direct service to the Republic and fighting those who oppose it, the Church has so many diverse mission fields in which it serves its grand purpose; building up the Kingdom of God. (see my post about the Kingdom of God, of which I wrote that it is, among many great things, an awareness that God is already King.) In this way, the many different people in this body, this earthly institution, can serve our unique missions in unique ways so that together we can all do everything.

In the Church, each one of us folks called forth to divinity has a life of mystery and ministry before us, with all the wonder and good which the Jedi do. It's up to us to figure out what it is. But I think that it has a lot less to do with figuring out than it does with just pursuing God and sanctifying who we already are to his Kingdom.

All of us in this Called Forth, eklasia, Church, are wrapped up in this mystery. We are called to be Jedi. Just a really cool sort of Jedi that includes 1/6th of all human beings. One where we can all contribute to the war of good vs. evil in the ways in which we are all individually called to; in communities, in foreign nations, in our backyards, in soup kitchens, in hospitals, in prisons, on the streets, in the classroom, in the office, in the forest...anywhere.

All darkness, all evil, all sadness, all hate, all war...all things wrong in the world...these are all manifestations of the great war between good and evil spilling over into our world. When we bring light to a dark place, bring love where there is hate, joy where their is sadness, companionship where there is loneliness, peace where their are desensions and war - food where there are hungry, water where there are thirsty, clothes where there are naked, we are fighting against the evil that has spilled over into our world. We are serving God in the war that has fallen from the heavens and taken its battles to our hearts, to our lives. Satan tries to do anything he can to distract us from the reality that God is King, often by giving us all sorts of material trials as many nations currently undergo, or even many cities with crippling poverty and failing infrastructure. By contributing our funds and compassion to these people Satan's weapons are aimed at, we fight to destroy Satan's tactics and nourish the soil for the Kingdom of God to grow.

Love is our weapon. What does Love lead me to do? In the face of a dark world, what does the voice of love say? What does my sword and my lightsaber hum to defeat? In what way does the Lord of Lords ask me to fight against the darkness of Satan's wrath?

We all have a ministry, a mission, and a purpose in this fight. We are all wrapped up in this mystery. God puts in each of our hearts the grace of love, our lightsaber, so that we can use it to fight evil where it reigns. To fight loneliness with companionship. Hunger with food. Ignorance with enlightenment. Despair with Hope. Atheism and Agnosticism with the truth of God.

We must be great humanitarians then, if not in vocation and career, than in our everyday in the ways God calls us to be. We must observe darkness, wrongness with the world, with the fuller perspective of why it is really there; it is a spillover battleground we live in from the war between darkness and light. We must understand our efforts in this war as being direct contributions to God's cause, the cause of light, and we need to make those suffering aware of this reality as well; that suffering is a result of the fall of man, Satan's foothold in our world and our lives, and that healing and compassion is found in new birth in baptism and new life in Christ.

We must all know that the great victory in this war has already been won on Cavalry, on the Cross that surpasses time and place as the deciding salvation of all men, that perfectly redeems us and unifies us with him.

All we must do now, as those Called Forth to divinity and salvation, is make the world aware. Aware that salvation is there for anyone in Christ. Aware that divinity is there for anyone in Christ, to be rescued from darkness, from Satan's grip, from death.  Aware that God is King, which equates membership in the Kingdom of God.

The orders inside of the Catholic Church are too narrow to translate to the Jedi Order, and the Church itself is too vast. This is because analogies only take us too far.

Yet for the sake of my symbol driven mind, it is more so than a direct translation that all Catholics indeed are called to be Jedi; yet the orders which we are called to are beautifully unique and much more perfectly suited to our individual persons and strengths.

We are a mystical army of love, of sorts, with many different specialities, divisions and corps. We all have a mission and ministry within this army that is perfectly suited for us.

Yet our unity and brotherhood is truly worldwide...universal, and Catholic, big c and small.