What about the Dark Side?

What About the Dark Side?

It sort of seems that I’ve hit a lead here with my writing that I continually come back to – the Star Wars Analogy. I keep feeling like there’s a lot to it, and it has taken a role in my prayer life, so I want to examine it further here. I want to use the symbol of Star Wars to better understand my faith, since Star Wars is so tiny, yet thorough in the world that it has created and its many fan fiction authors have given incredible life in the great collection of Star Wars books. Catholicism, on the other hand, is so big – of course it is incredibly thorough at the same time, but it seems like at least where I’m at now, I have a better grasp of the Star Wars galaxy than I do of the Catholic galaxy. I’ve been reading Star Wars books since I was 7 – Catholic books since I was 18. I pray that in examining this analogy, as I have a deal already here, I’ll be able to better grasp the parallels, and also contrast those areas where the two do not line up.

One contrast I’d like to say right off the bat, which I realized starkly this morning in meditation, is that in Star Wars the emphasis for those religious devoted to “the force” is always on mission first, mysticism, second. They are literally always concerned with doing something. Gotta go stop this bad guy, fight the sith, stop this disease, relieve people caught in some natural disaster. Jedi are extremely mission oriented. By this sense, they are all full time missionaries. The vocation of a Jedi Knight is to be obedient to the Jedi Council and go on whatever week, month or year long missions the council asks them to go on. Padawans learn all about the tenants of their faith, first, then they set out with a Master to undergo further training in the field, helping them with their Missions, until they become a full fledged knight themselves and take on their own padawans. They are expected to stay in line with their religions teachings, of course, and meditation and connection with the Force is a must for what they do. But that’s just the thing; once the Jedi undergo their missions, the Force is a means to accomplish good. It’s not so much undertaken for the sake of itself as it is for some other end.

To live in the Church of God is different than this, fundamentally, by a swap of the priorities. I was listing out the top three tenants of my personal spirituality to God this morning, in a discernment exercise, and I found undoubtedly that the top priority of my spiritual life is to be organically unified with Jesus as a part of his mystical body, to live in intimate love with him, and as it is hand-in-hand, to live in communion of course with his body made manifest today, the Catholic Church under his chosen Vicar, Francis. While I put union with Jesus as a mystical lover and communion with Jesus’s body as an institution in the same sentence, because the two acts really swirl around each other and are in essence the same end, they do require different acts of will to pursue and so I listed them as the first two tenants, rather than the first one. I listed mystical union with Jesus as a lover first, then communion with the Church second, not because the second is an afterthought, but because the later does require the former personal relationship to be a genuine communion. Third, I listed mission: fighting against the forces of evil with God and the Angels, as a member of the army of Light, to bring souls into the Light for which we were created. This war of darkness and light is as well two-fold. It has two fronts, but is one war – the humanitarian war and the mystical war. Satan puts people through terrible living conditions – hunger, sickness, war, depression, in order to ‘ruin the soil’ that the seed of the Kingdom will have a hard time growing. The first front of the war, therefore, is to satisfy the direct effects of Satan’s evil by helping humanitarian problems, that the soil might be pruned for them to accept Jesus as their lover and savior.

These three tenants lead to an important question – why is it so important that we accept Jesus as our personal lover, and then that we help others do the same? Well, because it is for this union – with God – that mankind was created. In our infancy, we had this unity. We were born with it. Satan, leading us astray, robbed us of original holiness, of original light, and since then we have been born to original sin, to darkness. In original sin, we are all born incomplete. Jesus restores our completeness. This restoration to holiness is the center of all religious pursuits, and the priorities above certainly stem from it. The reason that this personal restoration is of more importance than the restoration of others is because, well, this war has many battlefields – it takes place in every single soul. If our grand mission is to raise the flag of God over every battlefield, than the battlefield of our own soul is certainly the one that we are most responsible for. In this way, it is not selfish to think of ourselves first – it is responsible, as well as a total bliss, to achieve our soul’s purpose. Only when God is truly our greatest love can we spread that love to others.

Now then, the next comparison to be made – what about the dark side? In Star Wars, those persons adept to using the force are distinguished either by alignment to the light side or the dark side of the force. This is, indeed, a very central point to all Star Wars books – some people use the force for good, some, for evil. The force itself is described as having a light and dark side – wise characters often remark that the force is not good, the force is not bad, and people choose to use whatever halves of it that they do, embracing either the light or dark aspects of the force.

In this regard, the analogy fuddles. It reminds us of Zoorastrian Theology more than Catholic Theology, where there is a good and bad diety fighting it out in an eternal war. In Catholic Theology, God is all light – he has no dark side at all. Those with friendship with God don’t choose to either use that friendship for good or evil.

Let’s zoom back in on Star Wars. Let’s get a good look at what the dark and light side’s are, as defined by their two biggest representatives: the Jedi and the Sith, and their respective codes.

The Jedi Code:

There is no emotion, there is peace.

There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.There is no passion, there is serenity.There is no chaos, there is harmony.There is no death, there is the Force.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.

The Sith Code:

Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

So the jedi code is all about finding peace. Not being too caught up by feelings. Seeking joy in what is, pursuing what is through study, recognizing the harmony in the universe and not despairing at the transcience of death.

  

 The Sith code is all about living in the temporal. Habitually seeking those fleeting feelings of the flesh for added strength, to be used for vain pursuits of conquest and power, to vehemently resist all ‘chains’ of self discipline.

           

In short, the Jedi Code repeats and repeats, there is more than what is readily apparent. The Sith Code says that no, there is nothing more, get as most as you can out of this world of flesh.

            By this perspective, the contrast between the dark and light sides of the force, in our real world, is easily grasped. However, the force must not be thought of so much as a metaphor for God as a metaphor for life. This is, after all, how it is more often described throughout the novels – the force of life itself.

            

Those who are aligned with the light side of the force are aligned with the light of God – the true substance of reality, the more beyond our tangible grasp, the love, the peace, the harmony. Those aligned with the dark side of force shun the light of God. They prefer the darkness, to not see that there is more than what can be readily experienced by the flesh. They pursue the feelings of the flesh, as well as vain pursuits, prideful games of supremacy, and seek to have no restraints over their love of fleshy sins.

            

It would seem that Jediism is best represented then, in our world, by the Catholic Church, the called forth communion of followers of the Light. The dark side does not have an institution, so much, but a cultural leaning of people who buy into the lies of Satan, the former lightbearer made hideously black by his own gutting of himself of the light of God, which was once his great beauty.

            

As Catholics, then, a huge opponent that we face in fighting for the Army of Light is those followers of the dark side of life, those real-life siths, who unknowingly or otherwise serve the purposes of Satan by following greed and desires. By greedily robbing from the poor by industry or otherwise, contributing to a sex crazed society that destroys women’s self worth, or contributing to other evils that create humanitarian disasters that make it harder for those affected to accept God and fulfill their human purpose.

            

We must also always recognize the siths in us. None of us are purely beings of light, nor are any of us completely devoid of life, either. We must allow the light – the spirit – to grow, and the dark to shrink, by God’s great grace. And as a needed complement to this internal quest, we must also take up our lightsaber of love and fight the evil in this world all around.