Some Lenten Thoughts

I don't know, I started this project as just something to kind of explore all the ways that the Jedi Path has helped me with my Christian walk.  I was going to go through every tenet of the Jedi Compass, but since my surgery, I've found renewed interest in other things.  Still I thought I'd share what I've done thus far.  Maybe I'll complete it one day.  


The Force: Light and Dark

In the fiction, we learn that the Force has two sides- light and dark.  Oftentimes, in the Jedi Community, we talk about the dichotomy of Light and Dark with regards to the ethics, morals and personality.  Discussions about what actions are light and what actions are dark circle the air until it comes down to “sometimes even pursuits of the light lead us acts of darkness.”  As such, a Jedi learns early on that there is a whole spectrum of grey that needs to be accounted for.  I’ve had discussions where people equate the light and dark to God and Satan.  

For my own explorations, Light and Dark take on multiple meanings.  I can think of it in terms of the actions we take and the actions we do not take.  I can look at it from the perspective of Selfishness and Selflessness, which is one of the ways that George Lucas himself described each aspect of the Force.  I have contemplated it from the emotional ranges an6 d their impact on the psyche.  From personal narrative and external narrative.  And even worked through discussions of light and dark to grapple with larger questions such as “Why does God allow evil to exist?”

I grew up in an abusive home during the first 6 years of my life.  During my 7th year, my foster parents and the Department of Human Services worked very hard to help me discover that the world was not full of evil men.  So when an angel of the Lord came to me and told me that I needed to return to Christianity….I had questions.

What made the Christian God any better than the gods I was following up to this point?
If the Christian God is truly Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent, why would He allow evil to exist?  
Why let innocent children continually be abused?  Why allow murder to continue?

The cookie-cutter answer I got from the churches simply infuriated me: Because Adam and Eve; it’s to bring you closer to Him; or my ever favorite- he doesn’t, that’s why he created you!  These answers leave you to the decisions that:

1) Because Adam & Eve: God isn’t actually omniscient, omnipotent or omnipresent.  He’s lying to us about all this in a way to manipulate everyone.

2) It brings you closer to him: God is a manipulative bastard.

3) God created you! : Clearly that means he’s not omni-anything, because he needs to rely on a human to do everything…which means he’s just like any other “benevolent” god.

When I got to the Force Realist Community, my answers to these burning questions about God’s reason for allowing evil to exist became the primary focus of my exploration on the topic of Light and Dark.  

These different contemplations led me to a better understanding of the role Free Will plays in the history of the world.  From the beginning, Adam & Eve were given Free Will to choose for themselves the future.  So often we blame them as the first of us for our sinful ways- but the truth is that we cannot guarantee that even if they were upstanding holy people that their children wouldn’t have fallen from grace and launched us into what we are today.

In an objective view of what the Bible says, I had to learn a hard truth- God is not all-good.  Not in the sense of what we try to make him out to be.  If you read the Bible, you see clear times when God’s morality does not fall into line of what our morality is.  As a result of this, we’re told “That’s because you’re thinking with the mind of a human, not the mind of God.”  But this answer spells out the same problem: So God can get away with things that man cannot…

Think about for a moment.  God can kill off whomever he wants.  He can send people in to massacre an entire city (Jericho), He can halt an entire family line by having them swallowed up by the ground over the transgressions of the head of the house (Korah, Dathan and Abiram), and all other manner of atrocities….but humans cannot do the same on their own.  They must first seek the approval of God to do so.

One might argue “Well, that’s because God sees things in the future we do not.”  Then we’re left with a dilemma- why not kill off the sinner before they do unrepairable damage?

This is truly where the contemplation of a Light and Darkside of the Force pulled together the Bible in a view that I couldn’t get out of a church.  The satori moment came when I realized that Job had his own interpretation of what transpired around him:

“Shall we accept good from God, and not הָרָע”.  This word “הָרָע” is the word for “evil”.  The Septuagint reads “κακὰ” which is used for “evil” or “wickedness”.  This means that it was well known by the author of the story that God is not “all-good” in the sense of how we talk Him up today.

But that doesn’t strip Him of the title “Holy” or even “Righteous”- those are things by which we can give more moral grey area than we do when we say “good”.  In order for a person to truly be “Righteous” they need to make hard decisions when presented with the circumstances.  And Holy is defined by the head of the pantheon- in the case of Christianity, it is the God of Abraham.

It is in this understanding that Job recognizes God both visits good upon people, and evil upon them.  It is likely that Job even believed that there was the possibility that evil was visited upon him because of someone else’s actions- but rather than demand of God an answer as to what he could do to weed out the unrighteous in his midsts, he chose to neither speak good nor evil of anyone in his party unless they dared to ask him to curse God.  We don’t know the depths of his contemplation, only the results of them based on the Book of Job.

So it’s from here that the lessons of Light and Dark begin to truly manifest.  Once I had the very basics of how these discussions could unfold in various discussions, and how they related to the concept of “Free Will”, my contemplations of the Biblical Narrative took on a whole new perspective.

First, I suppose I need to clarify the key importance of “Free Will” in the discussion of “Why God allows bad things to happen.”  It goes to an age old discussion on why you should never cast a love spell on someone.  Whether it works or not, you will never know- because you’ve put out the intention.  If we are created in God’s Image, as the Bible states, I believe that this means we inherited emotions from Him.  It’s in those emotions that we find throughout our lives that what we want are genuine relationships- not fake ones.  I believe, that this is at the heart of why humanity was given Free Will- God wants genuine and sincere relationships.  Jesus hints at this with the verses corresponding to “not all who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter into the kingdom of heaven…”.

But Free Will means that we have choices to contend with.  If God exercised a dictatorship like what we see in North Korea, then adherence to His Word wouldn’t come from a place of sincerity, it would be out of a sense of obligation.  That, in and of itself, does not demonstrate mutual respect for the creator on our part, or his Creation on his part.

Thus, what we see in the Bible, as sacrilegious as this may be to most of my fellow Christian readers, is that God’s own struggle is with balancing His role as the God of Gods, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, His want for a relationship with us, and His respect for the Free Will He has imparted upon us.

From here, we can see how the discussion on the Light and Dark sides of the Force can come to life.  Whether you believe that the Force is something outside of God, something which flows from Him, or even that it is simply a word used to help facilitate a metaphorical construct of how every little detail impacts something else, the contemplation on how God’s energy moves the Force remains the same.

With this in mind, here are some contemplations you can begin using as you work through the Bible:

1. When you read a Biblical Story, consider how every action is both light and dark.  Within the confines of the story itself, ask “For good or for bad, why would God choose such actions?”.  Remember, you don’t have to agree with the actions God took in the story.  For a long time, these things upset me, but as I increased my own understanding of each action and prayed for wisdom to understand- my compassion for the decisions of others grew, and I was able to fully realize the line in what is called the “Skywalker Code” which reads “Jedi respect all life, in any form.”
2. How did some of God’s actions (Light or Dark) attract or detract from God’s want to cultivate a world of people who love both Himself and each other the way He loves us?
3. Instead of looking at the 10 Commandments as rules you need to follow, analyze them with the idea of “What kind of obstacles (darkness) did God want to help us avoid by putting them into place?”, “What darkness have I experienced as a result of violating this commandment?”, “What caused God determine that these 10 Commandments would bring about the most light into the world?”
4. Finally, contemplate what you do that is light and dark in the pursuit of your faith.  How do your actions of light or dark attract or detract from the Jedi’s Mission to be Guardians of Peace?

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