So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed “to bring balance to The Force,” but I never understood what it meant.
Star Wars is extremely dualistic–there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.
The “good side”, the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide “balance” while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren’t. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.
I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that’s about as far as it goes.
I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke’s vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.
Can anyone square this circle?
Edit: It’s funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.
The oversimplified explanation: they are stupid/unwise/shallow. I couldn’t have said it better myself than your last sentence, that’s exactly the narrative purpose of the prequel Jedi order.
They have the correct words memorized, but they don’t understand what it actually means. Anakin is able to quote “unconditional love is encouraged, it is just attachment that is forbidden”. When he goes to Yoda after having nightmares of the future, he tells Anakin that he must learn to let go of the thing he is afraid to lose, since it is just a part of life. Is any of that wrong? Not particularly, but was Yoda unconditionally loving him? Or did he uncaringly spout dogma at him when he could clearly tell he was struggling. No questions of what it was about, no follow up, no kind words, no empathy, no nothing.
Then there’s the clouding of the Force. So, they could generally see the future before this point, and now they can’t. And they don’t think this is odd or concerning? They’re not on their toes enough to expect a trap or a plot twist? Mace floats the idea of telling the senate in episode 3, many years after it started. Just because they are the ones that presuppose they are always trying to do the right thing doesn’t mean that they will always have the answers, always be strong, or even not just fooling themselves into thinking they have an honest heart for the truth. Pretending otherwise led to the downfall of the free world.
Yoda can rattle off “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” in Episode 1, but that’s exactly what happened to them. They feared losing to the Dark Side, feared losing their influence on the Republic, so they integrated further with the government, making both weaker (which always happens when you mix religion and government), which caused Anakin to doubt because they were so transparent, then completely abandon the ideology because he saw no place for himself in the world after making a single mistake.
I am all too familiar with the mindset as someone who was raised very Christian. Jesus himself even criticizes the practice of “tithing the mint and cumin, but ignoring thr weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Basically. the religious leaders of the time took the old law’s command to give a tithe (one tenth) of your income to God SO seriously that they’d dump out every slice on their spice rack into a table once a week, and carefully divide it into 10 equal pieces, and give a tenth to God. Yet they completely missed the point of religion, the concepts and real people that actually matter. Even for the small things, why did God want them to tithe their belongings? Not because he came down and grabbed it from the altar every night, but so it could go to people who needed it but couldn’t afford it. Yet the religious leaders neglected the orphans and widows in the community. The religious leaders wee “so good” by being “so dedicated” to thr tithing command, but guess whose job it was to distribute the tithes to the needy? Guess who actually kept it. They were too enthralled with the specifics (and their own additional dogma) that when God himself came, they killed him because they didn’t recognize his teachings as the same thing they “followed”. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, it is a universal truth about humanity, and unfortunately even so-called Christians have learned nothing from this.
Similar to Anakin, I left my local church of over a decade because my mom got cancer, and nobody said a thing about it to me. Nobody reached out after I left either. I called out one guy on it later, and he was basically like “yeah but she’ll go to heaven so no big deal right? I don’t know what you want me to say” Like yeah maybe, even if I fully believe that (which I’m not sure I do anymore) or in Buddhism where we all become a part of something greater, I still have emotions and it would sure be great if anyone cared enough to help me process them. If God gave us emotions, it was for a purpose, not to ignore them.
The first time I heard that line from Yoda about sensing much fear in Anakin, I was pissed. Here’s this 9 year old slave boy, a child taken from his mother, his home, his everything and surrounded and poked and prodded by all these weirdos…of course he’s afraid you fucking idiot. How dare you spew that crap. To paraphrase a great Jedi, “Yes the Jedi deserved it, and I hope they burn in hell!”
I’ve learned that systems serve themselves, first and always. There is no better lesson of that than Christianity. The historical Jesus was basically a radical hippie, but he was buried first by Paul and then the institution of the Church, which didn’t even feel the need to purge the story of the Pharisees or the Good Samaritan from the Bible, two stories which obviously call out the negative religious impulses the Church is founded on.
Yes, emotions are there to be listened to. A big part of waking up is taking your feelings seriously instead of burying them or denying them or ignoring them. I fucking HATE Christian funerals because they spend almost all their time convincing themselves that God is Good and The Person is Happy in Heaven, and it’s absolutely a terrible way to deal with grief and maybe even anger. I went to a funeral for a woman who had been literally disemboweled by her mentally-ill son, and, yeah, you can imagine the questions about God that were not asked at the service.
By ignoring your emotions, the risk is that you either become a zombie, miserably unhappy and not sure why, or you get completely overtaken by your shadow, the parts you are trying to deny (what happened to Anakin, and what happens to all those gay evangelists caught in bathroom stalls).
I don’t know where you are on your spiritual journey, but I left Christianity to become an atheist and now I’m trying to build some spirituality back into my life to keep the suicidal nihilism at bay. Britt Hartley’s YouTube channel No Nonsense Spirituality has a lot of good ideas.
I’m sorry you lost your mom.
I agree. That’s why religion and politics don’t mix. Someone truly spiritual is bad at playing politics, a politician can rarely be genuine. So then it just becomes a self sustaining system that doesn’t do or help anyone.
I agree.
Right now I’m just done for now attending anywhere and mostly with studying anything, aside from a few things like looking into Hinduism a bit, visiting with someone to a different sect of Christianity, stuff like that. I’d be pretty surprised if there was no intelligent design or greater purpose to the world. I do believe some form of spirituality is important to the human experience. I’m not married to any idea at the moment though.
Thank you, that’s more than anyone else said :) I haven’t lost her yet, but it’s just a matter of time. A few more years at most.
In my travels through religion, I find that people cluster in predictable ways around EVERY religion. Most people just want to think they live in an orderly universe and can manipulate it with superficial piety. Other people really want to use religion to be better people (usually more compassionate), others want to use it to be worse (tribalistic), and the smallest number are actually looking for an experience of the divine.
Though there is that commonality, there are some wild differences between religions. Like Christianity is very much based around faith in supernatural stuff. If you don’t believe, you’re not part of the Church and you are cast out because your doubt may infect others and thereby send them into Hell for eternity. I wish, as someone who doesn’t believe, that I could find a spiritual home, but I can’t find one within Christianity. But not all religions work that way.
Good luck with your exploration (and your family stuff!