Olive Crest United Methodist Church
7180 North 60th Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68152

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Rev. Debra Tompsett-Welch

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The Spiritual Life

June 1999

Learning to be a hero for God And Star Wars; The Phantom Menace

By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

You know, we spend a lot of time worrying about what we expose our children to. That is why we put age limits on movies and warnings on television shows. We think adults can handle, or understand, complicated situations and tragedies that would be too much for a child. And we are often right, some situations are destructive to their healthy growth and development. But we forget about a child that we all have, who is constantly being exposed to these influences, our child within. We all carry in us our own inner child and we don't spend much time caring for him or her. We think that adults can handle "adult" situations because of our developed powers of reasoning. We can put the event into context with the rest of our belief systems and disagree or expand on the event.

But do we do that? Most of the time we seem to be going around just accepting what we see on television or movies with little thought to their meaning. Sure a movie can be just for fun, but not if we let it influence us. If we let something become an "enthusiasm" for us, it is shaping us and we are responsible for guiding our inner child's life as we would be for those children we love all around us. The old computer phrase GIGO, "garbage in, garbage out" comes to mind. How do I turn "garbage" into fruits and vegetables? What do I fertilize my inner garden with? To grow healthy mental "fruits" I have to spend some effort on it, just "blowing it off" is not enough. If images of greed, pain and suffering are bombarding my mind, I need to balance them is with a positive ideas or images, or risk letting them define my whole life. To not let my world be dominated by violence and fear, I have to have a competing world in my mind that I can use as an ideal to compare with the world I am exposed to in television and movies. If I do this work of paying attention to my inner life, of seeing the Kingdom of God to use more traditional language, I can view the outer world in different ways.

Let me give you example from my own life. I went to see the new Star Wars movie, "The Phantom Menace". Then I read a review of it. Basically the reviewer said it was an advertisement for toys. Another review on the radio said it was too simplistic and targeted for children, a disappointment because it didn't deal with the big issues of history and tragedy of cultures in conflict that it could have. I am reminded of what Master Yoda said the in the Empire Strikes Back Star Wars movie, "Wars do not make one great", or in this case, tragedy is not the only definition of good. Do you start to see how your inner world highlights what you expect and pay attention to in the outer world?

I saw a different movie than those reviewers. I saw a movie focused on individuals and their struggles to live heroic, good lives, or not. In fact George Lucas agrees with me, in an interview with Bill Moyers in Time magazine (April 26, 1999) Moyers said: "I hear many young people today talk about a world that's empty of heroism, where there are no more noble things to do." Lucas replied: "Heroes come in all sizes, and you don't have to be a giant hero. You can be a very small hero. It's just as important to understand that accepting self-responsibility for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people - these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives. You don't have to get into a giant laser-sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become a hero." (pg 94) Can I be a hero if I am a klutz? Do I have to look good, be admired by my peers in order to be important, to be a hero in the pageant of history? There is a comic character in the movie called Jar Jar Binks. He is so clumsy that he gets thrown out of his city and society, yet he is instrumental in saving his entire planet. He is a hero, even if he trips every three minutes and even if he is "very" annoying. He is still a hero. What we look like on the outside is NOT the definition of who we are on the inside, that place where we choose what we will be in life and who we shall serve, the good, God or not. Where we confront our choice to be a hero or not. And there is much in our world that would like to define us only by our outsides, without any thought to our sacred value or to our freedom to choose our own destiny.

I found in the movie that George Lucas' inner world and my own overlapped each other and we shared our worlds for a time. Perhaps because we are both looking at questions of meaning in life and the conflict of good and evil in the world. Mr. Lucas struggled with them in that same interview by Bill Moyers, Of Myth and Men from Time magazine (pages 90,92). "... The film is ultimately about the dark side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. The issue of greed, of getting things and owning things and having things, and not being able to let go of things, is the opposite of compassion - of not thinking of yourself all the time. These are the two sides - the good force and the bad force. They're the simplest parts of a complex cosmic construction."

They then go on to talk about your own individual responsibilities in this conflict between good and evil, which is the context within which we make heroic choices. Moyers: "He's us?" (Darth Maul, the bad guy) Lucas: "Yes, he's the evil within us." ...Moyers: "I think it's going to be very hard for the audience to accept that this innocent boy, Anakin Skywalker, can ever be capable of the things that we know happen later on. (When he become Darth Vader) I think about Hitler and wonder what he looked like at nine years old. Lucas: "There are a lot of people like that. And that's what I wonder. What is it in the human brain that give us the capacity to be as evil as human beings have been the past and are right now?" "... I think it comes out of a rationale of doing certain things and denying to yourself that you're actually doing them. If people were really to sit down and honestly look at themselves and the consequences of their actions, they would try to live their lives a lot differently. One of the main themes in The Phantom Menace is of organisms having to realize they must live for their mutual advantage."

How do we chose the good over the evil? How do we live lives of heroic virtue? Even if we are small, can we live a heroic life? Is the wisdom of the past part of our modern present? Are the questions humans have struggled with so long, still the questions of a modern "virtual" world? Does God still give meaning to a people so cut off from their roots, who take their very identities from commercials and media, instead of history and family? If we, as people of faith, wish to live lives for God, we must have a vision of the heroic call of God to live out the compassion of God. To do that, we need an inner vision of what that compassion looks like. To translate that vision into action, we need to pay attention to raising our inner child as an adult brother or sister of Christ. George Lucas has spent his life struggling to clarify his inner vision, we who have even greater resources in the Bible and in our church's communal life can do no less. He is living out his quest for the heroic life as a movie maker, we are called to different places and jobs, but we are called to be even greater visionaries. Both for the sake of others and the Kingdom of God, but also for the sake of our child within. Our child who desires to live a heroic life for God. To be show the world a vision of living heroically as a brother or sister of Christ, and truly bringing peace to torn and broken world.

Your brother-in-Christ, fellow worker in the struggle to build the Kingdom of God: Reverend Michael Lee Burgess

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