MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, and the Rise of our Contemporary Unitarian Universalism

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU
Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, and the Rise of our Contemporary Unitarian Universalism

A Homily

13 December 2015

James Ishmael Ford

Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California

As you may have heard, the first film in the third Star Wars trilogy will be opening around the country this coming Friday. You may have also noticed how this is a big deal. It threads my own generation, who were the first to be captured by Hero’s quest pasted onto a space opera with verve and panache. But also it also threads together the generation following who lived into the much higher production values and rather darker themes of the prequel trilogy. And now it looks like that thread will be running through a third generation, who already knew all six of the previous films looping them as technology allowed, as many times as their hearts desired.

Many who wonder at the staying power of these films over generations have pointed to that connection to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces,” with its thesis of a great myth that plays out in culture after culture. Now I watch a third generation caught up in this story with at least as much enthusiasm as so many of us felt in May of 1977, and I find it hard to argue with Professor Campbell’s premise

We’ve just heard a number of our youth express how they see commonalities with our own spirituality within that Star Wars universe. They find the right of conscience and democratic process held up as central to anything worthwhile. They find our seven principals as sacred phrases that can become spiritual mantras. They find the power of rites of passage and quests. They find a reminder to respect the golden rule. They find harmonies of light and dark, serving and protecting, emotion and violence. They find a quest for universal community, with peace, liberty, & justice for all. And, they see the interdependent web is the Force. I’m impressed.

And. There is a real historical connection between the Star Wars franchise and how a majority of we Unitarian Universalists see our spirituality today. At least that’s my thesis. I find it connected directly to the mythologist Joseph Campbell and more specifically to the series of six interviews conducted by Bill Moyers that formed the core of the Power of Myth episodes that showed on PBS starting in 1988.

Now the spiritual current that is Unitarian Universalism is a uniquely American manifestation. There are others in the world who use the name Unitarian, and we share some things with them. But, Unitarian Universalism as a coherent spirituality rises with the Enlightenment. And it starts, uniquely in Western spiritual traditions, as rationalism.

However, no sooner did we separate from the mainstream of American Protestant Christianity, than we birthed another perspective as equally important, Transcendentalism. The influence of our Transcendentalists on who we are is as powerful as the rationalist impulse out of which we formed. I suggest we have from these origins two leading styles, deeply connected, but namable in their difference. I like to call those perspectives “mind” and “heart.”

We have shifted that leading focus a couple of times in our history. And so for most of the twentieth century we were led by the humanist movement and with that our rationalist impulse, right through the nineteen eighties. Then something happened. There was another great shifting, toward leading with the heart into a deeper appreciation of myth and feeling. Lacking a better term, I call it our new spirituality.

Of course there’s no hard binary division between these perspectives, nor has it ever been. The Chinese perhaps can guide us here with their word hsien, which sometimes means mind, and which sometimes means heart. Another way of looking at our contemporary shifting could be to say we moved from a broadly Freudian perspective in the twentieth century, to a broadly Jungian perspective here at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

And. I think we can mark that shift among us from those Power of Myth videos. Which, I can’t say with certainty, but I’m moderately confident were in the early nineties watched in pretty much every Unitarian Universalist congregation across the continent, discussed, and argued over, and gradually leading that shift of perspective to where we find ourselves today.

A small thesis. But I stand by it.

And, it has a direct Star Wars connection. Those videos of Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, the first five of the six, they were filmed at George Lucas’ s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. That ranch was built by the Star Wars franchise. The Power of Myth interviews that so touched, and triggered our new spirituality might never have been made without those Star Wars movies.

Interesting, isn’t it?

And so, my take away from all this? It’s brief. It’s simple. It’s that the Force may in fact be with us.

So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.