May the force be with you

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 4, 2014

Does a concept like George Lucas’ “The Force” represent most Unitarian Universalists’ idea of the Divine?

When film maker George Lucas rediscovered his copy of Joseph Campbell’s book “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” he had already written two drafts of the Star Wars screenplay. He had loved that book when he read it in school, Rereading the story of the Hero’s Journey, he could see the various elements of that journey: the awakening, the resistance to leaving home, supernatural help, leaving home, the training period where the young hero becomes strong, the battle with evil, the temptation to become evil, finding out that evil is part of you, (Luke, I am your father), resisting your new training, losing your patience with the wisdom, choosing to fight rather than use the power of the mystery…. Reading about the archetypes: the father (Darth Vader), the goddess (Leia) the mentor (Obi Wan,) the oracle (Yoda), the trickster (Han Solo) The story almost told itself. And, despite some of the mistakes that sprang from its being created mostly by white people, it spoke to people of many cultures.

People responded to the description of The Force. Obi Wan tells Luke “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” We watched him train his intuition along with his body. We thought “I could do that. I almost can do that now. I’ve felt The Force.”

Most people have felt a power flow through them at some time, and we hear ourselves saying words we did not know were there, doing deeds we did not know we could do, being “in the zone” when we were playing a game or making an athletic effort, where it felt that we could do nothing wrong, that the stars were aligned, that we were in the flow.

Unitarian forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a human being is a stream whose source is hidden, whose being is pouring in from somewhere else. As the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere, every particular person is contained in the (Force) Over-soul, the Unity within which we are all made one with all other. There is a common heart. All sincere conversation is its worship, all right action is submission to it. It is that force that makes us feel enlarged by doing good and diminished by doing wrong.

Within each person is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us. When it breathes through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affection, it is love “

The only word I changed in there is that, instead of saying “The Force,” Emerson said “The Oversoul.”

Emerson and his friends were reading the newly available translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts, and their new theology, called Transcendentalism, was shaped by their relationship with these Eastern Religions.

Conversation among religions is ongoing about whether this deep power is separate from us, but can be in us, whether it is us at our best or something greater than we are, whether it is only good, and evil is only its absence, or whether there is a separate force of evil, or whether both creation and destruction are contained in it, and we need to be careful about calling something either good or evil. Lucas made those choices.

The Force is strong in some and less in others. The Force has a “Dark” side (the culture in which we live uses the word “dark” to denote evil. It might more properly be used to denote the inability to see well, or move about with confidence. The Hebrew scripture says God created light and darkness and they were both good.)

So the Force has an evil side, or a destructive side. Carl Jung, upon whose work Joseph Campbell based his, would have called it The Shadow. Jung said that the archetypal Hero’s Journey mirrors the journey of the soul toward wholeness. In order to find balance, which is what gives one power, the oracle Yoda says, one must meet, fight and come to a resolution with the Shadow.

I invite you to feel as if you are in training, using your intuition to feel the Force, learning when to try and when to let it carry you. When your kids are too much, when your parents make you sad, when you get the bad diagnosis, when your life turns upside down, this is the time to get still and feel that deep power in which we exist. If we practice it in small ways, when life is going pretty well, we’ll be better at it when life takes one of its surprise spins. May the Force be with you.

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