Science, Fiction, and Fantasy - The NewMythologies(a sermon delivered at the Hamburg Unitarian Universalist Church on March 16, 2003) Science, Fiction, and Fantasy – The New Mythologies I am a Jedi Knight. That’s right. You heard me correctly, A Jedi Knight. Although I didn’t really know this myself until this past week, I probably should have realized it 25 years ago when I first saw Star Wars at the Northwood Cinema in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But at the time I was a naïve Lutheran fervently studying for my confirmation (and by fervently studying, I mean I spent a full five minutes every Saturday afternoon reading my catechism in order to pass the quiz our pastor was sure to give Sunday after service). So, I didn’t realize at that time, while I sat, open-mouthed and wide-eyed in the dark, watching blaster bolts ricochet off of light sabers just what a profound effect that George Lucas and other modern storytellers would have on my spiritual life. But in doing some research for this sermon, I looked into Jediism – the Jedi Religion – an officially recognized religion in Great Britain. Jediism is not, according to their website –actually based on the Jedi Knights from George Lucas’s movies. It says there that “Jedi … embrace Jediism as a real living, breathing religion, and sincerely strive to seek out and emulate real life examples of Jediism in the long rich history of mankind.” They go on to say: “The history of the path of Jediism traverses thought which is well over 5,000 years old. It shares many themes embraced in Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, Catholicism, Taoism, Shinto, Modern Mysticism, the Way of the Shaolin Monks, the Knight's Code of Chivalry and the Samurai Warriors.” It seems these modern Jedi have covered all their bases. But digging a little further into this religion from the future that is rooted so firmly in the past, I found this passage from a litany recited by aspiring priests of Jediism: “I recognize and accept that a true Jedi will always strive to exercise tolerance and discourage fanaticism. I accept that social bigotry is a form of fanaticism - fanaticism is born of fear, "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering." Although I do not necessarily condone or condemn other religions or diverse lifestyles, I do hereby renounce bigotry and fanaticism, which I recognize is based on hate. I abhor terrorism, hate crimes, the violation of women, murder, and robbery. I agree that murder is the highest crime. I choose to serve the Light - not the Darkness which promotes such in the mind and heart of the perpetrators who do such heinous and cowardly acts.” And that’s when it hit me. I am a Jedi. In fact, I could argue that all of us sitting here today are true Jedi, for aren’t these the same principles that we profess as Unitarian Universalists? I guess we shouldn’t find this too surprising as I’m sure many of us have dabbled in or at least studied some or all of the religions cited as precursors of Jediism. But my path to the Force followed a different trail, and one that I think more Jedi have taken than the official website would like us to believe. My path to Jediism went straight through the valley of fiction – Science Fiction and Fantasy to be exact. I was an avid reader as a young boy. Sure I played baseball in the summer, but I spent more hours alone in my room with a book than I ever did on the ball diamond. I started with mysteries – Encyclopedia Brown, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes. Then a wonderful thing happened that changed my life. My sixth grade reading teacher had us read two wonderful fantasies – Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Hobbit. I was hooked. I then plowed through the Lord of the Rings, read a bunch of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, and looked for more fantasy to dive into. But at the time, the mid-seventies, fantasy was not in vogue yet. Dungeons and Dragons was in its infancy, and the world was too messed up to worry about fairies and dwarves. But Science Fiction was still strong, had been strong since the beginning of the nuclear age, and so I turned to Isaac Asimov, who wrote compelling Science Fiction Mysteries as well as spinning sweeping stories about future worlds where humanity had survived the nuclear age and spread across the cosmos. But even with all these new friends – R Daneel Olivaw of Asimov’s robot novels, Frodo and Sam from Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, Valentine Michael Smith of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land – I was still pretty much alone with my fantastic worlds. Other than reruns of Star Trek, you couldn’t find Science Fiction on TV. Sure, my parents kept buying me books, but they didn’t understand my obsession with other worlds. I was a good kid who got good grades and kept quiet in his room. I’m sure they believed I would grow out of this Science Fiction phase. But then Star Wars came and changed the world. Science Fiction became mainstream entertainment. And, by the end of the 70s, due in large part, I am sure, to the success of Dungeons and Dragons, more and more fantasy fiction was being released. My little world of fantasy had become much, much bigger, and I have been able to stay (at least partially) in that world for my entire life, eventually turning my hobby into a career as an editor for the Wizards of the Coast game company and now as a fantasy novelist and short story writer. But that still doesn’t explain how these stories affected my spiritual life. How did I go from a confirmed Lutheran to a Unitarian Universalist / Jedi Knight? Well, it’s all about mythology. Fred Edwords said last week that stories help us understand some part of the world. The folktales he recited told us about the honor and pride of the Irish people. But they did more than that for the Irish people who listened to these stories centuries ago. They helped those people better understand the world they lived in, to better understand their place in the world, and to better understand where they came from so they could make better choices about where they were going. That is exactly what Mythology did for ancient people. Myths were handed down from generation to generation to explain why the sun rose every day, why the moon waxed and waned, why the seasons came and went, how humans came to be on this small rock adrift in a seas of stars, and why we all have to die in the end. Eventually, religions arose out of these myths and people prayed to Ra or Odin or Zeus to make sure that the sun would continue to rise. They would cry out to Osiris or Hela or Hades when a loved one died. They would perform rituals in the name of Geb or Sifa or Athena for a bountiful harvest. Myths and gods helped ancient man find his place in the world, helped him explain the mysteries of life so he could deal with the harsh realities of that life. Today, science has explained away most of those mysteries for us. Over the past several centuries, science has become our mythology. We now not only know that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun, producing night and day as well as the seasons, but we have atomic clocks that mark time to exacting amounts and Doppler radar that can track weather patterns (although TV weathermen don’t seem any more accurate because of it). Science has produced viable theories of the creation of the universe, the forming of the planets, and even the evolution of life on earth – all mysteries that were once explained by the intervention of the gods. But science still cannot explain WHY we live or even why we die. It cannot adequately explain how something so improbable as intelligent life on our planet came to be. Could it all just be coincidence, or did some outside force stir the primordial soup at just the right time to produce a life-giving broth? How did man and ape diverge? What really happened to the dinosaurs? Were these merely accidents of nature or was some hand guiding us toward intelligence and paving the way by eliminating the competition? And Science cannot answer the most important question that man has asked for millennia – the question to which we have only ever found suitable, soothing answers in the form of religion. The question of life after death. Is our time on earth all there is to life? Are we merely here to procreate so that mankind can continue? Doesn’t there have to be more to life than spending 70 or 80 or a hundred years on this rock? And, perhaps more importantly, if this life is all we have, why then in this new, post cold-war, post nuclear information age – why can’t we all get along? These are the kids of questions that science fiction and fantasy literature (yes some of it can actually be considered literature) have tried to answer in their own ways over the years. Jonathan Livingston Seagull finds that there is more to life than flying to your next meal, but he has to be willing to die before he can reach that next plane of existence. Valentine Smith in A Stranger in a Strange Land learns more about love and humanity from the martians who raised him than most humans are willing to swallow, and he ends up paying the price of a true messiah. Asimov tells us in the Foundation series that human motives are predictable in sufficiently large numbers but that all true growth comes from the free will of individuals. These are the stories that helped shape how I view the world. I missed most of the 60s, being just 6 when the 70s came around, but I saw some of what happened in that decade by watching those Star Trek reruns. This is a show that came out in a decade dominated by civil rights. But Gene Roddenberry’s future was a bright one where mankind had left prejudice, hate, and greed in the past. Then, when Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find these same vices on other worlds, Roddenberry was able to use this distance in both time and space to comment on the ills of our own world – ills that science can never overcome, ills that still plague us more than 30 years after the series left the air, ills that can only be treated by a dramatic shift in humanity’s perception of itself – perhaps by an all-encompassing force that surrounds us and protects us – from ourselves. I’d like to leave you with one final thought from the book Illusions by Richard Bach, which probably had a more profound impact on my impressionable teenage mind than any other fantasy story before or since. Illusions is a snapshot of the life of a “reluctant messiah who “came unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne.” Like the meditation reading today, this passage is from a fictional book written by the master, entitled: “Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul.” There are many passages from the handbook cited within the novel, but this one truly spoke to me 20 years ago when I first read Illusions and then again this past week as I leafed through the passages: “If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.” May we all find ourselves, someday, in a fictional world of our own devising, where all of our questions have been answered and where good triumphs over evil in the end – perhaps with the help of a light saber. |
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