What was Yoda thinking?

 

The wizened puppet created by Muppetier Frank Oz for the original Star Wars trilogy was introduced as a master of The Force and the one who patiently taught it to a young and impetuous Luke Skywalker, coaching him along the way with pseudo-Eastern mysticism. 

 

This Christmas season, a bunch of us were enjoying The Last Jedi — and then that latest Star Wars installment  turned Yoda’s guru-like presence upside down, having him shrug off the destruction of the Ancient Jedi Texts. The movie makers even made him claim, “Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.”

 

The insanity of that statement was clear as the film moved along and Rey continued her impulsive behavior. If only they had cut back to Luke taking his mentor’s temperature and proclaiming him to be feverish and delusional. Then the movie’s original spiritual cosmos would have been restored!

 

But the world is very different than it was almost 40 years ago when Yoda was created, so perhaps the popular franchise’s casual dismissal of its own “wisdom of the ages” is not so surprising. Age-old wisdom — Eastern, Christian or otherwise — is hard won. Those teachings from past eras require deep commitment, self-sacrifice, discipline and a certain detachment from much of what we otherwise enjoy. 

 

That may be why some popular Catholic writers have opted for a spirituality based more on business ethics than on the teachings of Jesus and His saints. Their approach reflects the Army’s “Be all that you can be” more than the much harder work of conforming ourselves to Christ.

 

A business model that incorporates Christian ethics coaches us to do great things and to combat the evils and imbalances in the world. With that inspiration, we strive to have an impact, to be successful and experience personal fulfillment in the process. To its credit, such a lived respect for employees, law, customers and the environment certainly outshines the shady, greedy practices of too many chief officers and their companies.

 

But when it comes to our spiritual growth, we are wise to remember that such a model is rooted in the world. It is focused on demonstrable success and personal achievement. Following Christ more and more completely will eventually look a whole lot different.

 

We can envision that difference when Jesus says, “This is the one whom I approve: the lowly and afflicted man who trembles at my word,” and when St. Mother Teresa says, “God does not call us to be successful, but to be faithful.” To many American Catholic ears, those statements sound strange indeed.

 

This is one of the more challenging ways that Jesus is counter-cultural. For example, Mother Teresa was criticized by some for not organizing people to change the caste system — with the awesome goal of nipping the problem of India’s poor in-the-bud, you might say. That certainly sounds good, and someone or several people might be called by God to do that work.

 

But Mother Teresa’s call was to be radically dependent on God and to serve Him directly. She was called to embrace poverty, to wash diseased bodies herself, to butt heads with powerful people and reluctant donors and to leave comfortable, admirable and safer pursuits behind.

 

Her resulting holiness shook up believers and non-believers everywhere, awakening many in the world to ponder God and ourselves — who He is, who we are and who we are not — and challenging us to see Jesus as present with and within the poor.

 

Yoda likely reflects the attitude of modern Star Wars writers when he describes the Ancient Jedi Texts with the wry statement: “Page turners, they are not.” 

 

May we not approach our time-tested, saintly texts with a similar shallowness. If we do, we will miss our call to become holy, able to make that ancient wisdom of God ever new in, and for, a modern world.