If it seems like every two or three months I’m publishing a blog entry about how I’m seeing things in a new light and shifting directions for myself and my spiritual journey, it’s probably because I am. It’s awful. In fact, I feel like a lifeboat adrift at sea without hope of finding shore. These past eight months or so have felt like a tumultuous unraveling of everything I was holding on to.
As a few might have noticed, my ministry Facebook page is gone. I deleted it because I felt like I was spending more time fetching likes and shares than I was actually doing anything worthwhile. It felt like the most vain of contests to try to gain popularity and that’s not what I’m really wanting to do. So what am I trying to do? The more I ask myself that question the more I find myself tongue-tied.
After leaving Temple of the Jedi Order, I felt like I was still supposed to do some type of ministry and so I got one of those terrible pay-to-be-ordained type of deals and was instantly an ordained minister. It’s funny how a service which originally intended to be liberating for people who were previously unable to get a minister for their weddings has become something that feels neither liberating nor good. I started advertising myself on community boards: posting my business card, talking to people, and writing content to be posted on my ministry Facebook page. It yielded nothing. Strangely, I wasn’t discouraged by that. I was frustrated by my own inability to articulate my purpose.
A few months ago I rejoined the Temple of the Jedi Order, perhaps because I felt like at least there I had some semblance of a purpose. As my political ideology had recently been called into question, I realized what an ass I had made of myself in parting ways with the Temple and wanted to reconcile with people there. Unfortunately, I have no idea if reconciliation is possible. I was so angry, so hurt, and unable to see what was happening that I burned every bridge and took the river beneath when I left. We shall see. I came at a time when a lot of things were falling apart for me: returning to Minnesota to live in isolation due to a lack of employment, friends moved away to start their careers (or at the least, jobs), and the renewed and ever-horrible habit of smoking had come back.
Since returning I have completed the Initiate Programme, despite no one requiring me to do so, I did it in part because I wanted to get back to some kind of roots. Somewhere along the way I had lost sight of what I was doing. I thought perhaps I would find meaning again in the Jedi path. Instead, I found myself frustrated, disillusioned, and stifled by the culture of the Temple. It’s not really a fault of the Temple. It’s come about because of a realization about what I need from a spiritual practice: community, participatory ritual, sacred space, etc. I think the Temple tries to offer those things in its own way, but I don’t feel connected to it.
Then I read an article published on Jacobin called, Smash the Force which articulates why Star Wars, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, and the concept of the Force itself is a charlatan’s masquerade. I wrote a nervous entry in my journal for people from the Temple to comment on, but most didn’t understand why the article bothered me so much. I think perhaps because I’m facing a culmination of things bothering and this article was not really a deathblow but a straw that broke the camel’s back.
If it were merely a criticism of the story of Star Wars, it would probably not have rocked me to the core as it did. Most, if not all, of my favorite television and movies are imperfect and reflect the systemic injustices existing in the world today. I try to watch that stuff with eyes wide open and so a criticism of Star Wars would be more welcome than feared. The article was much more than that and in fact parts out the assumptions most people make about Star Wars (including me) and shatters those illusions. It’s particularly the deconstruction of the Force, which is arguably the only thing from the Star Wars stories that the Temple utilizes as necessary-to-borrow that really struck me.
I won’t bore you with the internal mechanisms of the Temple nor do I want to point fingers at anyone, even unintentionally in a forum where those people do not have a fair opportunity to defend themselves. Suffice to say that for me personally, I have long worried that Jediism is not a syncretic faith, but a few pages ripped from the sacred books of various religions and hastily pasted together with a few introductory notes from long-discredited philosophers and thinkers. The article demonstrates why it is much worse than that. Others will not see it that way, and that’s okay, I cannot nor am I trying to convince anyone to see it this way. This is my personal conviction that the Jedi path may not be right for me. I haven’t decided what to do with that. Part of me doesn’t want to leave it because it means throwing myself into the open emptiness of spiritual uncertainty but another part of me feels as though I’ll just be miserable and unable to do much of anything meaningful if my heart isn’t in it.
The Sapling and the Soul 