In the World According to Rolheiser, Jesus, who is "the paragon of mature human love," through his redeeming death on a cross teaches us that love:
... lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn't see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.
In Star Wars, love is the Force that guides us aright when we "let go" of our ego and its mandate to control everything.
One of the things which fascinates me about Rolheiser's worldview, accordingly, is that it's really no different from that of Star Wars, or any other hero epic for that matter.
Take Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins, a mere Hobbit, leaves the comfortable Shire under extreme duress and takes a hero's journey in search of the Crack of Doom, the unique place where he can destroy the One Ring, the epitome of power. Evil Sauron, who, à la Darth Vader, epitomizes George Lucas's "Dark Side of the Force," wants Frodo's Ring as well, and the Ring wants to go to Sauron. Which side will win?
The Force is powerful, but so is the Dark Side. The Dark Side tempts even Frodo to wear the Ring and claim its power.
Unqualified, the Force represents (in Rolheiser's lingo) the "crucifixion" of the private ego. Qualified by the term "the Dark Side," accordingly, the Force represents what happens when the resurgent ego co-opts the Force's power to do good. When Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker turns into Sith Darth Vader, his ego has experienced what might be called the demonic parody of Christ's resurrection.
This would seem to be a universal message, this neverending story of the ego's crucifixion in hero after hero — Parsifal, King Arthur, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, Spiderman, you and me (sometimes) — with Christ the paragon of all heroes.
So the question I have is this: if we all respond so deeply to messages of love, ego-crucifixion, and heroism like these, why isn't it more widely understood that Christ is the paragon of all heroes?
When I was a college freshman at Georgetown University, where most students are Catholic, my "Introduction to Psychology" professor, Fr. Juan B. Cortés, a Jesuit, asked the class the first time we met to think of the name of a hero. He called on several students, whose answers varied ... but no one named Jesus. This fact Fr. Cortés commented on at some length, for the point of the exercise was exactly that something in the modern psyche, as it has developed, misses that Christ could conceivably be the Hero among Heroes.
That was in 1965. Twelve years later, the first Star Wars movie came out. I never made any connection then between the Force and the Gospel message.
Some ten years after that, my life took a turn, and for the first time I got religious. At about the same time, I imbibed Joseph Campbell's PBS series, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. Many of the points I've just made about heroism and the Force came to me courtesy of the late myth guru, Campbell. But Campbell identified Jesus with the Buddha — also a hero, yes, but the Buddha-Jesus link obscured (at least for me) Rolheiser's point about the cross.
To wit, it is the paradigm of all heroism.
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