Posted by Two of Eric Clayton’s great passions are Ignatian Spirituality and “Star Wars.” He has found his faith nurtured by St. Ignatius’s ideal of seeing God in everything – and by the heroic moral and spiritual journeys of the characters from a galaxy far, far away. Eric explores both these topics in his books “Cannonball Moments: Telling Your Story, Deepening Your Faith,” and his latest work, “My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars.” We discussed them recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcasts below).
“Winning wars and wooing women.” That may not seem like the kind of life that would lead a man to sainthood, but that’s how St. Ignatius started out during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Everything changed when he was a soldier at the battle of Pamplona.
Eric explained, “He’s defending the castle against the superior French forces, who offer terms of surrender to which Ignatius says no…So he gets the rest of his troops to go along with him. And it’s a terrible outcome. He gets a cannonball to the legs, but everyone else is killed or grievously wounded…He realizes, ‘My pride has brought about such devastation unnecessarily.’ So, he spends 11 months in bed recovering in his castle in Loyola, and it’s there that he’s given two books: one on the life of Christ and one on the saints.”
“He’s imagining two different paths for himself,” Eric continued, “or really, God is inviting him to imagine these different paths. One is his old way of life, and one is this potential new way of thinking, of being a pilgrim for God. So, the cannonball moment is just one moment, and it gets held up as, ‘He was knocked down a soldier, and he stood up a saint.’ That’s not it at all. He was knocked down, and then he had a very long time to pray and to think and to grapple with different ways his life could unfold, his vocation story. Then, he has to go out and try it and begin the journey. It’s not like he gets the answers all at once…He has quite a journey ahead of him, but it’s one that he does carefully through discernment in the company of the Spirit.”
Another key moment in St. Ignatius’s journey occurred while he was living in a cave, a site that Eric can’t help but relate to the Dark Side cave on Dagobah in “The Empire Strikes Back,” where Luke Skywalker faces his fears. Though Ignatius comes to write his Spiritual Exercises there, he also struggles mightily.
“He’s having these profound experiences of God,” Eric said, “and he’s also going out and serving God’s people in the nearby town of Manresa. At the same time, the evil spirit is tempting him and saying, ‘How can you, lowly that you are, live this life you’ve committed yourself to for all these years yet to come?’ [Ignatius] struggles with depression, he struggles with suicide. He struggles with thinking God wants him to suffer, and he lets his hair grow long and his nails grow long and doesn’t take care of himself.”
Eventually, however, the Light Side wins out in Ignatius’s heart, mind, and soul. He also cuts his hair and trims his nails. Eric noted, “The greatest thing he does for God in that cave is actually remember that he’s the beloved of God and treat himself that way. [He realizes]…’I should be out in the world because God still has dreams for me,’ as opposed to allowing the evil spirit to hold him fast with shame and guilt…I think it’s so important for all of us to release ourselves from our own cavernous experiences.”
Eric felt a spiritual connection to St. Ignatius’s story. And as someone with a talent for writing stories – as well as enjoying them in books, TV, and film – Eric has been greatly shaped by the spirituality of storytelling. During his time as an undergraduate at Fairfield University, a Jesuit school, he recalled that three questions guided him and his schoolmates one year: Who am I? Whose am I? Who am I called to be?
Eric said, “As we think about our own lives and our own vocations as stories, and you pair that with Ignatian Spirituality…you’re called to remember God is in all things. God is in all stories. God is in all the details as mundane and ordinary and nitty-gritty as they may be. Then, everything is worth sifting through and exploring to find God…Thinking about stories on the screen, even these so-called godless stories, we might be tempted to say, ‘God is necessarily there because God is everywhere. God is in all things.’ And so, stories like ‘Star Wars’ – but even ‘Ted Lasso,’ or my girls love Disney princesses – are ways for us to put ourselves in these other worlds and think about, ‘How is God speaking in this fantastical language that might be relevant to me in my very real, mundane world.'”
For Eric, the “Star Wars” series – in all its TV, film, book, and video game incarnations – speaks in a special way. He noted that George Lucas designed the spirituality in “Star Wars” to be intentionally vague, so that people from different faith backgrounds could see their own beliefs reflected. Eric felt inspired to write “My Life with the Jedi” as a way of asking, “What if we offered Ignatian Spirituality as a lens, as a way to understand this story? What if we put ourselves in the Dark Side cave in Dagobah? How would I respond? What are the spiritual things that activate for me if I was in that scene, in that moment?”
One of the main elements of “Star Wars” is how the Jedi are people who live for others. Similarly, a key aspect of Jesuit spirituality is being “a man (or woman) for others.” Han Solo, for instance, begins the series as someone looking out only for himself. When Eric watched “Star Wars: A New Hope” with his daughter for the first time recently, he was shocked to discover she thought Han was the villain for that very reason. It made Han’s turn to selflessness and friendship at the end of the film that much more powerful for both Eric and his daughter.
“You also have the sense that nobody is too far gone,” Eric elaborated. “It’s almost a trope in ‘Star Wars’: Darth Vader has to be redeemed, Kylo Ren has to be redeemed. You can quibble about the story justification of that, but I think from a spiritual perspective, I really like that. The idea that nobody’s too far gone, and we have to go get them. We have to go and be with people so that we can bring them back and help them to see themselves as loved.”
To know you are loved is a desire that runs deep in every human person. And getting to know our true desires can lead us down the right path in life.
Eric explained, “Our deepest desires and God’s will are actually the same thing. If we can get to the core of ourselves, that’s where we encounter God more and more deeply. And as we do that, as we realize what we really want in life, we discover what what we’ve been made for…When I think about Star Wars, all of our heroes tend to start on these sandy planets…They need to get away from these places because their desires are welling up and spilling over the status quo in which they find themselves…Luke wants to join the Imperial Academy because he wants to then jump to the Rebel Alliance. He wants to have a adventures. But as the story progresses, that desire becomes more clarified. You see he wants to help others. He wants to make a difference in a galaxy that is forgotten in these backwater planets like Tatooine. And the same with Rey and with Anakin. There’s the surface level desire, and then the deeper, the why of it. What are they really after?…We’ve got to go deeper and interrogate, ‘Why do I want this? Why does God want this? And how am I uniquely positioned to bring this into reality?'”
One of the ways to grow in knowledge of ourselves and our world more deeply is to become “contemplatives in action,” another Ignatian tradition. This time, to learn what that means, Eric recommends looking at an example of its opposite.
“If you’ve seen the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ TV show,” he said, “you have a contemplative not in action, a contemplative battered by shame and guilt. He’s cut himself off from the Force, sure, but he’s still contemplating, he’s still thinking, but he’s not acting. He’s not allowing what he sees in the galaxy to inform his response… You see in the show very early on how his lack of response…results in the death of a fellow Jedi and other things…A contemplative in action is called to look at the real world, to pray with the latest headlines in mind…The term itself comes from Jerome Nadal, who was one of the early Jesuits with Ignatius…At that time, you’re talking 1540s, your common form of religious life was to be in the monastery. So, this idea of a religious order that was out in the world was very uncommon. Nadal says, ‘The world is our monastery. We are called to take that form of prayer and experience of God, discovering how God wants to shower us with love and bring it into the world… And then allow the world to affect us, and then just keep doing it.’ Again, what are the Jedi? They go off, they reflect, they meditate, but then they have to go back into the world and keep doing stuff, keep serving peace, the carriers of peace and justice…[So you need to] bring all these real, tactile moments of suffering and challenge from the real world into your prayer, let it inform then how you act. And then you go into the world and you do what you can, what you uniquely are able to do. And then you bring the fruits of that action back into your prayer.”
Eric not only examines areas where the spirituality of “Star Wars” lines up with Christianity, but also where it differs: “I think the idea of the Force being…this luminous essence that connects all things and it’s in all things, that naturally lends itself to this idea of God being in all things. And the Force seems to have a will to it. But the Force isn’t personal. God is personal and intimate. And while the Force might be everywhere, God has desires for us and dreams for us. And so as much as the Jedi work hand in hand with the Force, God wants something even deeper.”
In the end, Eric holds these hopes for people who read “My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars.” He concluded, “For folks that are big ‘Star Wars’ fans, but maybe are searching spiritually, I think this book will hopefully give them some language that they might find new and fresh and give a new take on how to do Christianity…Another hope would be for folks that maybe are…already Catholic or practicing Ignatian spirituality, that this gives them a new way to do it, a new way to think about their own spiritual lives, a new way to think about engaging with pop culture as a spiritual tool.”
(To listen to my two-part interview with Eric Clayton, click the podcast links):
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