My inner geek meets my inner theologian.

Yeah, so I was watching Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back when the movie came to the part where Luke Skywalker meets Yoda and begins his Jedi Training. As I was so wrapped up in the complete load of Awesome that Yoda is, the education I got in college started to work with what Yoda was teaching. Then I realized that a majority of Yoda's dialogue with Luke is about faith.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

How many times have I heard that statement? I read it in a Taoist book, and the Bible says something similar. "Lean not unto your own understanding," it says. This is not a Head vs. Heart issue. It's an issue of control. When it comes to matters of faith, you cannot always let your mind scream at you, "LET'S FIGURE IT OUT!" The mind helps us to understand God, and know good from evil. It doesn't help us believe in Him. For that matter, the heart doesn't help us to believe either. It helps us to love God. The soul, that is what causes us to believe in the way that we call Faith.

When I became a CHR major and I began to learn about the Christian religion, I thought myself ready to face any kind of faith challenge. I was prepared and strong. I had tools to answer questions. I had nothing.

Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

It's true. I daydreamed about all the theological heiney I could kick and all the good I could do once I had this degree. I looked towards my career (at that time I thought it would be pastoring a church: That's gone). I looked forward to all the good I could finally do. I nearly missed the things I could do now, and didn't appreciate the things I was already doing. I was ready to be quit of the "in-between time" and get on to the important stuff. But we spend most of our time living in the "in-betweens." My home was there. I nearly missed it. I didn't like it much at first, but gradually came to love it.

Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is.

So as I continued to grow comfortable in my home (Friends, family, and community [also my weaknesses, my shortcomings, and inability]) I was able to finally start earnestly searching for God. Little did I realize how close God really was. And what at first was a desire for a meeting with God ahead, I found God in the very near future.

Not far. Yoda not far. Soon you will be with him.

Being blinded by my own forward facing outlooks on life, I missed God's presence--God's Now-ness. Later on I only missed God when I found myself doing things that made finding God hard. Not going to church, staying busy and crowded all the time--those things kept it hard.

Now I'm on a God hunt to see what I can do here and now. Hopefully God will allow me to take the little I have and get a lot done.

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

So, faith. I've not said that word out loud since I started, so I might as well start making it a more integral part of what I'm doing. Faith, as Monsignor Cuddy says, it taking God at His word and trusting what He says. As God teaches us through others and Creation, we come to find that God's empowering presence can really give us peace wherever we are. After all, God is everywhere. And God, being everywhere, and being all powerful, can do anything, anywhere. I want to see it, but most of the time I'm like Luke. I've got enough to move stones, but moving the larger, more important things, that's too hard. Take Grad-school for example. I know it can be done, but I don't know how. Certainly I can't figure out how to do it.

So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say?

Yoda's reply to Luke's nay-saying really got me here. God says, and I hear, but I act like none of it matters. There's always an "if" or a "but" or some sort of caveat or addendum that seems to negate it in my mind. There's something there that keeps me from going out and doing the Awesome that I can do in the name of God. And what is it that prevents me from these things?

Only what you take with you.

Sometimes I sit down with God and I say, "The everyday, common things are decent. They're expected. But the others?" Luke has a similar statement. He tells Yoda that there's a big difference between lifting stones and lifting his fighter from the swamp. And Yoda, that Little Green Ball of Amazing replies:

No! No different! The only difference is in your mind.

Common things: A fast shift at work. Uncommon things: Affordable Grad School. Neither of these things are different from one another. To have faith enough to know that God will deliver a fast shift at work is the same amount of faith to know that God will give affordable Grad School. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he said that if we had the faith of a mustard seed we could move mountains. But somehow, there's a difference and we can't do any of it. It looks hard, so it must be hard. It still looks like bread, so it must be bread. It looks like wine, so it must be wine. It can't possibly be the body and blood of Christ, right? We can't believe it!

That is why you fail.