Saving what we love: reflections on Star Wars and Pete Seeger

I, like a goodly percentage of human beings on this planet, love Star Wars. We were living in Chicago when The Force Awakens opened and somehow I—with very little foresight — scored tickets for the first showing on opening night. I tricked Simeon into thinking we were going Christmas shopping. I remember his forlorn face as we passed our usual movie theatre and as he watched the costumed twenty-somethings boarding the bus. What fun it was to show him the tickets. 

I cried actual tears when it was revealed that the hero of the story was a young woman. As they say, representation matters, and that is true even for middle-aged women! I had witnessed many women being brave in films—especially a  resilient bravery in gritty places: depression era farms, coal mines, concentration camps, diners, beauty salons. Yet I confess I enjoyed seeing one empowered by the FORCE, in charge of saving the universe, wielding a light saber.

The second film in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, was even more an homage to women, and not surprisingly this angered some male super-fans. The one character that attracted the most ire was Rose—how dare an Asian woman be a brave and sturdy mechanic and not a willowy and exotic, scantily clad oracle of esoteric wisdom.

This didn’t mean Rose wasn’t wise. Indeed, I believe she was given the most important line in the new trilogy. In a climatic moment she stops Finn from making a desperate kamikaze run against the First Order. When she gets to him she says: “We win not by destroying what we hate, but by saving what we love.” I don’t have any desire to trade in gender essentialism, and yet, this is a lesson I have learned in so many different ways from women that I love. The great and profound social pressure on men in our world is to make themselves into cannon fodder for some great cause and to be willing to throw their bodies onto pikes to destroy what they hate. This instinct persists even when the tools are not militaristic. I think of Woody Guthrie’s guitar that famously was inscribed with the words “this machine kills fascists.” Yes, that is a complicated message—how and in what way does folk music “kill fascists?” There is a lot to consider there.

And yet the images, the metaphors, the imagination of death and killing is still there. I prefer Pete Seeger’s inscription on his banjo “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” 

How do we save what we love instead of destroying what we hate? How do we never forget the sacred glimmers of what we love found even in our enemies?

So, my spiritual discipline today is to write a short list of the things I love. Maybe this is something that you would like to do as well.

Johanna, Simeon, Samuel, Doug, Jesus, Truth, Friendship, Community, Vulnerable Love, Daffodils, Spring, Easter, Advent, Reconciliation, Robins, Old Karl Barth, Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Ikiru, Curry, a Trip to Bountiful, my in-laws, 10 acres in Buckley Michigan, Church, Dogs that swim, Pussy Willows, Tomato Plants, Spotting a deer in the corner of the field, Words, breakfast, beers, coffee, ducklings, Preaching, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the opening paragraph of Cannery Row, the way it feels to turn a corner and see something new. 

As much as possible I will work to protect and save these things.