For the past 15 years of my life I have trained as a Jedi. I am yet far from being a master, and I will no doubt be in training for all the days I have remaining, but I can see things now that I did not see before, and I know things that have transformed me. It has not been an easy journey. It has been a formidable and merciless walk, fraught with disappointments and skin shredding sufferings but here I am today and I here is my journey.
Star Wars is a masterpiece. As a cult phenomenon, it has captured the hearts of generations. It is welcomed in any conversation, in almost any setting. It moves us to frenzy when we contemplate the interplay of light and dark, good and evil. It lifts us from reality and fills our minds with dreams of power and passion, battle and strength. Adventure stirs a longing for a world where we could engage the forces that threaten humanity, that seek to destroy all that is beautiful. The words of Yoda are clear:
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
“If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.”
The journey to becoming a Jedi is one of mastering your emotions. The novice must come to a place where they are no longer swayed by their emotions, but have become masters over their emotions. A Jedi may feel the urge to act according to an emotion, but they have the strength to choose not to act. Emotions are natural and they are designed to help us. Love causes us to act for the good of a person we love. Fear causes us to avoid situations or people that may be dangerous to us. Emotions are good, but the Jedi is aware that they can also be treacherous. They can lead us into harm. Desire for Revenge can hurt us for example. A Jedi can decide freely to act or not, using reason. He has that power and freedom, because his emotions do not control him. The man who is not a Jedi is manipulated by his emotions. He has no choice, no freedom. He is a slave.
I awoke to the treachery of emotion after observing the behavior of my male friends years ago. Many of those men had girlfriends and wives. Some of them even had children. Yet in a typical night out with them I watched them fall to their desires, and often they took home other women while their babies slept sound in their beds. Something was wrong. Those men engaged in such behaviors even though their partners would have been devastated to find out. How could they not feel the humanity of their loved ones? Why were they driven to death?
I was lost. If I could not call their actions wrong then how could I stop anyone from treating me badly? I had to be able to say, “no, what you are doing causes destruction to your life and the lives of others and you must stop.” I had to have an ability to recognize good and bad. I needed a guide; a universal principle that applied to all humanity, because it’s absence meant all action, even evil, was acceptable. It was then, in those moments of confusion, that I picked up my sword, my rosary, and began to do battle.
Gradually, it came to me. My friends were not in battle. They had succumbed to their emotion. They were defeated. They had embraced the dark side and fallen to their base animal desires for self-pleasure. I do remember them getting into physical fights outside bars, but all that was a farce. Their punching others was a shadow of real masculinity. Their pathetic efforts had no struggle. It was easy. Their fighting was just another self-indulgent spectacle of pretend anger and pride. Emotion ruled them.
In my battles I have witnessed an almighty struggle to remain true to the good while avoiding the seemingly easy fall to the dark side. Indeed, I have fallen often in weakness, but every time I have clambered to my feet and struggled on. My wife has needed me to be with her as we faced times of sickness and hardship. Her holiness was my only goal. My children were entitled to my time. I worked hard to hold them up and guide them in the light of Truth, the force. I could have left my home to find comfort in the pub. I could have closed myself in a room, hidden away, playing games, watching movies and avoiding the labour of family life. The temptation was real, but they needed me. It was my choice to give. I had to engage the force, prayer to God the Spirit who granted me the grace to know, and the strength to follow. My heart said “relax,” my conscience yelled “give.”
In monasteries throughout the world there are hooded men dedicated to a Jedi craft, of mastering emotion, of living with the force through continuous and self-giving prayer to God. He grants them strength and grace. Those men are true knights of the light. They battle day and night with darkness and they dispel darkness in our lives through a dedication to mastering their own emotional movements so they can pray for us.
Out in our world so many young men are victims to cultural influences. One perfect example is the use of pornography. Poor men are shackled to this insidious practice that eats their minds like maggots eat flesh. “It is harmless,” they say. “It is natural.” Ask them to stop for three months. They are powerless. Enslaved. It destroys their connection with others and their capacity for love. They are emasculated and their women weep.
Becoming a Jedi is not easy but falling to the dark side is effortless. Truly becoming Catholic is near impossible, but it is the ideal we must always strive for. The only other option is the devil and he prowls like a roaring lion seeking to devour you and those you love. His tool is the manipulation of your emotions to entice you to engage in activities and thoughts that will ultimately destroy you. Your only weapons are prayer, the sacraments and sacrifice, entering into God, where He will protect you and give you the grace necessary to win your battles. It requires a willingness to suffer and to embrace actions that will be repugnant to the senses. Yet we must, for it is our only choice. The other side is too horrible to even contemplate, and living with that for eternity is a nightmare reserved for the damned.
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It was a cold, dreary night in early December when I pulled up to the big white door of the Guesthouse, at Our Lady of Bethlehem Abbey in Portglenone, County Antrim. I could see dim lights in windows nestled in far off corners, and I received the sighing wind, crooning through trees and unseen corridors. Nothing moved. Above me my Queen gazed down, and lovingly willed my entry with her Christ child’s blessing. I moved forward.
He showed me upstairs to my quarters and as we walked he introduced me to the layout of the building and the grounds outside. I was a good hour late, and by that time the Cistercian monks of the monastery were asleep, but Abbot Dom Celsus gave no indication of inconvenience. After I had settled my bags, he sat with me in conversation as I ate. He listened mostly. What were my thoughts? How did I come to be there? I talked as though it were important. He listened as though only One Will really mattered.
Up stairs and through passages, I finally found the palatial hall containing our King and there I knelt in veneration. “Oh God have mercy!” The monks shuffled in quietly one by one in their white and black attire. They held to their vow of silence. Something deep and ancient was occurring. They did not acknowledge me. They did not even look in my direction. They attended their places behind two long wooden rows of tables, obedient and intent. A large wooden crucifix hung above the altar. It bestowed an unmistakable essence filling the vastness of the room. To this day, the influence of that cross sears my memory and compels me back, as though my spirit dwelt with it. When in need of peace I close my eyes and rest there. The monks began simply and ended simply. Their elemental chanting of the psalms was profoundly moving. It was a place where no concern existed only God. God was the focus; God was the goal. As they recited, “Glory be the Father…” they bowed. I bowed with them because for those brief moments I was one of them; I was one with them, in Him.
A third monk I spoke to was approaching his mid eighties. He was a brother and I was fascinated to discover he had not been outside the walls of the abbey in sixty years. I wanted to know everything about his life but he was unwilling to explore the past. His present was all that mattered and his future was given to God. Who or what he was before was in the hands of Jesus. He offered me advice about a vocation. He seemed to think that monastic life was my call and he assumed that I was discerning a vocation, so he offered me advice. “Your twenties is a good time to be entering,” he said. “At that stage you have experienced a little of life and you are more sure of where you are headed.” He longed for young faces to grace the walls of the monastery again. However, I feared he was unaware of the changes Ireland has endured in the sixty years he had been cloistered. Young men are no longer hearing God call them, being so engaged with a relentless and aggressive culture, which is determined to remove Catholicism.
Not many people recognize the power of monastics in our world. While we busy ourselves with life and worldly care, those simple men are praying for us. I once heard monasteries described as the “powerhouses of the world,” as they keep the world alive with their prayers. If they were to disappear, our world would crumble, and yet today, many of the monks are aging and few young men are replacing them. How can we convince young men to give up so many modern comforts to replace it with something more difficult, but ultimately a life that would fill them with true and absolute serenity?
As my time at Portglenone monastery drew to a close, I considered the treasure I was leaving behind. My vocational call lay elsewhere. I knew that with certainty, but I also could not shake the voice of God imploring me to be silent and to listen. He was speaking, and he would lead me on. I could be afraid of nothing if I trusted Him to shepherd. God is whispering to us all, and if we would only let him in then the world would be healed.
I grew up in a loving, comfortable atheist household of professional scientists. My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and my mom was a lapsed Lutheran. From the time that I could think rationally on the subject, I did not believe in God. God was an imaginary being for which there was no proof. At best, God was a fantasy for half-witted people to compensate their ignorance and make themselves feel better about their own mortality. At worst, God was a perverse delusion responsible for most of the atrocities committed by the human race.
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I locked in the last shovel-full of soil, and tossed it over my shoulder as wee Barney called me to grab my coat. He was a man pushing seventy-six years of life. Yet, here he was, spritely as a man half that, jumping in and out of the back of lorries and heaving even the heaviest loads. He had worked his days on some building site or other. He wore the face of a well-grafted soldier dedicated to his craft, and yet his craft was humble. He dug holes for a living, mixed concrete and shifted dirt. He did what he was toul’ to do, and he was known to have faced even the rancid jobs, that lesser men have ran from.
Barney had lost his wife not long before we worked together. He still had his children, but you could tell that losing her weighed heavy upon his breast. The more we sat together, the more he related to me the circumstances of her last moments. He harbored anger and resentment about the manner under which she went. Strong though he was, he was powerless to prevent it, and those that held the power had let him down. In his life, her presence had meant something profound to him, and yet he rarely noted it. She was always there for him, to take him back even after long absences, where he squandered his money and time on anything but his family duties. She was his home and his warmth.
From a third floor window, I leaned out slightly into the dull, rusty light of the evening. I did not expect to see or hear others. The shaking sides of the wooden building made me wonder, “Who could venture out?” I could barely make out a shape in the suffocated sky. Desolation abound. The sand swelled in leaps and swirls, consuming the trees. The pale light of street lamps barely protruded the darkened smother. The wind cursed the sun. Sharp, piercing particles bristled my beard and floated aimlessly upward, and down to the gloom below. How long had it been blowing? I was not sure now the time I had even been sitting there watching for life and movement. Nothing emerged. The dreary evening sobbed and croaked to it’s end, then from nowhere, a shuddering wail of a foghorn ululating, through the void. A great grey hulk, a ghostly ship proceeding forth from emptiness, unstoppable, unbreakable, bold and brawn. I watched it pass, and then back to emptiness it was gone.
As any parent should, I love my children with absolute giving to the point that I would bequeath every effort for their good. However, I am faced with the decision of sending them to be immersed in a culture that promotes ideology contrary to perfection. It is not only that they will be exposed to arguments in favor of vice but also, it is almost worse, that they might be exposed to mediocrity or indifference to virtue. It is likely that they will rarely have enthusiasm for virtue expressed to them through the words and especially the actions of adults and peers outside their family. They will be presented with people living lives that contradict virtue, making it seem like vice is the proper way to live. Culture today regularly celebrates promiscuity along with overindulgence on alcohol and drugs. It praises abortion, multiple forms of sexual deviance including homosexual actions, cohabitation without marriage, sex without commitment and pornography. Culture promotes independence despite responsibility. It scorns holiness, as religion and virtue become mere sideshows to their depravity, something to make them feel good now and again.
I watched the sun reflect off the old broken mirror in the hedge of my grandmother’s front garden. It was always there, though we never knew why. We never questioned its presence. Most Irish homes in those days had some odd knick-knacks or out of place bric-a-bracs tied up with bailer twine or stuck solid to dulled white washed walls. Our world was fascinating. Occasionally, my cousins and I would venture over to the mirror and peer inside. We would imagine another world in there with children and people just like us, watching us, wishing they could play with us, or that we could go on secret adventures into each other’s worlds. Those days never ended, for they were measured by life, not time.
It is clear why our little children should endear us. That is no puzzle. What is confusing is why we stop being endeared by people as they grow older and also, to a greater extent, by those people who are not connected to us by the bonds of family.
Oh how the rain falls o’er the fields as I peer out upon another dreary Irish evening. By my side this cup of tea befriends the laptop on my knee. Surely it must be the most dismal hour of the year, this January lull. The Christmas decorations have now lost their light and warmth. Disinterested, they have become clutter perched in corners awaiting their annual undoing, if only I could locate the impulse. A crow screeches above me heralding oncoming gloom. It is enough to give a man writer’s block.
Here is the definition of education provided by the Encyclopedia Britannica:
One of my greatest hero’s in life is my wife and I will tell you why. There is none so humble as the person who takes upon her the mantle of love, and who gives herself for the good of others. She rarely sits but in each moment she is giving something, small or large, for the fulfillment of her mission, to be mother, to be wife, to be a coworker, a sister, a friend. She works tirelessly, though she tires and yet she finds the strength to give. Her life is not focused on how she can find rest but upon how rest might be found for others. To her example, I fall gravely short, each and every moment I waste on the frivolous.
We must be paying attention to our moments and constantly reflecting, “Is this what He wants?” Get to know Christ. Know Him intimately; who He is, His life, His way, His Truth, for He is the calling of a real man. Not believing in Him is too convenient, an excuse to never change. Accusing other believers is another desperate diversion to prevent us from making the effort. Men who do these things have abdicated manhood. They reject penance for the comfortable.
The sun rises on a cold Dublin December and the arms of a warrior are held high in exultation. He is triumphant. He is glorified. He belongs to us. The hearts of a nation bleed in pride. The ghost of Cú Chulainn echoes through the centuries as his haunting voice chants our battle hymn, “As down a glen one Easter morn, to a city fair rode I…” For he has united us, and now we stand together behind him as he holds aloft his crown of victory.
McGregor has made great noise of his love for Ireland, of his love for its people and his love has brought him to tears. He would bleed for us, he would be beaten and broken and torn apart for us, to raise us up. He would never submit. He would never give up. The story of man, the story of who man should be. His people he would unite and the battle cries would resonate around the world.
We are all called to be great. When the time comes we are urged to be ready to give everything we are for the good of others. Every person is called to die to self and give everything for those he loves (and hates) including all his desires and dreams. Are we strong enough? In Ireland, the people have wandered so long in a fog of confusion. They have forgotten Truth. In their desperation for Truth they have filled their lives with things, comforts, idols or anything to make them forget the emptiness. Truth has become whatever we choose or feels good, not something specifically to be pursued. We build ourselves higher and greater. We look to others as examples of perfection. We cling on for dear life and we hope. Yet still through the fog the horn blasts loud and shrill and something, calling us to greatness, infiltrates our hearts. We search and seek. If only we knew where to find. That is Truth. Oh God help us! Oh God save us!
It is sometimes hard to be reconciled with the idea of loneliness in others. It is hard to comprehend the sadness of a stranger left cradling their aloneness in what can often be, for many, a desolate and callous world. In our comfortable world, people make groups and form bonds with chosen someones. We exclude others who do not fit our image of friend, an image we have conjured like a love longing teenager conjures the image of a perfect mate. We do it, typically, to benefit ourselves. Humans seek out closeness so that we may no longer feel the hollowness of solitude. It can be, fundamentally, a selfish action.
Our homeless kinsfolk wander the streets of our cities longing for the peace of a welcoming, friendly home but find only the frigid, disinterest of concrete corners. Elderly people, our wise kings and queens of old, now meld into wooden thrones as their eyes caress the quiet, stone walls of nursing homes and empty cottages nationwide. Their clocks tick tock on dusty mantelpieces. Little children awaken to Christmas trees decorated by paid staff. Abandoned or lost, their plight is the consequence of a broken world, which knows decreasingly the virtue of fortitude.