Imperfect present tense

I had a Facebook “conversation” not too long ago where I confessed to getting old. A friend of mine responded with “it beats being dead,” to which I replied, without thinking, that it did, for a fact.

Another friend immediately (and accurately) pointed out that we actually didn’t know that for a fact. The instant I read his post, I felt a bit like Peter when the rooster crowed for the third time. And I was instantly ashamed.

I was ashamed because I am a Christian. And as such, I’m supposed to know better.

Of course, everyone knows that Christians believe in an afterlife. We believe that what is waiting for us after death is so much better than what we have here that we can’t even imagine it. 

Often, this idea gets over-simplified (or more accurately, derided) by some as “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die” — an unspecified and intangible reward you get in return for a lifetime of denial, sacrifice and doing what you’re told. And I’m sorry to say that it is the sum total of what some people think Christianity means.

I think it’s more accurate to say that Christians believe that death is the moment that we cease looking at the world through a dirty mirror, as Paul the Apostle famously wrote to the Church at Corinth, and get a look at the way things really are. It’s not just life after death — it’s life as it really is. 

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13:12, NRSV).

Heaven, put simply, is when all of our questions have answers, and when we are reunited with the God we have been, whether we know it or not, yearning for all of our lives.

Before I go any further, I should say that I believe that as an important a concept as heaven for Christians, it is secondary to the much more important question of how we act towards our fellow men and women here and now; we are called to make earth as heaven-like as possible right now, with our work, our love, and our compassion. Simply sitting back, twiddling our thumbs, and waiting for heaven to come to us isn’t an option.

But I digress: I think the reason I gave my casual, off-the-cuff answer to my friend is twofold. First, I am, like most people, seeped in a lifetime of secular thinking, where death is seen as crushingly final. From where we stand now, when death comes, all of your choices end. From the earthbound perspective, the story is over. 

Of course, Christians believe the exact opposite — that death is the moment when the story actually begins. My pastor has a wonderful habit of saying someone who has died has “joined the Church Triumphant.” Apparently, it’s an idea hasn’t fully gotten into my bones yet.

There is a second possibility — that the off-the-cuff, without-thinking answer is much closer to what a person really believes than the reasoned, deliberate one. In other words, with my answer, I revealed that I really don’t believe what I actually profess to believe.

While I concede the possibility, I don’t think this is what’s going on at all. I’ve had ample opportunities during my lifetime to cultivate my innate deist tendencies (I never felt the call of true agnosticism within me, much less atheism). Instead, quite the opposite has happened; as I have gotten older, I have grown in my belief, and my faith.

In the interest of clarity, that belief is best summed up by the concise words of the Apostle’s Creed;

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, dead, and buried;

the third day he rose from the dead;

he ascended into heaven,

and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic* church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. Amen.

Instead, I think there is a third, and much more likely, possibility; that I am simply guilty of having imperfect faith. To quote our friend Paul again, faith “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1). I have not seen heaven — not in this life, at least — but I really do I believe it exists, for the simple reason that people that I trust — Jesus, Paul, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others — have told me that it does.

I do not have the faith of any of these men; least of all Jesus, who Paul calls “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Fortunately, faith is a not a quality that one is born with; it is a quantity that is developed, like strength or knowledge. If I am physically weak now, I can exercise, and become stronger. If I am ignorant on a given subject, I can study, and learn. And if my faith is imperfect (a foregone conclusion), prayer, study and fellowship can only increase it. 

If so, maybe next time, simple Facebook conversations won’t trip me up, and I won’t have to use almost 1,000 words to correct what I should have said in 30 or less.

We can always hope.

*We Protestants read this as “universal,” but my Catholic friends can feel free to substitute the uppercase C.

Saga Creed I: On the E.U.

This will be a short declaration fairly long screed on my Official Position on the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Ahem, and here goes:

I pretty much hate it.

Okay, obviously I won't be able to leave it at that. For those of you who don't know, the Expanded Universe, or E.U., are any stories or characters outside of the realm of the six Star Wars films. These six are called canon, which is a riff on the concept of canon scripture — i.e., something considered to be authoritative.

And I both love them and hate them. Mostly hate.

Mind you, I've been reading Star Wars novels for as long as there have been Star Wars novels, starting with the much-maligned and personally beloved Splinter of the Mind's Eye. It seems incredible in the age of instant information and communication in which we live, but in the days and months after Star Wars was first released in the late 70s, there was a big blob of nothing out there waiting if you wanted to get more of the Star Wars universe — especially if you lived in rural Tennessee, as I did.

You could:

Read Starlog — This godsend of a magazine debuted right around the time of Star Wars' release, as I recall, and contained articles about all things geek. My favorite memory was Starlog nailing the Blue Harvest ruse by Lucasfilm. It was the closest thing we had to regular news about the things we loved, and it was a lifeline back in the day.


Build models — Back before video games and DVDs, plastic model kits were both a way to get into the minutia of the Star Wars/Star Trek universe, and to fly your freak flag to any unsuspecting friends who happened to come over. My wife still talks about the shrine to Capt. Kirk I had built over my bed in college, including a picture of the man himself in the TOS-era captain's chair, framed by a collection of bugles and swords, and set off by a model of the TMP version of the Enterprise that I still regard as the high water mark of my model-making skills.

Talk to friends — This is still the heart of fandom, to me; listening and talking with someone who loves the things you love as much as you do, or maybe even more. Pretty much every friend I made in high school and college — notably my future wife and my two closest male friends — shared one or more of my great passions. Still, this had its drawbacks. For starters, the ratio of geeks to normal people in the 70s was still pretty low, and communications being what it was back then, it was pretty tough to find them. And I still remember my failed attempt to start my own Star Trek fan club while living in Ohio; it folded unceremoniously after the first meeting after the loud guffaws, giggles and constant interruptions from a boy who's name I can't recall cause me to give up 10 minutes in.

Write your own adventures — I have never been terribly productive at writing fiction. My first attempt was in my tweens, and I made another attempt a few years later. Both tries were seriously hampered by the fact that the word processor hadn't been invented yet, and I seem to be dependent on the much more malleable nature of digitized writing. But writing has always been a very popular way to dwell in the world of your choice; it is only since the birth of the internet that it has taken on the name Fan Fiction.

Read books —At last we come to it; the reason for the E.U.s of Star Trek, Star Wars and a few dozen other fandoms. The two big franchises are essentially story-telling mediums, albeit ones using very different narrative techniques. So if you really want to live in the galaxy far, far away (or the final frontier), and you don't have more canon to look forward to, what better way that through novels, comics and role-playing games that expand on that universe?

I wish that that were so. At its best, the E.U. novels do just that; they allow us to live in that world a little longer, visit with our favorite characters more, and have more adventures with them, and learn about how the world works. It gives you that little bit of extra time in a place where the Force works, space travel is how you get to work, and life is a little more black and white. They are, in a word, fun.

At their worst, they take beloved characters and turn them into something unrecognizable in the name of dramatic license; they carve off whole sections of a character's backstory to make what they're doing seem more important, and they create new characters that usually make the core characters look life buffoons. As I have observed elsewhere, Timothy Zahn did most of these in his widely-beloved Thrawn trilogy, which is widely credited/blamed with starting the whole E.U. business in the first place.

I should mention at this point that all of my knowledge comes from reading the E.U. in the mid-to-late 1990s, prior to the release of Phantom. From what I can infer on this rather good take on what the E.U. has become on fangirlblog.com, what I was reading then was actually the golden age of the Expanded Universe. Since then, there have been several multi-book sagas, one of which committed the cardinal sin of killing off Chewbacca, and none of which sound like very much fun.

I've mentioned fun twice, because at the end of the day, that is what Star Wars and Star Trek ultimately need to be for me; fun. Fun is my yardstick when it comes to Star Wars; I need to feel a sense of enjoyment. I don't go to those universes to get caught up in an angst-ridden soap opera with lightsabers. Drama is fine, but Star Wars is, first and foremost, an adventure story. It is, to use a crude analogy, Jules Verne, not Shakespeare.

That aside, I will tolerate not fun as long as George Lucas is the one dishing it out (witness Revenge of the Sith — grand and sweeping? Certainly. Riveting? Of course. Among the best of the saga? Possibly, depending on your point of view. Fun? Not so much). George is The Authority in his universe. But lately, because the content of the E.U. is so much larger than the core films themselves, it has, in the minds of many, become the main event; this multi-headed hydra, composed by a hundred different authors, all with different takes on the Star Wars characters and story, is, because of its sheer bulk, what is important, while the films themselves are, occasionally, made to conform to the product of the week to legitimize it. The tail is attempting to wag the dog.

A recent, and to me, rather infuriating example: One of my favorite vessels in A New Hope has always been the Tantive IV, also known as the Rebel Blockade Runner. Adopted from an early Ralph McQuarrie design concept for the Millennium Falcon, it is the first starship we see in the saga, as well as the site of the first battle. She never appeared again, and if anyone ever went anywhere near her history, I never saw it. I always wanted to know more about her, and when the ship made a glistening new appearance in Sith, I was thrilled to see the old girl again. It was, for me, an important link between Episode III and Episode IV.

I have only recently learned that in order to bring the ship into line with established E.U. continuity  — a vulgar practice apparently known as retconning — that ship has been stripped of its status as the Tantive IV, and is, instead, a similar ship from the Star Wars: Empire at War video game called the Sundered Heart. Apparently, this is the ship that Captain Antilles commanded when he wasn't aboard the Tantive IV. So when Obi-Wan lands on Bail Organa's ship, it's actually something from a video game I've never even heard of (and published a year after RotS) that's clawed its way into the films. It is not, as I've long believed, a beautiful bit of continuity and revealed backstory of one of the most iconic ships of the Star Wars story; it is some game designer's creation being forced into the main story. This was actually confirmed last year by Leland Chee, who has the unenviable task of making all of the myriad story lines in the Star Wars universe from the past 34 years seem like a continuous epic.

One point made often by the crew of The ForceCast is that the Star Wars story is ultimately what George says it is. It belongs to him, both as an artist, and in a very real, and legally binding sense. He is the master storyteller; he created the characters; he is, to use a fan nickname for him, The Maker. If he told us all tomorrow that Han Solo was actually Palpatine's half-brother, I wouldn't like it (as I didn't like the revelation that Luke and Leia were brother and sister back in the day), but I would have to live with it. And while I have nothing against Leland, his five-years-after-the-fact declaration isn't enough to change my mind. The fact is, there were toys from the time of the movie labeling the ship as the Tantive IV, which pretty much ends the debate for me.

I've gone far afield here, and probably muddied up the place with my griping about the E.U., when all I wanted this post to do was state my official position — my creed as a Star Wars fan when it comes to canon. And that, simply said, is this.

1. I believe that the six Star Wars films are the only truly canonical sources.
2. I believe that the Star Wars novels written from Splinter of the Mind's Eye onward should be regarded as professionally created fan fiction; fun, and occasionally edifying and instructive, but not authoritative.
3. I believe even more strongly that all of the Star Wars video games and comics should be taken with several grains, or perhaps an entire shaker, of salt.
4. I believe if you personally wish to adopt any or all of the novels, games, comics, cartoons, holiday specials or other fare, into your understanding of the Star Wars universe, you are free to do so. You are not free to tell me what pieces of the novels, games, comics, cartoons, holiday specials or other fare that I am allowed to adopt for my understanding of the Star Wars universe, and vice-versa, even if you work for a company George owns.

George Lucas said that for him, the end of the Star Wars story came with the final scene of Return of the Jedi. I quote from the Official Site:

"But there's no story past Episode VI, there's just no story. It's a certain story about Anakin Skywalker and once Anakin Skywalker dies, that's kind of the end of the story. There is no story about Luke Skywalker, I mean apart from the books. But there's three worlds: There's my world that I made up, there's the licensing world that's the books, the comics, all that kind of stuff, the games, which is their world, and then there's the fans' world, which is also very rich in imagination, but they don't always mesh. All I'm in charge of is my world. I can't be in charge of those other people's world, because I can't keep up with it."

I find this comment to be liberating. I don't have to like the E.U. (or the licensing world, as George calls it). I can accept it on an item-by-item basis, or not accept it at all — it is a different creature entirely. If I want to read a Star Wars novel, or play a game, I can enjoy it, but I don't have to find some way to rationalize something as being canonical if I personally don't want to. Star Wars, for George, and for me, is the films.

Exactly which version of the films is a can of worms I will crack open at another time.

Postscript: I want to give ample credit to an excellent discussion on E.U. and canon between Fangirl  and the TheForce.net crew in the May 27 edition of The Weekly ForceCast, for inspiring and informing this post.

Of Norse gods and flannel Jedis

Friday night, the wife and I went on a long-overdue date to the local movie house. We live in a somewhat rural part of West Tennessee; yet I am happy to say that the local theater now runs 3-D movies. And while I still think the whole 3-D movie thing is a bit overblown, and in no small degree a gimmick by Hollywood to keep traffic flowing to the theaters, I think this is a good thing, in the main — mostly because I no longer have to drive to Nashville to see a film in 3-D, which was the case as recently as two years ago.

On the downside, the local theater isn’t large enough to offer 2-D offerings of the same film for those who don’t like the new format (a non-existent complaint for me — if I care enough to go to the theater at all, it will likely only be for a ‘big’ picture, which I would probably want to see in 3-D in the first place). 

A greater concern is that two tickets to the Friday night 3-D showing of Thor nearly obliterated a $20 bill, leaving only a whimpering portrait of George Washington in its place — which explains nicely why I only rarely go to the movies these days.

So the wife and I have now seen the first of the big summer movies — Thor. I am no one’s comic book geek, as a general rule, but as a fan of stories with at least some element of the fantastical (Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, ect.), I find myself following them rather regularly, and consequently, have a passing familiarity with the comic, and the Norse mythos it was based upon. Also, I’ve always been a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s work, so there’s that.

It was, in a word, fun, from start to finish. Chris Hemsworth, whom we last saw as James T. Kirk’s father, is more than up to the task of bringing the son of Odin to life; he is, in equal parts, strong and vulnerable, infuriating and likable, and heroic and flawed. Natalie Portman’s performance was a surprise; she is, for the first time, cute. Thor’s brother, whose name I will not repeat in a nod to superstition, was deftly played by an actor whose name I cannot recall, and am, at the moment, too lazy to look up. In all, it was well worth sacrificing Mr. Hamilton, and I recommend it to anyone interested in an evening’s fun.

Earlier that morning, I had a happy accident when I accidently opened the Disney Parks Blog , which happened to be running a live stream of the opening ceremonies for Star Tours 3-D. I came in just in time to see Bob Iger and George Lucas making a few remarks in front of the attraction. When I went back later (when I wasn’t working), I found a picture of Iger and George standing next to Darth Vader, holding lightsabers.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen George with a lightsaber, and I have to say, it doesn’t really suit him. To be sure, no one has earned the right to actually carry a saber more than George, but on him, it looked a bit out of place. I think what threw me off was what he was wearing; jeans and a long-sleeved button-up flannel shirt. Now I know that George has developed a rep for rocking the flannel shirt as his default daily dress, but I’m sorry — lightsabers demand to be paired with a certain look, and “I’m heading down to IKEA to pick up some bookshelves” isn’t it. 

Of course, when George gave himself a Hitchcock moment and appeared in Revenge of the Sith, he didn’t appear in Jedi regalia, but instead dressed as a barely-recognizable blue-skinned alien. So I suppose if he didn’t do it when he had the full might of the Lucasfilm costuming and makeup departments behind him, he can hardly be expected to rise to the occasion for a theme park opening. 

But I’ve got to say, I expect more from a member of the 501^st — even an honorary one.

You say it's your birthday

I was just strolling through TheForce.net, and found this cool fan commemoration of George Lucas' birthday by a fan artist named Steven Hayford. Apparently, he's known for things like this, and I intend to find out more about his work. In any case, Happy Birthday to The Maker. You can find the original story, as well as a link to the full-size image, here.