Lessons From Luke Skywalker

“It is a dark time for the Rebellion.”

These are the first words seen onscreen in The Empire Strikes Back. I smiled as they were uttered by an autistic teen I know.

Many autistic children understand the world through movies and will extensively recite dialogue or sing songs that are featured on their soundtracks. Nothing brings me more pleasure than those moments in music therapy that invoke the Star Wars mythology. These films—the original three, in particular—put archetypes into the center of our culture, and it is a gift to have a common intergenerational reference that embodies the hero’s journey in the character of Luke Skywalker.

Source: By Andreas Eichler, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40793089

I listened to the countertransference that was taking place within me and realized I was gravitating to a particular thread of the plot. It’s the sequence in which Luke Skywalker undergoes Jedi training with Yoda on the swamp planet of Dagobah. After a rocky start, Luke eventually starts to improve. Then he intuits a message from the future: His comrades in the resistance have been captured by Darth Vader. Luke ends his training before he is done in order to rescue them. Yoda warns him he’s making a terrible mistake, but Luke leaves anyway. He’s not ready, but there is an emergency happening NOW. The fate of the galaxy rests on his shoulders.

Why, I wondered, was I thinking about that particular part of the story? No doubt it was subconsciously prompted in part by the political conversation that arose during the presidential campaign about “draining the swamp” in Washington, DC. It is a terrifically wrongheaded metaphor, for several reasons.

The first is ecological. Our very lives depend on swamps. They purify our groundwater and provide an essential habitat to countless species.

Psychologically, the metaphor fails because the inevitable trudge through the “swamplands of the soul,” as the Jungian analyst James Hollis writes, is what life is all about. We are not built for happiness, we are built to seek meaning. We will constantly be disappointed if we believe we can ever escape from challenges and start taking it easy. In his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis writes, “Life is not a problem to be solved, finally, but a series of engagements with the cosmos in which we are asked to live as fully as we can manage.”

We find purpose in life by rising to the challenge of tackling problems that are bigger than we are. In those times when we are called to resist forces that threaten our existence, it can feel as if it is up to us to save the galaxy. To prepare for those moments, people pursue their own version of Jedi training. Some people practice meditation or yoga. My daily practice includes waking up and playing Bach chorales at the keyboard. These are four-part harmonizations of sacred texts. I am drawn to them not for their religious message; rather, they offer their own kind of problem-solving that takes place at the intersection of thought and feeling and brings on, for me, the same brain state as meditation.

This morning I worked my way through a setting of Psalm 137, “By the Waters of Babylon.” Ordinarily I am thinking only about fingerings and the resolution of musical dissonances, but today I contemplated the text. It tells the story of a people held in captivity by a hostile government. They are so demoralized they can’t bring themselves to sing their own music. But then there is a change in tone, and the speaker insists one must never forget the land from which they came and everything it stands for. And I thought about what message these words might offer to a Jedi in training.