"May the Fourth"

Yes, this is known as "Star Wars" day because of the obvious pun on "May the Force be with you"


(Disclaimer: I really only recognize the *original* Star Wars movies - the one now known as "A New Hope" and its two 1970s/80s successors - as "real' Star Wars. Well, okay, I liked what I saw of "The Force Awakens" - my brother brought the dvd last Thanksgiving and I wound up seeing part of it in between doing other stuff. But the "prequels," the ones with Jar Jar Binks? Nope. I saw one of them in the theater and at one point leaned over to my brother and commented, "It's like watching a UN meeting on C-SPAN.")

Anyway, I know I've commented before, two things:

I think most anyone brought up in an even minorly-liturgical Christian setting feels slightly compelled to reply "And also with you" when they hear "May the Force be with you" (And I am not the only one who feels that so I know it's not just me).

But also, yes - in the "original" movies (which I guess are 4, 5, and 6 of the trilogy of trilogies?), the Force was a mysterious thing, and I guess in my child-mind I did imagine it as something like God or the Holy Spirit (at least among the GOOD Jedi), because I've told the story before about how my brother (who was somewhere between three and five at the time) asked me if I thought the Force was with us, and my mom over heard it and she said she held her breath, hoping I WOULDN'T say, "you silly kid, that was just a movie" but she was sort of surprised when I very earnestly said, "Oh, I HOPE so."

I don't even remember that happening, but she's told the story several times, so it must have. Then again, I could dive pretty deep into imagination as a child, and so it's not out of character for me. (I also was somewhat protective of my little brother; I think I held onto the Santa-belief longer than I might have because I didn't want to spoil it for him). And really, I think, it's sort of a nice thing for a kid to believe: that there's a power out there and you can use that power for strong good if you wanted to (the way my brother and I were raised - well, we would have been more the Obi-Wan type of Jedi than the Darth type)

And yeah, another way I was disappointed in the Phantom Menace was that it took the Force as a mysterious concept and changed it into something that seemed very reductionistically biological, with the midchlorians, and I felt like it made something that had been big and mysterious and, like I said, for certain people could almost seem a quasi-religious force, and made it something very small and almost mechanical. Oh, I know they backed off from that in later movies (and the fact that some Jedi chose to go "bad" means that it's not a perfect analogy of the Holy Spirit, but whatever)

Star Wars - the original three in the franchise, anyway - was big in our young lives. My brother had LOTS of the figures and I remember one Christmas I managed to score one of the more popular ones (it might even have been Yoda?) to give him, and that was a big hit. (The figures could be VERY hard to come by; at least one Christmas stores issued special rainchecks for parents to wrap up for their kids). I even had a Tauntaun figure (the one with the trapdoor in the back so you could stick a figure's legs through). And it is kind of amazing to think it's still going to this day...

(In a way, it's like Hello Kitty: it was around when I was a kid, it's STILL around now)