Can we come home?

Hans and Chewbacca

Photo: DailyStar.co.uk

I fully realize as I sit here on this rainy and cloudy day that I have a desk full of work from having been on the road for more than 10-days. However, before I begin a Sunday of labor when it should be a day of rest – and in fairness I did rest yesterday all day – I must reflect on the recent trailer of the coming George Lucas re-entry into Star Wars.

I have just watched it and recommend you do so before you read the rest of this blog: Star Wars Trailer.

Like many of my colleagues, who are/were Star Wars enthusiasts from the original series in the 1970s, I found myself actually shedding a tear at the end of this trailer. I won’t spoil it for you. Just watch and allow yourself freedom to feel.

You see, I believe Hans and Chewbacca do summarize it well. We are all “seeking to go home.”

For male Muslims, it appears their heavenly home will be filled with nubile virgins tending to their every need. For many Christians, some believe it will be a street paved with gold and a golden entry gate and reunification with those they loved in life. For others, it may be an endless feeling of love and bliss and I suspect that is really for all of us.

I believe it maybe that experience which every man and woman seeks and yet eludes them in this plane. Could it be that “coming home” is actually finding for the first time a sense of peace and an embrace of love and eternal bliss that transcends all those times in our lives when we didn’t feel peace and love?

Ann Landers was an advice columnist for many years when I was growing up in rural western Kentucky. When I was younger, my parents subscribed to the Paducah Sun-Democrat now more politically-correct they call themselves the Paducah Sun. This daily newspaper was where I honed my reading and vocabulary skills, learned about the history of the world and our state and received daily advice and counsel about life.

I experienced “The Cold War” between our country and the USSR in these pages and prayed at night that my little farm and family would not be annihilated by the “big one.” I grew up learning to “duck and cover” and always listening carefully for an Air Raid siren in the distance. I read of past historical moments that were the foundation of our country and the sacrifices that my ancestors made to make my country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” I consumed the practical, common sense advice of Ann Landers on everything from sex to proper manners.

Ann Landers was a pen name created by Chicago Sun-Times advice columnist Ruth Crowley in 1943 and taken over by Eppie Lederer in 1955. For 56 years, the “Ask Ann Landers” syndicated advice column was a regular feature in many newspapers across North America. Due to this popularity, ‘Ann Landers’, though fictional, became something of a national institution and cultural icon.

Landers gave advice on everything imaginable and often about love and relationships. She stated unequivocally that: “Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.”

I would posit that even in the best of human relationships few people could meet the criteria of this type of relationship. Admirable as it is, it is at best challenging to conform to such an existence in the bonds man forms with one another.

Which brings me back to the need for the human spirit to “come home,” let us imagine just for a minute how utterly ridiculous some of our imaginations are when it comes to peace and bliss throughout the history of our religions. I will not articulate them here for it is much better for the reader to do his/her own research.

In my life-time of 64-years, however I have witnessed many often unimaginable concepts of how people would find universal and forever peace and bliss from those who believed a giant spaceship was following a comet as their salvation to Timothy O’Leary believing that dropping LSD – “acid” would bring about an eternal ecstasy. I have seen radical Muslims seek their divine right to virgins by decapitating Christians and have relived the Middle Age Crusades and New Age liberation theology through a President unwilling to deal with terrorism of any substance associated with “religion.”

Whatever our belief system, I contend that all of us seek a relationship status reflective of Ann Landers definition of love and a perpetual state of bliss, the state where we have extreme spiritual happiness.

Hans and Chewbacca can come home. We must ask ourselves, can we?