Have you been watching the new Star Wars show Ahsoka on Disney+? I have been.
Obviously.
Wait. What’s that you said? No? You haven’t been watching Ahsoka? You don’t even know what I’m talking about?
Whoa. Okay. *takes deep breath*
Here’s my promise to you, then: This short essay will begin with Star Wars. It will have within it a lot of Star Wars. There will be Star Wars words that you might not understand or be able to pronounce or—quite frankly—care to.
But my promise is this: This essay is not about Star Wars. Not really.
Anyway, though. Let’s begin.
If you have been watching Ahsoka, then you’ve likely been delighted by the break-out droid hero Huyang, played by David Tennant. Huyang feels a little like this generation’s C-3PO: He’s vaguely humanoid, delightfully sassy, has no filter whatsoever, speaks not in beeps and buzzes but in honest-to-goodness words and is chock full of information no one seems interested in accessing.
More on that later.
But for intense Star Wars nerds like myself, this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered Huyang. Huyang has popped up across Star Wars stories, most importantly in an arc in The Clone Wars animated series where he helped a crew of young Jedi craft their lightsabers. Why did he do that? Because Huyang is an architect droid who has been assisting the Jedi Order and constructing lightsabers for, like, a thousand generations.
That makes roughly 900-year-old Yoda’s lifespan look like a speck in time.
All that to say, while C-3P0 is a lot of fun and definitely fluent in over 6 million forms of communication, his whole Rosetta Stone schtick barely holds water compared to Huyang’s deep well of information, experience and history.
But three episodes into Ahsoka, we’ve barely seen Huyang draw on any of that vast array of knowledge—aside from utterly destroying Sabine Wren’s tender ego by calling her the least impressive Jedi-in-training he’s ever met.
My question is this: Why? We’ve got this living legend onboard and we’re staring down this existential threat to peace and security in the New Republic and all Ahsoka and Sabine seem able to do is pew pew their way across the galaxy—at least, until we get to the next galaxy.
Alright—enough Star Wars. But hang onto that idea of Huyang, this vast, accessible, untapped well of information.
I wonder how often we barrel through our own lives, barrel-rolling over hard questions and new experiences and downright challenging moments, while some source of vast wisdom sits untapped in the corner. We grit our teeth and face down existential evil as though we’re the first to do so.
But history tends to repeat itself, our own spiritual lives are marked by the patterns they assume, and—in the wise words of Battlestar Galactica’s Number Six—“all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” So, let’s not recreate the wheel.
The question, then, is, who is the Huyang character in your life? Is it a therapist you refuse to call or a friend you never texted back? Is it a spiritual leader or an old professor or just that guy next door who seems to know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff?
Is there some untapped source of wisdom and knowledge, of tradition and insight, that you might turn to? A philosophical or religious tradition? A stack of books? That one podcast everyone keeps saying you should listen to?
The funny thing—or, one of the many funny things—about Huyang in Ahsoka is that no one takes his word on anything. His insistence on following regulations, his insertion of facts into conversation they don’t belong—it’s all a reminder that these proverbial wisdom figures aren’t to be approached uncritically.
But they are to be approached. Unpacked. Explored. Integrated.
And I wonder if we’d be better for having done so.
So, whether or not you’re watching Ahsoka—and c’mon, did I really not convince you?—let’s all commit to dialogue with the proverbial Huyang in our lives. Let’s not let all that experience and insight and information sit idly on a galactic shelf.
Because if we’ve learned anything from the first three episodes of Ahsoka—and life in general—it’s hard to vanquish a bad habit or an old foe once and for all.
And another thing…
And once you get started on Ahsoka, here’s why I think the show’s spiritual insight, making the Jedi path more radically inclusive, is so perfect for this moment in our own spiritual lives.
Wanna hear how my electric car fuels my spiritual life? Pun intended.
Finally, if you want to hear more of my thoughts on Star Wars and spirituality, sign up for this virtual program I’m offering through a great retreat center, Well for the Journey: “Into the Cave: The Spirituality of Star Wars.”
I can't believe I missed this while watching anything with Huyang, but especially Ahsoka. You're a smart one.