Luke! Trust your feelings!” As we know, Luke does what he is told, and the galaxy is saved. How fortunate that he did not trust his mind and skill, as he was tempted to, because then the evil empire would have won. The Star Wars movies express a view of how to live, a morality of feeling, found far beyond the perimeter of the Dreamworks studio. As Keats wrote to a friend, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
The morality of feelings turns out to be quite ecumenical. From a Roman Catholic website advising young people how to recognize the call of God: “Listen to your feelings.” From a young evangelical’s letter to a college magazine: “I became convinced that this is the guy God want[s] me to marry. . . . [But] he’s prayed about it and feels that she’s the one God wants him to marry. . . . There are times that I feel that maybe he’s wrong about her” (emphasis added). From a letter I received from a self-described witch, explaining why she converted to Wicca: “I enjoy it very much. I am no longer sad or lonely.” From the New Age best-seller of Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God: “Passion is God wanting to say ‘hi.’ . . . You need no outside authority to give you direction, no higher source to supply you with answers . . . . If you look to see what you feel about it, the answers will be obvious to you, and you will act accordingly.” From the back cover of Lynn Grabhorn’s popular self-help book, Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting: “With no effort other than paying attention to how we’re feeling, we can mold our lives exactly as we choose with relative ease and speed.”
