A Ramble About Andromeda

I've got something to admit. I'm a Kevin Sorbo fan. He may not be a great actor (let's face it, He does well, but the personalities of his main characters don't vary much), but he seems to be a great hero both on screen and off. Besides playing characters on the screen who are really trying to make a positive difference in the world, He himself tries to make a positive difference in the world in reality by being the spokesman and chair of (A World Fit for Kids!”, a non-profit organization that trains teenagers to become mentors to younger children. In what is a rarity these days, he has also been married to the same woman since 1998 (who also happened to play his chief romantic interest in both Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Andromeda).

I've recently become acquainted with Andromeda since returning to California. It's not as polished as some professionally done series but it's actually pretty good. The basic premise is that the “Systems Commonwealth” (read “United Federation of Planets” or “Galactic Republic”) fell and a three hundred year dark age followed it. The Commonwealth Highguard (read “Starfleet”) ship Andromeda Ascendant, the flagship of the Highguard fleet, and its captain Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) were stuck in a time dilation effect at the edge of a black hole and freed by a salvage crew. For Andromeda's captain, the Commonwealth isn't a memory, it was only yesterday. So, drafting the small crew of the salvage ship he sets out to restore the Systems Commonwealth, one planet at a time, and trying to rescue the populations of three galaxies from the aftermath of the “Long Night”. The show itself was created from the notes of the late Gene Roddenberry, and it certainly feels like it has his fingerprints all over it.

The biggest thing which sticks out to me about this show is that the Commonwealth that this captain knew and served had been gone for three hundred years. It had been torn apart from the inside out by what was essentially a civil war. Imagine if the Vulcans had suddenly turned militant and attacked the rest of the Federation and you've got a pretty good idea of what happened. People were badly scarred by hundreds of years of chaos. What were simple, basic technologies were lost. Any hope of restoring the Commonwealth seemed like a bad joke at best.

But there's this one statement he makes in the very beginning. He says “As long as this ship exists, the Commonwealth still exists.” In other words, the Commonwealth wasn't just a political and military entity. It was an idea. It was an idea that he himself had been deeply ingrained with and believed in deeply, and as long as he and his ship still existed, so did that idea, and so did the Commonwealth which he had sworn to protect.

In many ways it reminds me of the movie “The Postman”, based on a novel of the same title. The premise of the movie was that after an apocalypse which had caused the US government to fall and the country to fall into anarchy, a con man dons a postal worker's jacket in order to keep warm, and then delivers the mail from the truck he took it from to its original destination, lying to the people there about a “Restored United States” government and congressional order to restore the postal system. What begins as a scam grows into a movement and a counter revolution as the idea of a restored United States is passed from person to person and community to community and by the end it becomes a full blown reality.

The reasoning behind both the TV show and the movie is that both ideas are about giving people hope. And when you give people hope and something to believe in, it's a powerful thing that can achieve the impossible. Without it people and societies fall apart and collapse, but with it even a seemingly shattered person or society can be resurrected.

I think that people today are in need of this kind of hope where the Church is concerned. Sure, there are plenty of churches just about everywhere, but the Church itself is about as fractured, pock-marked, and corrupted in places as Dylan Hunt's Commonwealth. Many people, professed Christians, are fed up with the local churches and won't return because of abuse and ridicule they've suffered at the hands of church leadership. Just about every day there's some kind of scandal or story about church leadership hurting someone in some way. Further, there's the fact of the rampant schisms within the Church so that the visible Church isn't unified as one body, but a constantly squabbling, bleeding mass of body parts. Like Dylan Hunt's Commonwealth, it wasn't always this way. There was a time when it was One, Holy, Universal (Catholic), and Apostolic Church from one end of the civilized world to the other.

Dylan Hunt's Commonwealth was eventually, somewhat, restored. I have to wonder, do we want the one visible body of Christ restored badly enough to believe in it? Many churches profess that they believe in it every Sunday, and then continue on merrily in their own schisms. The only reason why it doesn't come to fruition in reality is because those same people who profess it don't actually want it to be a reality. If they did, then it would be.

I do believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I believe that all those who are baptized are a part of it. This is the reason why my family and I have attended so many different kind of churches, both liturgical and non-liturgical (which was actually one of the reasons why I was suspended from the priesthood). I don't agree with the way everyone does things. I've read enough of the writings of the Church Fathers to know how they did things to agree with the way things are done today, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize the legitimacy of their baptisms or their inclusion in the Body of Christ. It's also the reason why I've learned to keep my mouth shut about these differences when visiting other churches (no, I don't keep my mouth shut online; my blog is fair game). I believe that we are one Church, and what's more I do try and act like we are one Church. It's sad that in so doing, I think we frustrate and annoy those churches we visit that certainly don't believe that we are one Church. They would like to see my family and I as notches on their Bibles and it's just not going to happen.

As far as I'm concerned the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church does still exist in practice as well as Creed because I still believe in it and intend to continue to act like I believe in it, correcting, rebuking, and encouraging my brothers and sisters and fellow members of the body regardless of their denominational flavor because they are my brothers and sisters Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Evangelical, or Charismatic.

Now, here's my question. Do you actually believe in One, Holy, Universal (Catholic), and Apostolic Church? Are you willing to take the hard road, ignore denominational lines, and act like it? Are you willing to do what it takes to lift our own Long Night?