The Circle Is Now Complete: Alex Bird, a Real-Life Jedi, Brings the Force to Life

On September 30, 2016, Alex Bird joined Jack Hitt onstage at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut, as part of the ongoing series “Amateur Hour,” in which various tinkerers, zealots, and collectors discuss their obsessions. Bird, who lives in Kingston, New York, works to restore cognitive and social skills in survivors of brain injuries. He is ranked as a knight and deacon at the Temple of the Jedi Order, where he has three apprentices. The conversation that follows was recorded live and has been edited for brevity and meaning.

JACK HITT: As I was growing up in the Episcopal Church, there were things that we did: You said grace at a meal, you said your prayers before bed and sometimes when you got up. As a Jedi knight, what do you do during the day? How do you practice the religion? What happens?

ALEX BIRD: I am a knight in the Temple of the Jedi Order, generally truncated to TotJO. It’s a very new endeavor, and we’re in a place where we’re still creating the text from which we operate. The phrase borrowed directly from the movie—and everyone is familiar with it: “May the Force be with you”—is used, as are a dozen variations of it. But we try very hard to take it a step further. I and the people I practice with take the movie as a starting point. We say, “Here is a myth. Here is a series of images that turned us on when we were kids. Rather than following them all in the fantasy direction, let’s see how fantasy-oriented our lives can become.”

Does that mean you meditate? Do you pray?

I do! I meditate, and I teach meditation as part and parcel of my work.

Just general meditation or Jedi meditation?

In Revenge of the Sith, we see Samuel L. Jackson, i.e. Mace Windu, sitting on a terribly uncomfortable-looking couch in his boots, which I’ve always interpreted as him meditating. But what was the content of that practice? We don’t know. But we can look at real-world analogues. The bulk of my practice personally lies in that vein of Vipassana meditation, something closer to Zen meditation for the men and women I serve. I think it’s more accessible to them.

Is there a group with whom you meditate?

Well, I’ll back up a bit. We chose a myth. If you grew up in a religion, so did you—or, rather, a myth was presented to you, a story that speaks to a culture in a specific time and a specific place, generally with a finite set of motifs. Creation, destruction, or hero’s journey. Every one of us was handed a myth, and these are things that before TV, before movies, when we were young, our elders would have sat us down and said, “Here’s where the world came from. This is a story about a villain. Don’t act out these behaviors. This is the story of a hero. This is the way you should behave.” And there will be a set of images that accompany it. These stories help you make decisions about how you want to live your life, but the language of the story also predicates your relationship with whatever it is you hold sacred, your notion of the transcendent. And if you are a Christian or a believer of one kind or another, it involves God.

I am an ordained minister, and I’m also an atheist, and that’s okay, because I have my own sense of what is transcendent. For me, it’s not supernatural. It could be as simple as something beautiful. Soon, it will get cold and I’ll go outside, breathe, and the moisture will leave my mouth. It will crystallize into fog: To me, a beautiful and transcendent thing about the world. But also, simple physics. But it’s beautiful and it speaks...