Assimilated

We watched the final episode of the Star Trek series Picard last week, and one of the scenes moved me so much I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. (Spoiler Alert: if you haven’t watched this series yet you might not want to read further.)

In Season 3, Jean-Luc Picard finds out he has a 21-year-old son named Jack. The young man is plagued with violent thoughts, strange powers, and a persistent female voice in his head calling to him. It turns out that during the time Jean-Luc spent assimilated by the Borg (The Next Generation) a biological seed had been planted in his body. That seed had been passed on to Jack and was now maturing. The voice he had been hearing was the Borg queen calling him to come “home” to the collective.

Once Jack realizes what is happening, he follows the homing signal in his head to a Borg cube hidden inside Jupiter. His intention was to kill the queen, but she proves too powerful for him and he is assimilated. She uses him to broadcast instructions to the entire fleet of the Federation, which is already under Borg control.

Only one ship, the now archaic Enterprise D, remains unaffected. With the entire crew of the Enterprise gathered once again on the bridge, Picard sets out to sever the signal being used to broadcast Jack’s commands and rescue his son. This brings us to the scene in question.

Picard manages to find Jack, but the Borg queen mocks him, telling him he is too late. “Only he can choose to leave now,” she laughs, “and he is too far gone for that.”

That is when Jean-Luc makes a decision he never would have believed he could. After running from the Borg for 35 years, he willingly chooses to assimilate himself in order to reach his son.

Jack can see and hear him now, but he refuses to leave. He is euphoric and thinks he has found his true home. When nothing Picard says seems to work, he tells Jack, “If you won’t leave, I’m staying here with you.” With that, the spell of the collective is broken, and Jack chooses to receive his father’s love.

Satan’s kingdom cannot withstand the power of one free human being.

Sound familiar? There was a time when you and I were like Jack, mesmerized by the words of the ruler of this world, doing his bidding without even realizing it, and so “far gone” we didn’t know there was any other way to live. Our cruel master, knowing that the only way we could leave his “collective” was by our own free will, made sure it felt to us like there was no other choice to be made.

So God made a decision only a father, desperate for his child, could make: he willingly subjected himself to the powers that held us captive and entered into our situation. He knew full well that we might reject him and choose an artificial euphoria over a relationship with him. There was no guarantee that we would respond to him, but his love compelled him to try.

The parallels between Jack’s situation and our own are striking. These words from the Bible are a pretty apt description of the drama that unfolded between him and his father :

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient…. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

When you were dead in trespasses, God made you alive together with him…. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.

Colossians 2; Ephesians 2

In Picard, one single act of Jack’s will breaks the Borg queen’s hold on humanity and ultimately destroys her. Satan’s kingdom cannot withstand the power of one free human being.

The story of redemption is all around us, even in a seemingly innocuous tale of science fiction. As this episode of Picard reminds us, we can’t pull ourselves out from under Satan’s control. Even if we do fight back, the seed he planted in Adam calls out to its master and overpowers our best intentions. We needed a father to come after us and set us free by the power of his sacrificial love.

And that’s just what we got.

Do you belong to yourself?

“You are only free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place–no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.” —Maya Angelou

In the first episode of the new season of Star Trek’s Picard, Jean-Luc Picard, now in retirement, finds himself in a personal crisis. He has spent his whole life constructing his identity as a starship captain and space explorer. Now that those adventures are over, he finds himself wondering what would have happened if he had ever allowed himself to put his own desires before his duty, and what would happen if he tried that now.  Who is he really under his Star Trek uniform?  For the first time in his life, Picard has to face the fear that drove him to the stars in the first place.  What was he running away from?

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward, proposes that our lives can be divided into two parts. The first half of life is driven, albeit unconsciously, by fear.  Early on we learn what the rules are for safety and connection and we resolve to keep them. These rules have benefits – they keep us in check and help us build a successful life. But in the process of keeping our fears at bay, we construct a “false self,” a persona we present to the world.  During the first half of life, we may feel and appear very successful.  But we lose sight of the “true self” that we glimpsed in our early years.

Somewhere along the line we experience what Rohr calls a “necessary falling,” a failure or loss that shakes the false identity we had come to believe was real, and we enter the second half of life. When that happens, we, like Picard, are finally open to facing our fears and “coming home” to our true selves. In finding our true selves, we find a more authentic relationship with God as well.

Christopher Heuretz describes three stages of spiritual experience that correspond well with Richard Rohr’s:

“The pilgrimage home to God involves three phases: a construction phase of identity, followed by an earth-shattering deconstruction of who we thought we were, which finally brings us to the necessary reconstruction of something truer… where we find signposts to help us navigate the reordering of our identity into wholeness.”

“Reordering our identity into wholeness.” 

“Reconstruction of something truer.” 

All of us long for this wholeness and authenticity.

In a recent consultation, my counselor Tammy and I talked about my core fear that if I don’t do everything right, I will not belong.  About how I ran after approval with good grades and conformity. About how I abandoned my true self a long time ago reacting to the responses of others, ever seeking to avoid conflict and feel worthy of belonging. How even the days I consider to be successful ones are spent serving the false self I have constructed to deal with my fear of not belonging.

Then Tammy asked me a key question:  Do I belong to myself?

Brene Brown, in her book, Braving the Wilderness, describes the day she finally understood what Maya Angelou was saying in the cryptic quote at the top of this post. She had just stood up in front of a bunch of dressed-to-the-teeth scientists in her jeans and clogs and spoken about her work from a place of authenticity. To her surprise, she had been enthusiastically received, and talked to her husband Steve about it. His response was,

“You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself in a real way.”

She went back to read the full transcript of the interview between Maya Angelou and Bill Moyers the quote had come from:

MOYERS: Do you belong anywhere?

ANGELOU: I haven’t yet.

MOYERS: Do you belong to anyone?

ANGELOU: More and more. I mean, I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much. I like the humor and courage very much. And when I find myself acting in a way that isn’t… that doesn’t please me — then I have to deal with that.

Brene recalls,

“I looked up from reading that exchange and thought, Maya belongs to Maya. I belong to myself. I get it. I don’t have it completely, but at least I’m getting it.“

Spoiler alert: Picard does end up uncovering the trauma in his childhood that led to the construction of his false self and begins the process of reconstructing his identity into something truer. It takes courage to “brave the wilderness” of authenticity and truly belong to ourselves. But the reward — freedom — is incredibly great.