Of Canons and Lasers, and Laser Cannon

There has been a great disturbance in the force.  George Lucas has sold the rights to the Star Wars universe to Disney, and Disney has plans for it.  Just the other day they sent shockwaves through Star Wars fandom the likes of which have not been felt since the first Death Star obliterated Alderaan.  The announcement was the formation of a canon, not a cannon, a canon, a set of material that is going to be considered authoritative for whatever direction Disney now takes the worlds of Star Wars.  The Canon has been identified as the first six movies, which focus on the Annakin Skywalker-Darth Vader story arc, as well as the animated Clone Wars movie and series.
What is left out is the rather massive opus of work that has been done under the Star Wars trademark, which includes novels, comics, role playing games, and various and sundry other creative ventures that have fed a group of fans well in the long spaces between Lucas' creative activity.  The novels, for instance, have reached back into the days of the Old Republic and gone forward into the lives of the children and grandchildren of Han Solo and Princess Leia.  They have traced the work of Luke Skywalker as he rebuilt the Jedi Order.  It has all had to meet a certain standard of internal consistency in order to bear the name Star Wars, and there are people who consider it sacred, which is where I get really interested in this phenomenon.
I should pause and give an account of my Star Wars street cred.  I have a Millennium Falcon and several action figures on a shelf in my office.  I have a tattoo of the Jedi Order insignia (the Knights of the Old Republic version).  Star Wars was every bit as foundational to me as a child as the Bible, (I have to admit that, at one point, I probably cared a lot more about Luke being Vader's son than I did about Jesus being God's Son).  Watching R2D2 and C-3PO making their way through the deserts of Tatooine is one of my earliest and fondest memories of a movie of any sort.  I destroyed enough Star Wars merchandise by actually playing with it to make collectors everywhere weep.  Princess Leia was the first woman, besides my Mom, that I thought was really beautiful.  I am, to this day, disappointed that science has wasted it's potential on iPhones and hybrid cars and still not produced a working lightsaber.  Jar Jar Binks makes me clench my fist involuntarily, and I really don't see what Padme ever saw in Annakin in the first place.  Yoda is still my favorite character, followed closely by Chewbacca.
Let's just say, I have a rooting interest in Star Wars, but I have been a little surprised by the lament from the people who out-geek me.  The formation of the "canon" of Star Wars, has apparently led some fans into a sort of existential crisis, and in doing so has given me a real-time insight into what probably went on in the Church circa 320-370 CE.  It sort of dawned on me this morning that there were probably people who were deeply attached to the Gospel of Thomas or The Apocalypse of Peter.  We actually have historical knowledge of the debate that went on over the inclusion of The Apocalypse of John, also called Revelation.  It was a little heated.
There were large quantities of material written about Jesus, and by the early church, which just didn't make the cut.  It wasn't just a random process, there were good reasons why the things that were eventually called Scripture were picked over the things that weren't, and yes, as Dan Brown likes to point out, there was some political stuff involved, but ultimately the choices that were made were made so that the Canon of Holy Scripture could be a faithful and living foundation for the Church.
One of the things that the Canon sought to avoid were Gnostic heresies and theological dead ends, of which there were plenty.  They did not want to paint themselves into any corners.  Which is also why Disney (I think) has decided to abandon the novelizations of the Star Wars universe and go a different way.  If they follow the story arc of the novels, they would get some good stories, but, like the Dark Side, forever would those books dominate their destiny.  Once you canonize something, you're stuck with it.  Some of the books are well done, and some of them are just pulp fiction, but there are a lot of them, and I can see how trying to hold them all in canonical regard would seriously crimp the creativity that might just breathe some real life back into a franchise that I dearly love.  One of the reasons The Clone Wars is my favorite post Return of the Jedi part of the universe is that it is free to explore a bit and not be slavishly bound to the Annakin-Vader-Luke Skywalker story line, which, quite frankly, gets a bit old after six movies.
Now we can have some fresh stuff, without the whole, "that's not how it worked in the book!" arguments that geek/fandom is so hell bent on having.  I think Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has firmly established that cinematic and literary storytelling are different things, and that both can be good.
While I have some misgivings about whether Disney is a trustworthy steward of a world that I have loved since I was a kid, I am actually rather excited to see what they do with it, when the end of the story is not a foregone conclusion.  I am thankful that George Lucas came up with this wonderful idea, but I am glad that he finally has given it to the world to continue to tell the story.
In essence that describes very well the life of the church.  In many ways the canon is never really done, even as we argue about the various ways to interpret the canon of scripture, the story of Jesus and his disciples continues to be told in different ways by different people, in different cultures and different ages of humanity.  The re-telling, and the continual searching is life.  I fear for any universe where that process stops.