Beyond a Mere "Code of Honor"

The following is from one of my websites: Soul Trek: TNG. It's my latest meditation on the episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. It's a slow-moving project, due to my life as a stay-at-home dad, but I'll keep plugging away for as long as it takes...

     This refers to the TNG episode called "Code of Honor"; see the link for a synopsis.

     

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This episode should cause us to look at the way we view and treat the people around us. Lutan's constant choice to refer to the people around him, especially women, as "things," and the Enterprise's crew as "strange, alien things"－as though simply denying their personhood isn't insulting enough－is a crass way of expressing verbally what many of us do only subtly. As Pope Blessed John Paul the Great so wisely taught us in his Theology of the Body, one of the tendencies that Original Sin has saddled us with is this very same urge to see others not as persons, equally worthy of the respect due every human being, but as mere tools to be used for our own self-gratification, for the advancement of our personal and selfish desires. For Lutan, everyone, even his "first one" Yaree

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na, is simply a tool, a pawn to be used to give him the power and the undefined but all-important (to him, at least) "honor" he craves.
     But where he seems to do this consciously, we tend to do it thoughtlessly. We see the people driving the cars around us, for instance, as obstacles to our desire to arrive swiftly at wherever it is we're going, and so we curse at their perceived stupidity－after all, they can't hear our obscenities, so it isn't hurting anyone, right? We grumble when our loved ones ask us to clean something around the house, or when our children want us to play with them, because they're just getting in the way of our desire to vege out in front of the TV and/or computer after a long day of work.
     These are the little ways that we devalue and disrespect even those closest to us, but our culture teaches us constantly to keep using others in much more damaging ways than this. We are repeatedly taught, in practically every TV show, even at times in Star Trek, that sexual intercourse should be expected and encouraged as quickly as possible after a couple admits mutual attraction to one another. However, biologically and spiritually, this is the worst kind of abuse of another. As my wife, a family physician, likes to point out to her patients, the most common sexually transmitted disease is depression, because intercourse biologically tells our brains to be linked emotionally for the rest of our lives to the person with whom we've just mated, especially the woman's brain. So when the couple that just started going out (or worse, just "hooked up" for a one night stand) parts ways because their relationship had no stronger basis than physical attraction, their bodies don't know how to cope; their hormones tell them they should feel as bad as if their spouse had just died.
     This is just one way in which intercourse outside of marriage hurts us. This is only one of many scientific reasons, reasons which God knew before we ever thought to study them, that God's command that intercourse be reserved for marriage is anything but arbitrary.(1) Like all of God's laws and commandments, this is given so that you "may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10b). He loves each and every one of us because we are unique, unrepeatable persons, created in His image and likeness, no matter what our physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual deficits, no matter our current situation, and even no matter how much we bump heads with one another.
     So let's not be like Lutan, seeing each other as stepping-stones or stumbling-blocks on the way to the precarious glories of being "on top." And let's also not be like the writers of this episode who saw the Ligonians too a mere obstacles to the crew's humanitarian mission of procuring the vaccine, as though it was law (the Prime Directive), not each Ligonian's (even Lutan's) inviolable dignity as a human(oid) person, that stopped the crew from squashing the Ligonians like bugs and stealing the vaccine simply because they could. Instead, let's be like Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (a.k.a. Mother Teresa) and look at each and every person we interact with today and every day as though they are the dearest person to our hearts. Let's drop everything that's important to us and make their needs come first. Let's respect them enough to honor them for who they are, before even considering for a moment how we might use them to make ourselves feel better.

​     Let us pray:

     

     Blessed John Paul the Great, you reminded us of the absolute sanctity of every human person, of each unrepeatable person's inviolable dignity as a child of God. Pray that we would never forget that lesson and never cease to practice self-donative love because of it.
     Blessed Mother Teresa, you taught your sisters to see the face of Our Host Holy Lord, the King of Love-Come-Among-Us, in even the most destitute and seemingly unlovable of persons. Help us, by your prayers, to likewise see His Adorable Face in that of every person we meet today and every day.
     Amen.​

     

This is only a portion of the content available at the Soul Trek: TNG website, so if you enjoyed it, please head on over and check it out!

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For more information on the science and wisdom behind the Catholic Church's teachings on sexual morality, I recommend reading 

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Sex Au Naturel by Patrick Coffin.

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