Welcome back, my faithful readers and newcomers, to another edition of Gaming With God. This is part two of a series of posts on the game Tales of Xillia 2 which I started and am about 10 hours in already. It’s a fantastic game, even though it has some flaws here and there. If you’re looking into playing it, I suggest getting Tales of Xillia first before diving into part 2 as it’s a direct sequel.
The world of Xillia is split into two. One is called Rieze Maxia (pronounced Ri-zay Max-e-a), which is the home of the spirits, and the other is Elympios, which looks like a technologically advanced city. Since they are split, one needs the other to survive, thus causing all the problems that occurred in part 1. The people of Elympios have hated the Rieze Maxians since they are the ones who have the energy to survive, while those of Elympios are slowly losing their own. Even though there is progress between both worlds for peace and trade, racism and spite are still alive and well.
As you walk around Trigleph, where the main character Ludger is from, NPC’s (non-playable characters) are quick to mention how backward Rieze Maxia is, how they are better because of their technology, and how they don’t understand their use of spirit artes. For the people of Elympios, they have only known the use of modern luxuries and have not been aware that there is a spiritual world unlike their own. In the case of Rieze Maxia, the technology of Elympios has never been seen nor do they have anything even close to it available. Just imagine someone from the 1700s coming to the year 2016 and taking a look around, that’s basically what’s going on here.
These issues that keep coming up wherever you travel in Xillia reminded me of how we treat the spiritual world in our “modern” lives. What really makes us so modern though? The fact that we have the internet, smartphones, and digital music? To me, the world is still the same. It just has some great ways to make it more fun or easier to learn and navigate. The spiritual side of our lives, though, gets discarded because we believe it’s imaginary or “crazy talk” today. Regardless of the religion that you are talking about, I see people my age or younger consider worshiping God as something nice to do, but not to be taken seriously.
When you look at the world of Rieze Maxia, they live from the spirits there, looking to them for guidance, energy, weapons or defense from monsters, and just general daily necessities. Putting the two together, living in a technologically advanced world (Elympios, aka First World nations today) while spending time with our Creator every day (Rieze Maxia) is something I myself strive to do. When I first began exploring Christianity after being a Catholic all my childhood, I slowly realized how this spiritual reality can manifest in my life everywhere I went. Whether it’s in my marriage as a husband, my duties at my job, being a leader in my home or to others, as a writer, or anything else, I want to be efficient using what I have available whilst prioritizing my time with God.
My challenge to you today is, how are you bringing the spiritual into the natural? What are you doing to seek after an eternity, when this life is over? Our phones or social media accounts won’t get us closer to the Divine (unless you’re reading the Bible app!). The supernatural is real, and the only way to experience it is to give it the time it merits.
- MEGALOBOX S2 – Fighting for a Second Chance - 03.20.2024
- First Impression: PLUTO - 10.27.2023
- First Impression: SPY x FAMILY Season 2 - 10.07.2023
I think one common misconception of many Christians is that we are simply here in this temporary world to which we have no deeper ties, so all we need to do is, in my own word, “save as many people as possible before the Lord sweeps us all away from this and into our eternal Heaven.” Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God, and while the Bible promises that there will be some sort of “End Times,” it focuses especially on the coming of a “New Earth,” or the rejoining of the Heaven and Earth which were originally created to be “very good.”
There is the eternal to consider, but we must also focus on the Kingdom here where we are! We may not be justified by works, but we sure aren’t exempt from doing them! So I guess that forms the basis of my answer to your questions. I try to examine everything I do with my goals and ambitions to see how they hold eternal value. Am I doing something purely for myself? Perhaps I should rethink it. Is this going to show someone the love of Christ? Am I showing others what it truly means to follow Jesus? If not, I shouldn’t be doing that thing.
Of course prayer helps, too 😉
Oh, as one final note, I do also think that “Catholic” does not equate to “non-Christian” (just look at our staff!), and I know you don’t think that either. But perhaps what you meant was that you grew up as a cultural Catholic before you truly began a relationship with Jesus (which just so happened to be in a protestant setting).
I enjoyed having a prompt to respond to at the end, and I look forward to your next post!
Thanks JP for the insightful reply. Yeah, I am trying out the prompt at the end to see how it works. It just came spontaneously.
Yes, I agree with your comments on living for the eternal, but having a Kingdom minded focus on what God is doing today in this generation. Are we helping to advance His will on the Earth? How does my own life reflect His glory? I think about this daily…
And yes, I actually removed that phrase on those of other religions. I was hesitant on putting it as I didn’t mean to offend. I love my Catholic brothers/sisters and Christians from any denomination or even athiests, whatever. 🙂
And yes, growing up Catholic I honestly never discovered that relationship with the Father I was seeking, and found it in accepting Christ. Not saying you cannot find God through the Catholic church, I just did not personally. I have lived an odd life indeed in regards to my spirituality.
Luminas here! 🙂
“The spiritual side of our lives, though, gets discarded because we believe it’s imaginary or “crazy talk” today. Regardless of the religion that you are talking about, I see people my age or younger consider worshiping God as something nice to do, but not to be taken seriously.”
The general conception we seem to have of the spiritual end of things post-Enlightenment is rather atheist: That is, that a believer’s spiritual experiences are a figment of their imagination. Most religious people claim to not believe this, but then a lot of them later act in a way that flatly contradicts what they just said. Self-professed Christians on the Internet dismiss the real spiritual experiences of young people (Even more likely if it’s a girl) claiming that they’re a ploy for attention when in fact the person might genuinely believe what they are saying did happen to them. People pray to God to forgive them their transgressions and then make no attempt to actually change their behavior, essentially assuming that God Himself isn’t a real person that they literally just talked to. Personally, I struggled for years to accept that what I was experiencing spiritually was in fact real to me—- Because the existence of another person in my head that so deeply fulfilled me is contrary to the cultural belief that religion shouldn’t make you happy. Which ironically comes out of a society constructed from a Christian framework. Which, oddly enough, despite our different Gods, is definitely not what your God had in mind! XD
I think that while we should question the validity of our own experiences to be sure we know what we’re dealing with, assuming resolutely that anything inside the mind “didn’t really happen” in any sense is a major mistake. I assume that, when someone desperately tries to send a message of worship to someone else in the spiritual world for years, it presumably does get to whoever it is really going to. I’m kind of banking on that being the case.
I think you touch on two different and interesting points – the first is how we view the world and the second is how technology impacts our lives, views of the world. On the first, as we’ve learned to understand the world around us better – some of us have lost the wonder of the natural world. We know how most of it functions, so where is the wonder – for some. The magic as “more primitive men” viewed the world, is gone. But why? Just because we understand better how earthquakes happen, doesn’t make it less frightening. Just because we understand how to harness the power of electricity, doesn’t make it less miraculous what it can do. Just because we get how the Grand Canyon is formed, doesn’t make it less breathtaking. When we lose the ability to be in awe of the beauty of the world around us because we “understand science better” we lose something important in our lives.
On the second – it’s interesting how many people have gotten to worship technology. Imagine if someone from a few hundred years ago came into a modern house. They would most likely ask about our flat, black, shiny god which displayed strange pictures (TV). They’d assume it was a god as we center our entire room around it and spend a great deal of time in front of it. The Neil Gaimann Novel “American Gods” touches base on the way many in the modern world worship technology, giving it the veneration people used to give to the sun or lightning. The anime series Fractale (which I would recommend) also shows a logical end to worship of technology, where an entire cult to the “Fractale” system with priests and worship centers are created in the world. When we get to the point where technology is no longer a tool, but getting between us & our Creator, we need to take a step back. TVs, internet, anime are all created things and when we let them take precedence and give them elevated value, it devalues our God.
Thanks for the comment, and yes very true. We need to be weary on how we treat technology and it’s role in our life. I try to see it as something that helps me advance my tasks more efficiently than something that I need. I remember when I didn’t have a cellphone when I was in high school and life went on. Now suddenly, it’s always in my hand no matter where I go! I do have to check myself often and put the tech down (ps4, cellphone, laptop, etc) and just spend time with God
[…] those that have been following, this is part 3 of my series of posts from Tales of Xillia […]