Today, America remembers--or at least makes a pretense of doing so--Columbus Day. By putting it this way, I mean that unless they get the day off from work, most Americans, I suspect, pay little attention to the meaning of this second Monday in October.  It's just another day of life.
     So why does America remember Christopher Columbus?  Extensive research has found Columbus to be decidedly less wonderful than he had been considered to be fifty years ago.  Our best evidence indicates that he engaged in questionable financial transactions; participated in excessive political pandering; mistreated the American natives he met; and used his religion (or at least the idea of God) to justify his frequently debasing actions. Moreover, as many a Native American historian has remarked, 1492, the year Columbus "discovered" the Americas, is one that sparked many centuries of tremendous suffering for the thousands of people who had at that time called the Americas their home.  Although the natives' descendants today benefit, in part, from the material improvements that Westernizing of the Americas has brought them, far too many of them continue to languish on the margins of society.  They remain ostracized and forgotten in their native land.
     So why remember this?  History teaches us many things.  In this instance, it teaches us that when we search for individual riches and glory at all costs, particularly in the name of religion, we too often demean and deny the goodness and glory of everything and everyone else.  In the big picture, the discovery of the Americas has benefited people the world over.  In painting a big picture, however, we too often forget that it is the product of a multitude and often conflicting individual brush strokes.
     While I do not claim to speak for God, I cannot help but think that he would rather have seen things done differently.  He doesn't need brutality to let people know about his love for them, and he certainly doesn't need those who proclaim his virtue and holiness to inflict suffering and pain on those to whom they are "trying" to make him known.