Yesterday, America, and perhaps other parts of the world as well, remembers--or at least makes a pretense of doing so--Columbus Day.  Why?  Extensive research has found Columbus to be decidedly less wonderful than he was 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.
     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 the very religion we seek to uphold.  God 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.

     Though those of us who live in white America are likely grateful to be doing so, we should be quick to realize that the instant we suppose our experience is the result of the work of God, we just as quickly elevate our joy, our earthly joy, over that of everyone who lost theirs when we got ours.