Friday, February 25, 2005

Brendan's Isle: Histories and Mysteries From Campires to Kitchen Tables

So why did I call it Brendan's Isle?
Before Columbus came in 1492; before the Chinese fleets in 1421; before Leif Erikson in the 1100s, a wily Irish priest named St. Brendan and a handful of monks left Ireland in the 500s in a leather boat and jouneyed for seven years and along the way found America. They did not build anything like the Danes, they did not stay like the Chinese and they did not conquer like Columbus, they simply stopped and witnessed God's grand creation, and found it good.

Brendan's Isle is a place of hope where we can come together as a global community and experience the joy of transfiguration. Its where we can forgive and be forgiven. Brendan's Isle is an idea that we can come together and share our cultures with the other's in our community and possibly along the way we will realize how infinitely insignificant we are, yet experience the Love God holds for us as a community.

Brendan's Isle is America and its not. There is a diversity here that doesn't exist anywhere else. Everybody kept discovering America. Everyone has a stake in it. Its like the roughneck kid in the global community who had a row with his dad and had to grow up too quick, and now, he feels like he's the biggest so he has to be the big brother to the world. Big brothers always mean well, but sometimes they can be a real bully.

America is caught in an adolescence. Its like the rest of the world is just waiting on us to make something of ourselves and become a better part of the whole. We have to stop trying to be the moral dictator's of the world when we are so immoral ourselves. We have to stop acting as if we own everything and start remembering that God placing us as stewards over the land mean that we are visceroys, not victors over it.

Brendan's Isle is America and it is not. Physically, it is the diversity of America, but the ideals of it are far beyond where we are. That part of Brendan's Isle is a dream that we need to start dreaming, that we can let go of our ideas of God and the church and realize that we are not the moral sword of God, we should be acting as the compassionate bandages instead. God loves us all -- even our enemies, and there is nothing we can do to change that because his love for all of us is perfect.

There are some key issues that we need to explore to help our kids do something better than we did. That is what Brendan's Isle is going to be -- a place where we can remember apartheid and choose to forgive all the wrongdoings of it; It will be a place to forgive slavery; a place to heal the wounds of Ireland despite continued oppression. It is a place where my son will be able to look out at ideals not set by an agenda or a church or a political organization -- but a place filled with people loving and appreciating each other in the perfect love of God. It will be a place where we can learn about transfiguring our community and our minds.

It will be a place where we can send people out into the world and show them the humanity of mankind -- show them that there is no evil in man and nature -- show them everyone and every culture has the capacity for good -- show them what we can become together. It will be a place where others can come to our surreal community and witness the corporate nature of living in the oneness of Christ.

In my perfect plan, I want to turn this idea into an educational program for children, both as a challenge to the deplorable and violence filled Children's Educational Television programming currently challenging the innate goodness in our children, but I want it to go deeper than that. I want to find a calling for this idea.

I think we need to tear down some borders. We need to realize its okay to be Irish -- there's a lot of history there. We need to learn its okay to be Lakota from the Rosebud and its also okay to be part of one thing and another. Its okay for me to really dig all my cultures and get down into the roots of all of them. This isn't just about America, its the whole global community and its my desire to introduce us all, to shake hands and share a laugh and a story and learn we can live through the differences.

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