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Skellig Michael is a special place.
For centuries this tiny crag of an island about 7 miles southwest of Ireland was known chiefly as the reclusive home of thousands of seabirds and a handful of monks.
In December 2015 it became known the world over as that incredibly strange and beautiful place featured in the climactic scene of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Two years later it figured prominently in The Last Jedi, the next entry in the Star Wars saga.
Directors J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson were looking for an earthly vista that could pass for an out-of-this-world landscape – Luke Skywalker’s “Jedi Island,” the one place in that galaxy (far, far away) where the sad and broken hero could seclude himself.
Skellig Michael qualifies.
In 2012 my two brothers and I boarded a small Irish tour boat and journeyed to the island.
We felt fortunate. The weather was perfect. Almost half the scheduled trips are canceled because of rough seas, high winds, and driving rain.
We immediately encountered the resident colonies of puffins, those strange little ocean birds with the thick, multi-colored beaks. The producers of Star Wars were granted permission to film on the island only if they never so much as ruffled a feather of this protected species. Johnson became so fed up trying to shoot around them that he invented Porgs – terminally cute fictional creatures that appear as “screen covers” for the puffins.
Skellig Michael is vertical. We clambered up the 660 rocky steps (note my ruggedly athletic, stooped form in the picture above) in order to reach the ancient monastery at the top.
There we found a collection of roughly hewn stone shelters resembling human-size beehives, cisterns for catching water, and a tiny chapel.
Very little is known about the Christian monks who populated this place sometime between 600 and 1200 A.D. There are no trees on the island. Any wood to make a fire had to be brought from the mainland across the unpredictable seas in fragile boats – a voyage that might literally be the last one a monk ever took.
There was no agriculture on Skellig Michael, either. The monks ate the meat and eggs of seabirds, and whatever food they might be able to bring from the coast or barter from passing sailors.
It’s estimated that at any given time there were no more than a dozen monks and an abbot living in this colony at the edge of civilization – seemingly the ends of the earth.
Why did they do it? What motivated these incredibly committed individuals to forego virtually every pleasure we take for granted?
The monastic ideal of the Middle Ages was to please God by separating from the rest of the world. It seemed best to look after one’s own soul in rugged isolation, and to pray for the rest of fallen humanity from a distance.
Over time, however, followers of Jesus gradually began to reclaim Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John 17:15-17:
“My prayer is not that you [Father] take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it… As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”
As generations of theologians have put it, our call is to be in the world but not of the world.
Sometimes that seems like a hopeless cause. Even Jedi Knights have looked for places where they can hide themselves from the pressures, responsibilities, and disappointments of a deeply flawed society.
But now is not the time to lose heart. Since Jesus has identified us as the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-15), our call is not to retreat to forsaken specks in the middle of the ocean. “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (5:16).
Salt and light belong where they can do the most good in our broken world – every day of our lives.
Which means that if we ever contemplate a boat ride to the ends of the earth, we should make sure it’s a round-trip ticket.