Thursday, June 3, 2010

Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace



I recently finished reading Shusaku Endo’s historical novel Silence, and have found myself periodically haunted by it over the past several months as it continues to expand in my imagination. The story brings to the fore much of what interests me, and what I’d like to explore in this blog. Endo explores the manner in which culture acts as a sieve through which we sift our understanding of Jesus and the Divine. He explores pride and its insidious presence, even in acts of love, service and humility. He explores the relation of suffering to faith and their relation to a God who remains silent in the presence of both. It’s this last theme that interests me most, this relation of God’s silence with God’s presence/absence, especially in light of the Balthasar sermon for which this blog is named. This also is the central question Endo wrestles with in his novel, hence its title.

Through the book Endo is dramatically rendering the Christian gospel through and for Japanese eyes and ears, sifting the Western presentation and understanding of Christianity through the customs and workings of both Japanese culture at large and Japanese Christians. As a means to this end Endo’s central character, through whose eyes and letters the story is largely told, is a Portuguese Jesuit missionary priest, Rodrigues, who sees his mission as one of correctly ministering the sacraments of the Church to the existing and hidden Japanese Christians (Christianity and all missionary activity have been made illegal), and evangelizing those who were not part of the church, with a certain triumphant expectation at the core of both. Also on his agenda is locating his Jesuit missionary mentor who is rumored to have apostatized, that is turned his back on his faith.

Almost immediately upon arriving in Japan two of those to whom Rodriques has been ministering are put to death for their faith, tied to a stake in the ocean’s tide and killed by hypothermia over the course of several days, a slow agonizing death to be sure. He holds them in high esteem because they were willing to die for their faith, yet he seems to struggle with his own responsibility in the matter, given they were only discovered after he had arrived. This struggle grows as he is captured, along with other Christians to whom he ministered. He sees many of them tortured and killed while in confinement and tries to continue to minister to them, striving to remain a strong example of faith for them. This however continues to be a greater and greater struggle. He is finally confronted by his mentor who is alive and has in fact apostatized, and is serving the Japanese government in their attempts to counter Christianity. In the end he must choose whether to apostatize himself, however not in order to save his own life, but the lives of many other Christians who were being slowly tortured and killed in “The Pit”, an execution device where a person was hung upside down in a pit and a small incision made in their ear so that they slowly bled to death over the course of days, giving them time to recant their faith and save themselves. Thus at the novel’s climax you see the apparent trajectory of the entire story is one of Rodrigues moving closer and closer to apostatizing himself, with this tension of course felt by the reader, torn between Rodrigues’ commitment to his faith, and his love for his fellow Christians.

Throughout the novel there runs a parallel thread to Rodrigues’ narrative. Though told entirely from Rodrigues’ perspective, the character Kichijiro is meant to serve early on as a picture of everything that Rodrigues is not: weak, fearful, proud, and often emotionally unhinged. In the story Kichijiro apostatizes as often as the opportunity arises, often citing his weakness as a reason, and wondering why God had made him this way. It must be noted that Kichijiro is also the one who betrays Rodrigues to the authorities, raising obvious comparisons to Judas in the gospels, a point not lost on Rodrigues’ sense of righteousness. Kichijiro however recognized that his faith was not as “strong” as the other Christians who were willing to part with their lives for the faith; however he consistently returns to the faith, asking Rodrigues for confession and sacraments even after his repeated apostasy and betrayal in the novel. Over the course of the story as Rodrigues follows a trajectory toward apostasy, it becomes apparent that perhaps he is more like Kichijiro than he’d like to admit.

The obvious question to ask as one reads the novel, assuming one was a person of faith, would be whether he or she would end up apostatizing in a similar circumstance. The less obvious question, and the one ultimately posed by the novel is whether one SHOULD apostatize. The first question of course assumes one shouldn’t, but this assumption isn’t necessarily shared by Endo as the story reaches its climax. For the most part in the story the Christians are asked to simply step on a “Fumie” in order to show they are not Christians. A “Fumie” is simply a rendering in bronze or wood of Jesus, possibly on the cross, or possibly of Jesus and Mary. If the person steps on the Fumie they’re released, if not they move closer to torture and death. The novel begs the question of whether this simple act undermines or reveals faith. Simply put, is it more loving to apostatize so as to alleviate suffering or to steadfastly embody the faith that one teaches so as to be faithful and consistent? Endo’s answer to that question reveals the difference between the existential needs of Japanese and Western Christians, at least as he perceived them.

Endo believed that either could be valid expressions of faith. Rodrigues’ mentor, as he is urging him to step on the fumie and release his fellow Christians from their pain and suffering calls it “the most painful act of love you have ever performed.” Rodrigues even sees a vision of Christ, whose face has been very important to Rodrigues throughout the entire novel, asking him to trample on him, declaring that it was for this reason that he entered the world. I will not reveal here Rodrigues’ decision. You’ll have to read the novel yourself. It will suffice to say that his decision of course shapes the course of the rest of his life.

Without revealing the climax of the plot, I will say that Endo throughout the story, through various characters, but particularly through Rodrigues, asks why God is silent in the face of such suffering, even going so far as to ask whether God is even present at all. Why does God not intervene in the interest of justice or mercy? Why does God not make God’s presence known in the interest of comfort? Endo eventually concludes that God’s presence is revealed through the Christ imitating weakness of Christ followers. Endo sees in the story’s climax a vision of Christ not, “filled with majesty,” or “made beautiful by endurance of pain,” or “filled with the strength of a will that has resisted temptation,” but an image of a face, “sunken and utterly exhausted.” He concludes later in the book that even if God were silent that these weak, flawed, stunted, and failed expressions of faith would have spoken of God. These expressions of faith to Endo are participations in the humanity of his savior, and the dramatic re-rendering on the world stage of both the divine love which Christ rendered while human, and the human dependence on that love as we impiously, impatiently and imperfectly render that love to one another, which contrary to prevailing conventional wisdom and intuition, is really a magnificent encouragement.