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Faith and Hope: The Strong and the Weak Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic writer, sought to bridge the gap between East and West. Recognizing Western Christendom required enculturation to a radically different ethos. Having studied in France in post-WW II, Endo was deeply influenced by Catholic novelists as Mauriac, and Bernanos. Someone called him the Japanese Graham Greene. The translation by William Johnston of Endo’s wonderful book, Silence, sums up in the preface. Endo’s challenge, “the tree of Hellenized Christianity cannot simply be pulled out of Europe and placed in the swamp of a Japan that has a completely different cultural tradition.” Francis Xavier, the intrepid Jesuit missionary, touched land in Japan in 1549, and there was the beginning of a flourishing faith. Francis rhapsodized about the Japanese, “The people we have met so far are the best who have as yet been discovered, and it seems to me that we shall never find … another race equal to the Japanese.” (Johnston) However, a 1614 edict led to the expulsion of all missionaries and a deep suspicion of Jesuits and the uncompromising obedience of Japanese converts. “The hunt for Christians and priests became as systematically ruthless as to wipe out every vestige of Christianity.” (Johnston) The novel Silence takes place during this persecution. I find the characters so reminiscent of the peace movement these last forty years in the U.S.; the heroes, martyrs, the strong and the weak; the utter uniqueness of each one’s struggle to be “faithful,” the danger of labels, given the mystery and complexity of our stories. The Japanese authorities in Silence move from executing Christians, creating martyrs, heroic witnesses, to a more selective oppression. Arrest, imprison, and torture the priests in an effort to propel them to a public abandonment of their faith, apostasy. The apostasy is carried out by a “fumie,” trampling on the engraved face of Christ. One of the incentives to apostasy was to tie and suspend a priest’s converts over a pit of excrement for days. The understanding: apostatize and save their lives or refuse and they die an awful death. Rodrigues, a young, ardent Portuguese Jesuit missionary is in search of his former teacher, Ferreira, who has apostatized—now a collaborator with the Japanese authorities in seducing his fellow Jesuits to follow his lead. In his words, “It is the only course open—save the lives of the people, deny your faith, the missionary effort is doomed.” Garrrpe, a classmate of Rodrigues, refuses to deny the faith and drowns in the sea seeking to save three of his people bound and dumped in the water after his refusal. No empty threats. Rodrigues, after a long, tortuous imprisonment, succumbs—publicly steps on the face of Christ and is congratulated by the authorities for his wisdom, saving the lives of the people, an act of compassion. In the very act of apostasy, he experiences a revelation, “He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure.… And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest. “Trample! Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into the world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried the cross.” The Christ Rodrigues had previously known was glorious, filled with majesty — “I know my Lord is different from the God that is preached in the churches!” “I fell … Lord, you alone know that I did not renounce my faith.” At the end of Silence, the man who betrayed Rodrigues to the authorities, his name Kichijuro, comes requesting that Rodrigues hear his confession. Kichijuro laments, “In this world are the strong and the weak. The strong never yield to torture … but what about those, like myself, who are born weak!” Rodrigues grants him absolution and, reflecting on the drama of his life, finds love; “I love him now in a different way … Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love.” As we walk together on this journey, following the non-violent Christ, who wept for his people, we are a mixed bag of humanity. In Endo’s personal reflections on the paradox of the strong and the weak, he relegated himself to be among the weak. Some are so transparently good, a Dorothy Day, a Romero, they point us to the way. But we need room for the jungle of humanity who fall short of the mark, knowing God’s mercy is beyond our comprehension. Gary Wills, the prolific writer of the secular and the sacred, in his book, What Jesus Really Meant offers a new slant on hope. “Judas could not bear the knowledge of what he had done. He killed himself for having killed God. It was an act of contrition that redeems him, makes him a kind of comrade for all of us who had betrayed Jesus: He is our patron Saint Judas.” Joe Bradley |