Silence brought
to you by…Best Baby Strollers
by Shusaku Endo, translated by William Johnston
Completed February 2000
Shusaku Endo was one of Japan's great 20th century authors, and like Walker Percy and Graham Greene, he is a Catholic who spent a good portion of his literary life writing about his faith and his struggle with it. As a Catholic, Silence is a book that really makes me think. I don't know that Endo provides any answers, but he asks a question that I think most Catholics don't want to face. It is the same question that Jesus asked as he hung on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Endo picks an awesome setting for his question: the period of Christian persecution in Japan in the late 1500s and 1600s, when many Japanese Catholics and European priests were tortured and forced to apostatize. Endo's "silence" is the silence of God in the face of these awful events. After experiencing one of these events, one of Endo's characters writes: I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God.....the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent."
But while Endo's main character, the priest Sebastian Rodrigues, struggles with this question and his faith, I found the book as a whole to be faith-affirming. Like Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, Martir (the story of a priest who doesn't believe in the resurrection), the loss of faith equates to a loss of purpose, a loss of strength and a loss of humanity which paints the power of God -- silent though He may be -- much more powerfully than words could ever do. While engaged in the struggle, Rodrigues (and his brother priests and Christians) have a strength to which we gravitate. When they lose their struggle, they become (repeatedly Endo uses this word to such powerful effect): "servile." How ironic. When characters place themselves at the service of God, they are pillars of strength. When they reject their faith-driven duty, they become servile.
Of course Endo's work is not so simply reduced. The specific circumstances of his characters and priests make us think what we would have done and it is -- even from the comfort of our lives -- difficult to imagine that we would have been able to act differently. As one character comments on a group of Japanese Christians that are being tortured mercilessly, "Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them." It seems blasphemous to think or write this, but Endo was -- and remained -- a Catholic. No doubt, however, one who for better or worse, confronts the historical and philosophical questions of his religion.
So, having said all this, I wouldn't recommend this book for an inexperienced Catholic, or for a non-Catholic trying to understand Catholicism. Endo is working out his doubts and confusion (in addition to this question of silence, for instance, he is very concerned with whether Catholicism can even work in the "swamp of Japan"). The European priests, for instance, talk about how the Japanese' "faces all look the same" -- surely a metaphor for the great divide in understanding (along with a touch of racism) between Japanese Catholics and their brethren elsewhere. Beyond God's silence, too, he struggles to understand why God has "given our [Japanese] Christians such a burden ["the long years of secrecy have made the faces of these Christians like masks. This is inded bitter and sad."]" Rodrigues (no doubt speaking for Endo) concludes, "this is something that I fail to understand."
Another issue for Endo, I think, is struggle of the weak. Some of us are strong and some are weak. Are the weak to be blamed? At one point Endo describe a weak character and then asks, what if he had been born in Portugal and never put to the test...he would have undoubtedly died and gone to heaven. Endo seems fascinated in this respect by Judas, and creates a Judas-like character (Kichijiro), who at the point of betrayal says this: "'Father, forgive me!' Still kneeling on the bare ground Kichigiro cried out in a voice choked with tears. 'I am weak. I am not a strong person.'" Is that a valid defence?
From a literary standpoint, too, this is an impressive work. Endo's metaphors and imagery come through even in translation. One such passage from Rodrigues:
|
|
As I pushed open the wet door, the song of the birds broke in from the trees like the rising of a fountain. Never before had I felt so deeply the sheer joy of being alive. We sat down near the hut and took off our kimonos. Inthe seams of the cloth the firmly entrenched lice looked just like white dust, and as I crushed them one by one with a stone I felt an inexpressible thrill of delight. Is this what the officials feel when they capture and kill Christians? |
|
I don't know that I could imagine a few sentences expressing such powerful images...at complete opposite ends of the spectrum: from a sense of freedom to a sense of being a hunted animal.
Silence is really a simple story, but one that is beautifully told to make us think about things about which we may not want to think.