Martyrdom, failure, surrender, and the difficulty of loving God and other people when love becomes painful rather than sentimental
I found Silence by Shusaku Endo at a Goodwill a few months ago. The front features a red image of Jesus crucified on Japanese Kanji, so even though it was in the fiction section, I thought, “I need this book!”
I think sometimes, the Holy Spirit puts the right books into our hands at the right moment. I’ve been praying about what it means to do God’s will and what it means to love others and how I’m never as good as I want to be. Through this journey, there have been several books and movies that have helped develop my understanding. First, He Leadeth Me by Father Walter Ciczek, then Triumph of the Heart which I watched with Stuart on St. Maximillian Kolbe’s feast day, and finally Endo’s Silence.
What do we do when we fail others or they fail us? How do we love Jesus when we feel abandoned by Him? How do truly love others as Jesus commanded, and avoid the trap of just loving ourselves through them? These stories helped me immensely in contemplating these questions. I’ll tackle these questions over several blog posts, starting with: What do we do when we fail?
Silence (Spoilers ahead)
Silence is a novel based on the apostacy of Jesuit Father Giuseppe Chiara who came to Japan to find his former mentor Father Cristóvão Ferreira who had been tortured and forced to renounce his faith. Endo renames Chiara to Father Sebastiao Rodrigues and adds an additional missionary Father Francisco Garrpe. He also introduces Kichijiro, a Japanese peasant who serves as the mission’s guide into Japan who Fr. Rodrigues initially pities and loathes for his lack of courage. This servile, cringing, man cannot be a Christian, he thinks. Throughout the story, we learn that Kichijiro has been presented with many opportunities to be a martyr but each time, he renounces his faith and steps on a brass image of Christ, the Fumie. He even betrays Father Rodriguez to the Japanese government, causing him to be imprisoned. Still, Kichijiro owns his weakness and constantly comes to the priest for confession, following after him pitifully like Gollum trailed Frodo in the Lord of the Rings.
Rather than being subjected to torture of his own body, Father Rodriguez is presented with a terrible choice: tread on the fumie and become apostate or watch Japanese Christians be tortured to death. He holds out, but eventually through exhaustion, verbal sparring with Fr. Ferreira, and God’s apparent silence, he steps on the fumie. The only time he seems to think he hears God speak is right before he apostasies. He believes he hears Jesus command him to step on the fumie. I wonder if the author believes this is Jesus speaking though. Can Jesus ever tell us to do a thing that is a sin?
Kichijiro finds the apostate priest and asks for penance in the last pages of the final chapter in the book, “Father I betrayed you. I trampled on the picture of Christ. In this world are the strong and the weak. The strong never yield to torture, and they go to Paradise; but what about those, like myself, who are born weak, those who, when tortured and ordered to trample on the sacred image…”
The priest replies that “There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?” and agrees to hear Kichijiro’s confession, even though he has likely been thrown out of his order and can no longer administer sacraments.
Father Rodriguez identity is subsumed into Japan- he is forced to take a Japanese name and a Japanese wife and collaborate with the government on further persecution of Christians.
The book ends with a curious appendix in the form of a diary of an officer at a Christian residence in which we learn that Kichijiro followed Father Rodriguez to his new home in order to become an attendant in his household. Apparently Kichijiro kept sharing his Catholic faith because we learn that both he and several of his friends were arrested and tortured. This appendix also shows that despite Father Ferreira’s protestations, Christianity is capable of taking root in Japan.
You Exist Here
Reader, do your failures or the most painful moments of your life, play over and over in your head? It reminds me of the pilot for Star Trek Deep Space Nine (yes I’m that kind of nerd) where aliens who have no conception of linear time try to understand humans, a very temporally focused creature. Yes I know we’re supposed to be talking about Silence and He Leadeth Me. We’ll get there, I promise.
Anyway, Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek’s best captain, fight me behind the Denny’s if you disagree) tries to explain that humans experience events in a sequence, one after another and that they love to explore and learn and are not by nature violent. But the alien shows him the worst moment of his life, when his wife was killed during a Borg attack. Despite his insistence that his life is linear, the aliens remind him, “You exist here.” Sisko is forced to admin that yes, while he experiences time, he also is stuck in this terrible moment and can never really leave it behind. You can watch the short scene below:
That scene always comes to mind when I try to gently brush away painful memories. You exist here.
In the same way, Father Rodriguez exists in the awful moment of his apostasy. Whereas Kichijiro falls, seeks forgiveness, falls again, returns, seeks forgiveness, Father R remains in his failures. I think, because he had an inflated sense of himself, a lot of spiritual pride in the beginning of the story, he found it impossible to seek forgiveness and turn to God. He saw Kichijiro as a wretched person, not fit to be called a Christian. But Kichijiro owns his wretchedness. He knows he needs saving. He knows he cannot do anything on his own. Does Father R know that?
Kichijiro knows what to do with his failure, probably because he has failed in many other areas of his life. Fr. R doesn’t.
So what do we do when we fail? What can we do but repent and turn back to Jesus?
