Shusako Endo's Silence

[While the following post was written the last week of Lent (and was meant to be published in those days), Shusaku Endo's Silence belongs among those "perennial favorites" we're always going on about.   Rather than a straight book review, we offer more of a personal reflection. One note: if you haven't read the book, this review contains spoilers.]

As a kind of Lenten supplement, I have been reading Shusaku Endo's Silence. It has been a balm to me, in a strange "bright sadness" kind of way. Set in seventeenth-century Japan, it tells the story of Jesuit missionaries and the hidden Christians they serve. Throughout the book, Endo explores the silence of God as the Christians (most of them peasants born into, what seems to be, a life of hardship and suffering) are tortured. The priest need only trample on the image of Christ and the torture will cease.

A Judas figure, Kichijiro, figures prominently throughout. Having apostatized several times, the priest questions him:

"And yet you know how to look after yourself. Mokichi and Ichizo have sunk to the bottom of the sea like stones and yet . . . . ."

"Mokichi was strong---like a strong shoot. But a weak shoot like me will never grow no matter what you do."

He seemed to feel that I had dealt him a severe rebuke, because with a look like a whipped dog he glanced backwards. Yet I had not said these words with the intention of rebuking him; I was only giving expression to a sad reflection that was rising in my mind. Kichijiro was right in saying that all men are not saints and heroes. How many of our Christians, if only they had been born in another age from this persecution would never have been confronted with the problem of apostasy or martyrdom but would have lived blessed lives of faith until the very hour of death . . .

Men are born in two categories: the strong and the weak, the saints and the commonplace, the heroes and those who respect them. In time of persecution the strong are burnt in the flames and drowned in the sea; but the weak, like Kichijiro, lead a vagabond life in the mountains. As for you (I now spoke to myself) which category do you belong to? Were it not for the consciousness of your priesthood and your pride, perhaps you like Kichijiro would trample on the fumie [the image of Christ].

I keep thinking about this passage. Maybe I would be strong; maybe I would trample to keep myself or those I love (my children, my sisters, my family, my friends) from suffering. But hypothesizing is futile, and the distinction between strong and weak matters little. The strong are just as likely to stomp on the weak as they are to help them. Endo (through the priest Rodrigues) says as much in his definition of sin: "Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious to the wounds he has left behind."

What matters, what Endo brings up in myriad ways, is that we share the suffering. We bear it together. We try to ease it for each other as we can. In the beginning before the two priests split up, they are able to share the hardships they encounter: "When I was with Garrpe we could at least share our fear as one shares bread, breaking it in two; but now I was all alone in the black sea of the night and must take upon myself the cold and the darkness and everything else."

When the silence is finally broken, the priest hears (what he believes in the voice of) Christ tell him:

Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.

The only way God makes sense to me is Christ. So many things in the world scream that God is dead or doesn't exist. But love is real, as real as weakness. And the upside of weakness is that it can lead to great love.

Near the end of the book, when Kichijiro seeks out the priest for confession, Rodrigues reflects again on what he has done and who he is:

He had lowered his foot on to the plaque, sticky with dirt and blood. His five toes had pressed upon the face of one he loved. Yet he could not understand the tremendous onrush of joy that cam over him at that moment.

"There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can one say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?" The priest spoke rapidly, facing the entrance. "Since in this country there is now no one else to hear your confession, I will do it . . . Say the prayers after confession . . . Go in peace!"

Kichijiro wept softly; then he left the house. The priest had administered that sacrament that only the priest can administer. No doubt his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege; but even if he was betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love. "Even now I am the last priest in this land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him."