“Silence:” Is Anybody There?

You pray. You pray a lot. You pray for a long time. The need is great. You pray some more. People are being tortured and dying horrible deaths. You pray more, and harder. And then you get…

Nothing. Silence.

That "nothing" is the heart of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, the story of two Portuguese priests in Japan in the 1600s during a time of great Christian persecution. Published in 1969, the novel is based on a true story. One of the priests, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, is imprisoned and gets to listen to the moans and cries of native Japanese Christians being tortured. The other priest, Father Christovao Ferreira, has already apostatized and abandoned his faith, convinced that Christianity does not apply to Japan.

Endo, himself a Catholic, explores this silence of God. How can God be silent, as in “do nothing,” as his people are persecuted, tortured and killed? How can God allow such awful suffering and remain silent, even as His people earnestly and sincerely seek His face and His answers?

Agnostics and atheists often ask the same question. If there is a God, then how could He allow such injustice, destruction, depravity and suffering? How could he allow an impoverished country like Haiti be destroyed, with 150,000 dead and untold misery? How?

I’d like to let agnostics and atheists in on a secret. Christians struggle with the same question. It is as hard for us to comprehend this as it is for others who reject any notion of God. The difference is, we struggle and pray through the question, and we keep struggling and praying even when the answer appears to be silence.

Pat Robertson’s statement notwithstanding, I don’t believe that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are by definition God’s judgment being meted out. But I do know that when these events happen, God expects his people to respond.

And when they do, there is no silence.

Previous posts on Shusaku Endo’s Silence:

Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”
“Silence:” How Do You Betray Your Faith?
“Silence:” Is Christianity True or “Cultural?”

Silence is the first book to be discussed this year by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement. For the month of February, the book is The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon.

"Silence:" Is Christianity True or “Cultural”?

Is Christianity true for all humanity, or it is “cultural” or “geographic”? Another way of asking the question is, is Christianity universal or specific to Western culture (and in serious danger even there, especially in Europe generally and among the elites in United States)?

That’s one of the two questions posed by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, the story of two Portuguese priests in Japan in the 1600s during a time of Great Christian persecution. The novel was published in 1969, and is based on a true story, but the questions it poses seem even more contemporary and important today. (I’ll discuss the second question, what is the “silence” of the title, next Monday, the final of four posts on the novel.)

Knowing a persecution of Christians is underway, Father Sebastian Rodrigues goes to Japan for two reasons – to provide pastoral care for the Christians who are left and to verify the rumors that the former head of the mission to Japan, Rodrigues’ own former seminary teacher Father Christovao Ferreira, has apostatized and abandoned the faith. Rodrigues is eventually found by authorities, imprisoned but not (in the novel, at least) tortured. Instead, the local authorities attempt an array of intellectual gambits to convince Rodrigues to abandon his Catholic faith. These include conversations with the local ruler and the torture of native Japanese Christians.

The most dramatic and persuasive of these attempts is to bring Rodrigues to the former Father Ferreira, who now dresses in Japanese style, has a wife and has become something of an agent for the Japanese authorities (he at least does what he’s told to do). Ferreira attempts to convince his former student that Christianity simply will not work in Japan; it will not take root in the country’s culture. It may work in Europe, but Europe is not Japan.

Rodrigues fully understands the importance of the argument. If it is true that Christianity does not apply to Japan and can flourish only in a more hospitable culture, then it is a fraud, and a fraud everywhere, because its claims are indeed universal. It is not just a “religion for Europeans” but a faith for all humanity. And while Rodrigues finds himself slipping under the influence of his former teacher and fellow priest, there’s a more formidable question looming.

Can you renounce your faith in name only to save the lives of others? Isn’t that a kind of Christ-like sacrifice?

Silence is a provocative read, and it’s meant to be.


Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the book under discussion in the month of January by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement.

The book is also being filmed as a movie by Martin Scorsese and stars Daniel Day-Lewis, and is set for release late in 2010. For more information about the book, visit its entry on Wikipedia. And artist Makoto Fujimura talks about the book in an IAM podcast.

“Silence:” How Do You Betray Your Faith?

Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the book under discussion for the month of January by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement. (And check IAM out -- it doing some important things in the areas of art, culture and faith.) Discussion groups have actually formed in various places and there’s a discussion guide you can download. The guild will be posting various reports from the discussions. There’s no discussion group in St. Louis, and I would be hard-pressed to attend even if there were, so I’m participating via blog posts.

In Silence, the story of two priests who travel to Japan in the 1600s at a time when Christians were being relentlessly persecuted, one character plays the role of traitor. Kichijiro is something of a ne’er-do-well the priests meet in Macao while they wait for a ship to take them to Japan. He is the only Japanese in Macao, and when the priests find him, he’s drunk and dressed in rags. His eyes are described as “dirty yellow” and he has a crafty look about him. Kichijiro is obviously going to be a problem and cause problems; he’s set up that way from the beginning. But he’s the only Japanese the priests have, and they taken him on as guide, even understanding that he will be a problem.

When they ask him if he’s a Christian, he says no, repeatedly. Eventually they learn that he is, or actually was, a Christian but apostatized. His apostasy doesn’t prevent him, however, from asking Father Rodrigues to hear his confession, even after he betrays the priest and the priest is imprisoned. Betrayal, apostasy, then a desperation to have his confession heard – this is the repeated cycle of actions that is the character Kichijiro.

Identifying strongly with Christ, Father Rodrigues sees Kichijiro as a kind of Judas, but the character and his role in the novel is more complex, and Rodrigues gradually comes to understand that. Kichijiro moves back and forth between Christianity and apostasy so many times that it becomes clear he has become neither Christian nor Buddhist; he is both and neither at the same time. In that sense, he stands for something larger for the author – the practical results of the clash of Western, Christian culture and Japanese, Buddhist culture. And the clash is played out in a time of terrible persecution, when one’s faith can and often does lead to torture and death.

It would have been almost too easy, and too much like a caricature, had Endo drawn his characters like Christ and Judas. But he reached for something beyond caricature, and one of the things the novel does is to explore the “traitor” in all of the characters, not just Kichijiro. One of the primary reasons Father Rodrigues traveled to Japan in the first place was to find Father Christovao Ferreira, the priest who had led the Christian mission in Japan and who had reportedly apostatized. Ferreira was also Rodrigues’ teacher, and so this mission to find him carried both theological and personal purposes for Rodrigues.

Father Rodrigues will find his former teacher, and his teacher will attempt to teach him a new lesson. The question becomes, will Rodrigues learn it, and become the Judas he sees in Kichijiro? Or is this the “traitor” that is in all of us, the betrayal most quickly exposed in a time of stress and trial?

Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”

I’ve followed artist Makota Fujimara through his web site and blog. His art is stunning, and he has heaps of well-deserved accolades and accomplishments, including having served on the National Council on the Arts. He is also an author, a founding elder of his church in New York City, and the founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM).

IAM has a mission: to “gather artists and creative catalysts to wrestle with the deep questions of art, faith and humanity in order to inspire the creative community to engage the culture that is and create the world that ought to be.”

I became much more familiar with IAM when my friend L.L. Barkat told me that IAM was publishing her book of poems, InsideOut. I immersed myself in IAM’s web site, and found myself in a world of art, faith and culture, a world I felt immediately at home in. And I discovered that IAM has a Reader’s Guild, and it would be hosting book discussions on selected books each month of 2010, including works by Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, C.S. Lewis, Italo Calvino, Annie Dillard and – Shusaku Endo.

I was not familiar with Endo. OK, so I’m part cretin. But I learned. He’s considered one of Japan’s finest novelists, if not the finest, a member of the so-called “Third Generation” of writers who emerged in Japan after World War II. He was born in 1923 and died in 1996, and he was a lifelong Catholic. He wrote numerous novels, but his most famous work was Silence. And it is Silence that is the first book the IAM Readers Guild will be discussing.

These discussions are generally being hosted in small groups in different locations; there isn’t one listed for St. Louis but I was intrigued enough to buy the book and read it, and I’ll be “participating” by blog posts here for the Mondays in January. If this works, I’ll continue this for the succeeding months.

Silence is the story, based largely on historical events and people, of two Portuguese priests who slip into Japan in the 17th century during a time of persecution of Christians. They have determined to go to Japan to minister to the faithful and to learn if the stories of the apostasy of the leading missionary – and their former teacher in seminary – are true.

The story is told by one of the two priests, Father Sebastian Rodrigues. And it is a story about faith and apostasy, how thin a line there is between the two, and whether one can remain true to faith even through apostasy. I found myself challenged on almost every page. Would I respond this way? Would I do this? Do I really understand what my faith is and isn’t? Is the difference that clear?

It’s an astonishing read.