This book ruined my life. Sorta true. It's the catchiest review intro I'm going to come up with. I'm afraid to review this book and remember why it set me off to feeling hopeless and stupid. Band aid scenario. Pull it off!I don't have the religion or spiritual kinds of faith. I'm dyslexic when it comes to religion, maybe. My mind jumbles the meanings and I just don't speak that language of KNOWING what you can't see and this is good and this is always bad. I don't look at someone who does have it and see that core glowing from within them. I hear the adults from Peanuts warbled talk about it like someone being in love with someone. *I* am not in love. Maybe it is something spiritual I have but it isn't like anything I've heard about. My Star Wars buddhism and humanism, whatever that is. Any kind of thread between me and everyone else, of past, present and future (on good days when I don't heartily wish there was no me). I at least want to see the glow in another. The times I believe what is worth remembering (and is actually remembered!) is enough. Things I'm afraid to try to name 'cause it'd probably make me an asshole (like if I could ever understand or know anyone else). I live for moments I feel like walls of skulls aren't so thick after all. I'll try to keep the faith (that I don't have 'cause I don't know what it is) that there's going to be something in there to spark the life and days for the next day. Something like that. Unless I get confused reading a book like Silence and it ruins my life! Church? After life (that there won't always be life has sometimes been my only hope)? It would occur to me last, if at all. (My first memory of catholicism is seeing the bath tub in the catholic church my cousins went to. I decided they used it to drown children while the adults watched. Not to mention the Alabama baptist church my mom allowed this "kind lady" - ha!- to force us to go to.) Shusako Endo's Silence might be about God and religion and stuff like that, as the book jackets and quotes suggest. Graham Greene named it as a best novel of the century. Other guys called Endo the Japanese Graham Greene. I only know The Third Man Graham Greene, really... No help at all. Since that stuff doesn't exist in my heart I read something else. I felt a little stupid reading this was about Christian themes. More remorseful still when it is about philosophy. Soooo don't get it. Humanity? Asshole! Maybe I didn't read the intended book. Oh well. Can I go on beating myself up about it forever? (Yeah, I could.) If I had read it as a Christian themes book I wouldn't have given a shit about the book at all and could have moved on with my reading life as if nothing had happened.What killed me was the losing the faith in the unnameable let's not be an asshole stuff. I guess I was an asshole. I can hardly explain it to myself why Endo's Silence "triggered" one of my more awful depressions since fall of 2009 (I didn't talk to anyone that was not purely perfunctory reasons for months. I'm, um, afraid of people sometimes. Um, all the way into spring 2010). My mental health is a fragile little balanced thing that I have to keep watch over constantly. The little engine that couldn't. The stupidest shit can make me feel bleak as hell. I never know when it is going to happen. Relatively happy one second, depressed the next. I read lots of books and listen to music to keep up the feeling like someone other than me. I need other voices than me in here. I don't know how it happened. Yes, I do! It was that damned Kichijiro, and Father Rodrigues. It was that damned Mariel. Father Rodrigues is pumped up with love of Jesus Christ (he loves his beautiful face. Young me thought my dad looked like Jesus 'cause he had a beard. Now I think he looked like a prototype of a hipster. Too late. Jesus couldn't stop brutal jerks from sporting beards. George Harrison had to shave his off after Charles Manson ruined the look. Anyway, the look isn't gentle to me. It's the beard! Perfect for hiding undesirable dinner foods and violent secrets). The Catholic church is ready to give up on converting Japanese. The grapevine has it that Father Ferreira apostatized. I really don't get this apostatsy business. This could be me not getting the whole religious thing. WHY would it convert anyone to your religion when you got killed for it? "I wanna do that!" Does it matter if every person you are ever going to meet (for example, brutal guards with or without facial hair) knew that you fantasized about paintings of Jesus in your most affectionate moments? If that's where your feelings of self worth came from... Father Rodrigues definitely got off on the inner paintings of himself looking holy and serene. Boy, did he ever. Does one moment negate your entire being, what you are about? Denial of yourself to someone else? I personally believe that you are going to spend your life with yourself and knowing yourself is more important than a few Japanese guards getting you to say what you didn't want to say. Father Rodrigues lies to himself about his reasons for saying what he didn't want to say. That was kinda creepy crawly to read about. Stop the Jesus navel gazing, man! Did he believe that God was not there for him as the most protective big brother on the block? Or did he just wake up and smell the burning feet?Kichijiro was their Japanese guide, rescued from exile in Portugal. Kichijiro is a Christian in his heart. I think he was embracing the Catholic guilt too well. He apostatized. His entire family did not, and died their martyr deaths (maybe they were partying up there in heaven with Jesus made water wine while their brother drowned in sake and guilt made vomit. Who knows for sure?). Father Rodrigues hates Kichijiro, for all that he will not admit it. He likes to think well of himself and it depressed me to read his full of shitness about the lost man. What is the point in having a belief system if you can't LIVE with it? It depressed me to read about the pity from his Christ for the pain of having to step on the fumie. One man hated himself and the other felt he was loved. What enabled him to think that way? I couldn't do it. What the picture of Christ thought, in the heart of Father Rodrigues? What Kichijiro followed him through so much to hear, that it was not the end to have had that moment and stepped on the fumie? It is forgiven? What is forgiven? To live? Life sucks!!!!! Most of the time, for most. It is okay to feel something about it? What the hell is there to forgive? One day was not the whole life! What enlightenment did Father Rodrigues have that Kichijiro could not have? Kichijiro who would at least admit that he wanted to live. I don't know how it happened. I didn't catch myself in time. I couldn't stop thinking about Father Rodrigues. They were on their crosses to bear and the darkness crossed my face, crossed my heart. Hoped to die. My cross to bear. I made a face and it got stuck that way (it isn't stuck. It was the worst because it felt like it would be. Stuck). My cynicism started up. My lack of faith is truly that I cannot trust people in the me to them and them to me way. Would I hole up inside as Father Rodrigues? So supicious, that Father Rodrigues. I related too much to Kichijiro's cut off from life, his half alive desire to BE alive again. The inkling of what he wanted, yet doing all of the wrong things to keep that desire fed. It's a struggle, to live every day. I don't care if they die and if there's a happy all you can drink wine buffet party, or the kegger from hell with every asshole frat guy all in one place. I felt hopelessly stupid that I couldn't grasp what the point of this was. Is silence better if it is unspoken to not go unheard? God is dead, or unknowable, perhaps uncaring? It is possible to escape being an asshole and hiding from what you don't understand? Is there a glowing within others and I'll never be able to see it?I'm feeling more myself again, today. What I live for to stay with head above total darkness is the not faith but just trying not to be an asshole "I know them all" while keeping some kind of faith in not being all alone in this noggin. Other voices. No silence. It was my fault. I listened to my potential Father Rodrigues too much and I should have looked into the world around him, as much as I wished they'd look at each other (starving peasants risking all to feed the priests! Ugh!). It wasn't about him. If they needed Christianity it was because it was hard to live through the day to day without a connection to someone (I'm hoping their image of Christ wasn't as reflecting back as that stupid priest!). They went through a lot, those Catholic Japanese. They didn't doubt and grow silent within themselves.Silence is one of the few words that I know in kanji (I'm progressing perhaps slowly in kano. I'm not rushing anything. It's a kind of hobby to relax me, that's all [Note to self, don't start feeling bad about this]). I'd show off my writing if I had a (working) camera (I break everything! [I'd bang my head in frustration if I wouldn't break it too]). I've practiced it a lot. I've been writing reminders to myself like that for a long time. It was one of my worst ones to write "Shut up" on my own arm to remind myself throughout the day to not talk to anyone because everything I said felt so hopelessly stupid and pointless. I was afraid of feeling worse so I hid, in silence. (I've stopped doing that during the last three years, at least.) Silence is better (golden?). New language, new meaning. Silence instead of words of despair. (I'm not positive at all it's gone. I'm moment to moment.) Silence like listening is good silence. Sometimes I do nothing but read until I feel better. (I am hating myself writing this review. Is there no chance? Next thing I'll probably write some shit like "Forgiveness is better than faith" and I'll feel hopelessly tongue tied trying to write what I feel and connect it to thoughts that are half words, parts pictures, songs from childhood.My favorite song from childhood is in my head. "I used to think that the day would never come that my life would depend on..." the setting sun! (Like Japan.)Father Rodrigues hiding in a hole and waiting for his church followers to feed them and be blessed. The hand of god... Someone else's hand... That's not good enough. Some clarity would be good.)The cover art is of a christ figure hung on the character. Jesus.
"Silence" has a Biblical quality to it. I suppose it is the way that it raises monumental difficulties — moral and theological conundrums, and existential crises — then only subtly, even indirectly, to point in the misty direction in which we might find our answers. This great art, which Scripture does so well, is nothing other than knowing when to fall silent. Such silence affects us strongly: pedagogically, it is provocative, and aesthetically, it is magnetic. It is the silence which challenges us, drives us to reflect upon the "sparks flying upward" and to wrestle with an angel in the dark. When Jesus tells His disciples, "It is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you," what can He imply but that His tangible presence is somehow less helpful to us than His seeming-absence. It is better for us if His voice sometimes seems silence, than if His presence were something we could validate by experiment and sensation. The striving, the reaching, the 'leap of faith', the crisis which requires us at last to rely purely upon our own subjective, soul-to-soul knowledge of Him as a Person — would we ever exercise ourselves in these if He were always within reach of our fingers or of our prayers for fire to rain upon the altar? Thus is the silence of God. He sees to it that we learn to cry for Him, to cry that deepest of all human prayers, "Oh my God!", for we need more than His mere presence.And thus, following the Biblical art of silence, Endo's "Silence" reminds us all at once of Job's apparently senseless suffering, of Abraham's moral crisis, of Jacob's embattled renaming, of Judas' betrayal, and of Jesus' Ninth Hour.But, of course, "Silence" is more about God's silence, than Endo's. And it is just as much about what it means to really admit that we are weak, that we are not heroes, that we sin. It is about what it means to participate, not only in the suffering of Christ, but in the infliction of Christ's suffering. (view spoiler)[Indeed, "It is for that reason that I am here," Christ says to us, as He says to the character Rodrigues. We need Him to suffer for us. He knows this and has come for this very purpose. And it is in this sense that we betray Him, and it is in this sense that He opens Himself to our betrayal: "What thou dost, do quickly." He comes to our door, in our frightened and guilty times, to tell us that we should make Him our scapegoat. "Trample on me," He says, "I will bear your sin. I came to be trampled of men. I am your lamb. I am your sacrifice. Slay me.""Lord, I resented Your silence," we say with the priest, when at last we feel we are heard."I was not silent. I suffered beside you," the Lamb replies. This is not a God who wields power like a man, or keeps himself untouched and wholly apart. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Silence (1980)?
Silence is a modern classic by Shusaku Endo. On the cover a crucified Jesus hangs from Japanese writing characters. My friend, Carol, recommended this book to me awhile back and I've had it sitting on my bookshelf. Then during Holy Week while I was finishing Fr. Neuhaus’ Death on a Friday Afternoon, he mentions the heroic struggles of the European missionaries who gave their all to travel around the world to share the Gospel message. Sometimes it just seems appropriate to leave off one book and seek out another, as if you are being led to it.Silence tells a fictionalized story of what may have happened to two Portuguese priests who ventured onto mainland Japan during the persecution of the Christians around 1643. The story is told – brilliantly and poignantly – through the eyes of one Sebastian Rodrigues. The all important thing was to suffer and die a glorious martyr’s death. It was unthinkable that those who did not know Christ could devise any suffering, whether it be physical, mental, emotional or even spiritual which would lead the true believer to recant—but then this was before the days of Vietnam and the Japanese POW camps. Then it was believed no pain, deprivation, imprisonment, torture of oneself or one’s fellows—however prolonged, could ever be so bad it couldn’t be endured for love of God. It was simply a matter of one’s faith and will.Silence is about the silence of God. I was 96 pages into the book before it occurred to me to keep track of all the times Shusaku Endo used the word, ‘silence’, ‘silent’ or ‘silently’, as well as words about sound. I had a feeling it was central to the story. From then until the end of the book (page 191) I counted fifty-one more times; I may have missed a few. It might have been a silly exercise—like something a high school English teacher would have you do—but I didn’t mind. And it focused my reading just when plot action came almost to a halt and most everything which was ‘happening’ was in the main character’s mind, or as experienced through his senses.Silence is a powerful book. It seems to have as much to say about East meets West as it does about evangelization, martyrdom and the true voice of God. It is one Christian man’s search for the meaning of ‘the mud swamp Japanese in me’. ‘Japan is a mud swamp because it sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process.’ (p. xv) Sound like another country we all know and love?Silence will leave you different than it found you. 'Be still (silent?) and know that I am God.' (Psalm 46:10)
—booklady
There are certain books that deal with faith and doubt in a way that hits so close to home that I really need them to end a certain way for the sake of my own belief system. Silence is one of those books, and the fact that it didn't end the way I wanted it to means that I'm still somewhat reeling from having read it and am not yet sure how to talk about it, let alone say whether I liked it or not. Endo seems to be tackling the very idea of relying on others for our own strength and faith, though, and what he has to say is very complex and difficult to swallow. Silence takes place in Japan in the 1600s, while the country was closed, particularly to Christianity. The book opens with three Portugese missionaries who decide to journey to Japan for the dual purpose of maintaining the Christian communities that have been shut off from church leadership, and to seek out their teacher, who had gone to Japan years before and was rumored to have apostatized. Endo portrays a Japan where Christians are persecuted mercilessly, and the arrival of the priests only intesifies the situation.From the beginning we see that the survival of any of the Christians hinges on the rest of their community - if any one person in the community decides to come forward about their religious beliefs (for an alluringly hefty reward), the whole community suffers. So they must have utmost faith not only in their religious choices but also in those around them. The priest whom the action centers around struggles with his own faith and purpose in being in Japan, especially when he sees that the peasants are tortured all the more for his presence among them. He questions the purpose of missionary actions at all, and is tormented by the situation he is placed in by the government: having to choose public profession of faith at the expense of the peasants versus renouncing his beliefs in exchange for the peasants' freedom. Above all else he is overwhelmed by what he perceives as the silence of God in the face of increasingly unbearable circumstances.The book comes to no easy answers or tidy solutions. I have a lot to think about, that's for sure. Right now I feel like I'm glad I read it but I'm not sure what to take away from it. I guess that's what Endo was trying to suggest - that this world is even less black-and-white than we like to think of it, and that oftentimes there is no solution to a problem (or resolution to a book) that is entirely satisfactory.
—Jessica
A novel about the power of faith and people's actions through, or from it. On the surface it is the story of a Jesuit priest living in Tokugawa Japan, dig a bit deeper and it transforms into a contentious debate between faith and dogma. For Christianity to survive in Japan it might need to conform to the Japanese mindset. The question is ‘Can it adapt and still keep its message intact?' Missionaries fight for the integrity of Jesus’ teachings while hiding from local daimyo and their spies, hostile to any European religious encroachment on their native soil.Sebastian Rodrigues tries to reconcile his faith in his god, which is severely tested, with personal convictions. Poignant, thought-provoking and very powerful.
—Fil
