Another recommendation by Will, the father of the boy I watch, this book was just as incongruous with what I'd think he'd like, though it was utterly removed from the former, The Bone People. A Portuguese priest travels to Japan in the 1600s to minister to the persecuted believers there. He is captured and forced to renounce his faith by stepping on a portrait of Christ. Throughout his Japanese sojourn he struggles with the seeming silence of God, but after he apostatizes he realizes that God had been with him all the time.
"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.
Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.
Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "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." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.
"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.
Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.
Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "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." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.
The novel was translated from the Japanese, and the writing was as pure and unadorned as haiku. I don't know that I've ever read a work of Japanese literature, and I'm pleased my initial foray was a book so sympathetic toward my own beliefs. Endo was a Christian, after all, and he believed that if Christianity wasn't true in Japan, then it wasn't true anywhere.
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