A moving and disturbing book

Published on February 01, 2010 by Susan Mulder (IAM Readers Guild, Philadelphia/South-Central NJ)

I was raised a lapsed Catholic-crammed full with the idea that I was going to heaven but absolutely no idea why.  I was also taught to venerate the saints and statues I encountered but seldom set foot in a church to do so.   This strange sort of religious upbringing replete with the ‘high five you’re a catholic’  attitude without the foundation or structure to give it form served to be a catalyst for me to become a seeker at a young age.  I remember begging to go to parochial school with no success and later, when the opportunity presented itself, converted to a reformed idea of salvation in the office of my public high school’s guidance counselor.  I often feel as a Christian I have somewhat of a split personality as it applies to certain understandings and this became extremely obvious in my reading of Silence.

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 A moving and disturbing book, Silence was not a difficult read.  I found myself lost in the voice of the book-as though I was listening rather than reading.  The characters of the book were vivid, maybe not in image but in psychology, and they have continued to stick with me even after putting the book away for a couple of weeks now.  Kichijiro, as I interpret him, is reminiscent of the court jester.  The part of the fool is so much of what he is about but I found him to serve as an example of human nature at its basest form.  He represents so much of the failure of human character-the continuous cycle of sin/repentance, reform and relapse.  I don’t really see him as a bad person or the literary villain but more as a pathetic reality.   

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The interaction of East and West in Silence is incomplete with both parties seeking the conversion of the other.  The cultures bump up against each other but seldom truly merge.  Even the conversion of the Japanese is discussed as being an incomplete, hybridized Christianity due in part to translational issues.   The priests themselves undergo a transformation as they realign their expression/or lack of their faith and become themselves a hybrid.

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I can say-without hesitation-that if I were asked to “trample on the fumie’, and most especially if it involved the sparing of others-I would do it.  This gets into a delicate area for some and I mean no disrespect but it was an object-always had been and continues to be.  The intimacy of my faith is such that I cannot imagine it being embodied by something-it is an indwelling of the Spirit within my life and therefor to ‘trample the fumie” would change nothing. I think this is the area where the dichotomy of my faith history caused the most conflict in my reading.  I could understand the devotion to the idea but not to the object.  Oddly, it was reading the next book for the guild that I came across a quote that added some clarity to my thoughts. On page 20 of Robert Cappon’s The Supper of the Lamb he says “Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world.  Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world:  an idol.  Things must be met for themselves.  To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them un-important altogether.  Idolatry has two faults.  It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things”.  Granted, these books are wildly different and address vastly different topics but this summation provided an immediate moment of recognition to my reaction in Silence to the ‘trampling’.  Another thing I struggled with, much like the ‘fumie’,  was the continual visualization of Christ and the idealized Warner Sallman-like image with “clear blue eyes” (pg 106).  This autoclaved image of Christ was present throughout the book but evolves at the end when Rodruigues recalls trampling on the “fumie” and the immediate, yet inexplicable “joy” he felt. Though he didn’t understand it at that moment, he came to understand the full breadth of the presence of Christ in his life did not come from this imagery and his love for Christ was now truer than it had ever been.

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The word silence appears numerous times throughout the book and represents many different forms.  The silence of the people in order to protect themselves and the ones they loved.  The silence of the martyr’s in an attempt to preserve their salvation as well as the perceived silence of God.  The wake of silence left behind by so many unanswered questions of the faith continues to resound but in Silence  it is Rodruigues’  dawning understanding, when he consents to hear Kichijiro’s confession at the end, that Christ had been there all along that allows him to find this ultimate truth.