A Christmas message...of sorts

Let's try something different for today's post.

Back in college I did a research project on Shusaku Endo, probably the foremost Japanese Christian author in world history.  I had read two of his Christian-themed books (which I may discuss separately in the future) and in the course of the research project, learned a lot about Endo's life story.  I found key elements of his life history to be compelling and moving, and perhaps I'll share part of it now as a Christmas message (of sorts)..

Rather than try to paraphrase things in my own words, I'll just share some direct excerpts from an authorative article on Endo's life and work: "Japan's Faithful Judas" by Philip Yancey...

At one point in history, Japan seemed the most fruitful mission field in all of Asia. Francis Xavier, one of the seven original Jesuits, landed there in 1549 and spent two years establishing a church. Within a generation, the number of Christians had swelled to 300,000. Xavier called Japan "the delight of my heart ...the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity."

As that century came to an end, however, the shoguns' revulsion over the divisions among Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch Christians led to a change in policy. The shoguns expelled the Jesuits, required that all Christians renounce their faith and register as Buddhists, and began to harass any who disobeyed. The first executions soon followed, and the age of Japanese Christian martyrs began.

Japanese who agreed to step on the fumie--an icon of the Madonna and Child--were pronounced apostate and set free. Those who refused were hunted down and killed in the most successful extermination attempt in church history. Some were force-marched into the sea; others were bound and tossed off rafts; still others were hung upside down over a pit full of dead bodies and excrement.
...
A museum in the city of Nagasaki houses remnants from the age of Japanese Christian martyrs....In the 1950s, a young writer named Shusaku Endo used to visit that museum and stand alone staring at one particular display case, which contained an actual fumie from the seventeenth century, a portrait of the Madonna and Child engraved in bronze. Endo was especially struck by the small black marks defacing the bronze; these, he learned, were made by human toes, the impressions left by thousands of Christians who had committed the fumie. The fumie obsessed Endo. Would I have stepped on it? he wondered....

Later...Endo realized what had held him so powerfully in the force field of a museum display case. The story of the Japanese Christians in the seventeenth century had haunting parallels with his own life in the twentieth. Although he had never had to face the wrath of the shoguns, ever since childhood he had felt a constant, unrelieved tension of faith. Externally, he was a Christian; what was he underneath?

At the age of ten, Endo had returned to Japan from Manchuria with his mother. Suffering from the pain and social rejection of a divorce, his mother found solace in the devout faith of her sister, and so she converted to Catholicism. In order to please his mother, Endo went along with the conversion and was baptized a Christian. But had he meant it?

"I became a Catholic against my will," he now says. He likens his faith to an arranged marriage, a forced union with a wife chosen by his mother. He tried to leave that wife--for Marxism, for atheism, for a time even contemplating suicide--but his attempts to escape always failed. He could not live with this arranged wife; he could not live without her. Meanwhile, she kept loving him, and to his surprise, eventually he grew to love her in return.

As a Christian teenager in prewar Japan, where the church comprised far less than 1 percent of the population, he suffered what he calls "the anguish of an alien." Classmates bullied him for his association with a Western religion. The war only magnified this sense of alienation: Endo had always looked to the West as his spiritual homeland, but these were the people now vaporizing the cities of Japan.

After the war, he traveled to France to pursue the study of such French Catholic novelists as Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Yet France hardly made him feel welcome either: as one of the first Japanese overseas exchange students, and the only one in Lyons, he was spurned this time on account of race, not religion. The Allies had cranked out a steady stream of anti-Japanese propaganda, and Endo found himself the target of racial abuse from fellow Christians.

During his three years in France, Endo fell into a depression. To complicate matters, he contracted tuberculosis, had a lung removed, and spent many months laid up in hospitals. He concluded that Christianity had, in effect, made him ill. Rejected in his homeland, rejected in his spiritual homeland, he underwent a grave crisis of faith.

Before returning to Japan, though, Endo visited Palestine in order to research the life of Jesus, and while there he made a transforming discovery: Jesus, too, knew rejection. More, Jesus' life was defined by rejection. His neighbors laughed at him, his family questioned his sanity, his closest friends betrayed him, and his fellow citizens traded his life for that of a common criminal. Throughout his ministry, Jesus purposely gravitated toward the poor and the rejected: he touched those with leprosy, dined with the unclean, forgave thieves, adulterers, and prostitutes.

This new insight into Jesus hit Endo with the force of revelation. From the faraway vantage point of Japan he had viewed Christianity as a triumphant, Constantinian faith. He had studied the Holy Roman Empire and the glittering Crusades, had admired photos of the grand cathedrals of Europe, had dreamed of living in a nation where one could be a Christian without disgrace. Now, as he studied the Bible, he saw that Christ himself had not avoided disgrace....

Jesus was the Suffering Servant, as depicted by Isaiah: "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces..."

Surely this Jesus, if anyone, could understand the rejection Endo himself was going through...

Endo returned to Japan with his faith renewed, although he never really associated himself with Catholicism or any other organized church ever again.  He wrote many significant novels afterwards--important works such as "Silence" and "The Samurai"--focusing specifically on the plight of Christians in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries.  He became quite well-known worldwide and his books--despite their Christian subject matter--became best-sellers in Japan despite Christianity still not being a large part of Japanese culture.

The lesson Endo learned is important:  many doubt the wisdom of God for allowing faithful people to suffer...and yet, Jesus suffered.  Many think becoming the Lord's "chosen" will result in fortune and glory..yet Jesus and his twelve "chosen" had none of these during his earth life.  Let's allow ourselves to remember that our faith is founded on Jesus and Jesus alone, regardless of whether we're accepted or rejected by those around us (even those supposedly of the same faith...)  Regardless of what cross we are called to bear in this life, let us remember Christ "hath descended below them all" (D&C 122:8)

Merry Christmas, everybody!