Reading Silence by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo and finding it powerful.

“But Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”

and later…

“I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of those last stammering words of Kichijiro on the morning of his departure: ‘Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering upon us? And then the resentment in those eyes he had turned upon me. ‘Father’, he had said, ‘What evil have we done?’

The silence of God. Already 20 years had passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of the churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him God has remained silent. This was the problem that lay behind the plaintive question of Kichijiro.”

The book asks many questions. It points out something about human nature as well. It suggests that we really do not know who we are until confronted with who we are. That we really do not know who we are until the moment of crisis – and sometimes not even then.

That some of us may believe ourselves to be paragons of virtue, strength, grace and forgiveness, while others of us see ourselves as utterly corrupt, broken, weak and incapable of any good thing, still others somewhere in the middle and a blissful few who have chosen not to look ahead have never asked themselves about themselves and thus will have no clue until the moment shockingly or otherwise defines them.

Still in the moment when we learn a little about ourselves we are encouraged or we are laid flat on our backs by the reality of our weakness. In that weakness we can chose to wonder at a God who manages to love us despite ourselves or we can do the more common thing – deny our weakness, cling to a phantom of strength and redefine the world around us in unnaturally bent ways that force our illusions to  fit somehow – however cramped they feel.

In the midst of it all is God…this God who looks on most often in silence forcing his creation to create his voice out of wilderness and wild interior voices. This God who remains powerful in our suffering because he is one with it somehow in a way we cannot understand but in a way that cleanses, heals and saves nonetheless whether we like it or not.

How does one act before this God? How does one be in the world with this God ever-present but never-present? How do we not tear one-another apart in the tension of this place? What holds us back but the invisible, loving, all-powerful hand of a great eternal love…