O God, Do Not Be Silent

Theological reflection on suffering inspired by Shūsaku Endō’s masterpiece

*Content warning: torture

**Major plot elements of the 1966 novel Silence are revealed

I read Shūsaku Endō’s novel, Silence, over the Christmas break. It’s a story about human suffering and its relationship to God’s activity and work, which naturally piques my interest because religious trauma relates to the same themes. This story also connects to the suffering and violence currently experienced in Gaza and Ukraine. I’ve been thinking about it for a month now, intending to write about it, but I’ve been stuck. More about that in a bit.

Endō is perhaps the most famous Japanese novelist of the twentieth century and Silence is perhaps his greatest novel (also adapted for film in 2016 by Martin Scorcese, starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson).

Silence is a work of historical fiction, based on a period in the first half of the 17th century when Japanese rulers ruthlessly persecuted European Christian missionaries and the Japanese disciples they had made, many of them impoverished rural farmers. Endō is a Catholic Christian, by the way, which suggests the source of his interest in the subject of the novel.

The Japanese government perceived the growth of Christianity in Japan as a strategy by Western imperial powers for cultural assimilation and ultimately domination. Christianity was thought to be a germ through which European culture could take hold and spread through the masses in Japan and open a door for colonization.

And so Japan’s leaders sought to rid their country of Christianity and demonstrate that it was incompatible with Japanese virtues and culture.

The driving question at the outset of the novel concerns the whereabouts and wellbeing of a Jesuit priest named Christóvāo Ferreira. He is the leader of the Japanese mission and in his three decades in Japan has seen the number of Christians grow by thousands. But rumor has it that Ferreira was captured, tortured, and apostatized (that is, renounced his Christian faith; related to the word apostasy). No one in Rome (church headquarters) has heard from him for quite some time.

And so two young Jesuit priests from Portugal, Sebastian Rodrigues (who writes most of the letters that comprise the book’s content) and Francis Garrpe, set off to Japan to join the Christian mission there and to find out what happened to Ferreira.

The Silence of God

When Rodriques and Garrpe arrive in Japan, they are welcomed by the Christians of a small farming village and hidden in a cabin in the woods where they will be safe from the Japanese authorities who constantly visit in search of Christians.

While the priests are there, they serve the Christians of the village, administer the sacraments, and teach them about the Christian faith. They travel to a nearby island and expand their ministry among the Christians there.

But eventually someone in the village reports them to the Japanese rulers and they are captured and imprisoned in separate locations.

At this point in the narrative, the strategy of the Japanese rulers for driving out Christianity is revealed: they seek to get the priests to apostatize, just as Ferreira allegedly had. If the priests renounce their faith, they reason, then Christianity will have no way of spreading among the peasant farmers because no one will be able to teach them and facilitate Christian rituals (like baptism and communion).

One might assume that the Japanese authorities would torture the priests in order to coerce them to apostatize. But their approach is much more cunning. Instead, the priests are well fed and treated with respect. They exploit the priests’ values for compassion and service and torture the impoverished Christians in front of them, either by beheading, drowning, or the infamous pit, where individuals are hung upside down in a dark pit for days at a time and cut on the forehead or neck to serve as a vent for the pressure caused by the blood rushing to their heads, pressure that caused excruciating pain. If the priests would renounce their faith by putting their foot on a copper image of Christ, called a fumie, they and their fellow Christians would immediately be freed from their torture and allowed to live.

It is in the midst of these experiences that the major theme of the book, reflected in its title, emerges: the silence of God. Repeatedly, Sebastian writes in his letters about God’s silence in the face of this atrocity and injustice.

When two of his friends and fellow Christians from that small farming village, Mokichi and Ichizo, are tortured and drowned in the sea, Sebastian laments:

Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God . . . the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.

After witnessing yet others tortured and killed for their faith (and his), Rodriques cries out to God:

Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent . . .?

Struggles with Silence

The silence of God in suffering seems so true to reality, and is part of the reason this novel really resonates. I’ve certainly had experiences where this felt true, and have cared for others who have, too. It’s a normal part of the human, spiritual experience. Even Jesus has his own experience of God’s silence as he is tortured on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And yet, part of my stuckness in reflecting on the novel were problems I saw with the narrative, not with Endō’s masterful writing, but with the appropriateness of my using such a story to reflect on human suffering and God’s relationship to it.

Admittedly, these are problems I wouldn’t have seen were it not for what I’ve learned from abuse and trauma studies, as well as from resources about white supremacy and systemic racism.

The most glaring difficulty is the broader context of imperialism and colonialism. The central figure, Sebastian Rodrigues, is a representative of colonial and imperial mission. The Japanese leaders were right in their assessment — this was not just a harmless religious group sending their leaders to the country to spread their religion. This was part of a broader strategy of westernization and colonization by the European powers. If that seems dubious, consider what these European powers did moving in the opposite direction on the map: the enslavement of Black bodies and the erasure of Indigenous people in America, and all in the name of the Christian evangelization and salvation of those bodies and people.

This problem is amplified in the story when the wellbeing of impoverished Japanese Christians hinges on the perseverance (or lack thereof) of missionary leaders like Rodrigues and Garrpe. The more they cling to their faith, the more Japanese peasants are captured, tortured, and killed.

Add to this the infernalist doctrine assumed by Jesuit priests — that if they did not travel to this foreign country to share the gospel with ‘the heathens’ then they would be subject to divine wrath and eternal conscious torment in hell. This diseased imagination would suggest that as long as the subjects of evangelism and mission become Christians and avoid hell in the afterlife, their present sufferings and oppression are less important to address.

Rodrigues, then, is in league with the colonial power and becomes the subject of oppression himself. Is it appropriate to reflect on his suffering when he enters into it as a privileged person, complicit with the colonizing impulses that would impose a form of (western) Christianity in ways that would dishonor and do violence to eastern Japanese culture? Is the silence of God in this story actually disapproval of such complicity?

In the end, I do think there is something instructive about Rodrigues’s suffering and experience of God’s silence (I am writing this essay, after all) — which perhaps even reflects another brilliant element of the novel — because this conundrum is true to human experience, just as God’s silence is. The oppressed becomes the oppressor; the oppressor has also been oppressed. We are all wounded and wounders. Silence illustrates the cycles of violence that lead those who experience trauma to traumatize others, and those who have been traumatizers to be traumatized themselves. We see this presently in the conflict between Israel and Palestine/Gaza — for decades each group has taken turns enacting violence and suffering it.

God Speaks

One day Rodrigues’s prison interpreter escorts him to a house where he meets none other than Christóvāo Ferreira, the one he had been looking for all this time (the Jesuit leader who had allegedly apostatized and had gone missing).

Ferreira confesses that he did in fact apostatize, and now he has a new Japanese name — Sawano Chuan — and he translates books on subjects like astronomy and surgery in order to add to the knowledge of the Japanese people. In this way he feels as if he is of some service to the Japanese, the whole reason he came Japan in the first place. Rodrigues also discovers, through the interpreter, that Ferreira is writing a book that seeks to discredit and disprove Christianity.

Rodrigues presses Ferreira about why he renounced his faith. At first, Ferreira says it is because Christianity failed to take root in Japan. He brought a sapling to plant in Japanese soil, and it decayed at the roots and became something different entirely.

Later, Ferreira visits Rodrigues in his prison cell. The moans of Japanese Christians hanging in the pit resound in the background of their conversation. Rodrigues expresses contempt toward Ferreira for apostatizing, and Ferreira defends his actions:

‘I did not apostatize because I was suspended in the pit. For three days, I who stand before you was hung in a pit of foul excrement, but I did not say a single word that might betray my God.’ Ferreira raised a voice that was like a growl as he shouted: ‘The reason I apostatized . . . are you ready? Listen! I was put in here and heard the voices of those people for whom God did nothing. God did not do a single thing. I prayed with all my strength; but God did nothing.’

God was silent for Ferreira as he was for Rodrigues.

Rodrigues protests that a priest ought to act in imitation of Christ, and if Christ were here, he would surely remain steadfast and not renounce his faith.

Ferreira retorts: “Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them….For love Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had.”

Ferreira then leads Rodrigues to a corridor where a fumie (the copper image of Christ) is placed at his feet, and he senses Jesus speaking to him:

And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.’

Rodrigues places his foot on the fumie and apostatizes.

Some time later, as Rodrigues sits in the Japanese house he has been relocated to, he sees the face of Christ is his mind. He speaks to Jesus (and Jesus speaks to him):

‘Lord, I resented your silence.’

‘I was not silent. I suffered beside you.’

What is God Saying?

At first reading, that line struck me as the crescendo of the book. It was an answer to the question of God’s silence in response to great suffering: God suffers with us. God is not silent after all, but actively participates alongside us in suffering.

This answer squares well with the story of Jesus, who is crucified to death by the ruling powers in solidarity with all who have been crucified.

James Cone, in the The Cross and the Lynching Tree, suggests along these lines that “The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the ‘least of these,’ the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices.” (156)

When I read James Cone alongside trauma expert Gabor Maté, who defines trauma as what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness, I was inspired to imagine Jesus, in his crucifixion, as an empathetic witness to the pain of those who suffer abuse and trauma. The empathy of such a witness has healing powers for those who receive it.

God speaks to our suffering by suffering beside us. I believe it.

And yet.

I found myself longing for something more. Wondering if that was all that could be said about God’s response to our suffering. Wondering if that’s all God says about our suffering.

I was stuck again.

Is it a luxury of privilege and safety to be satisfied with an answer that does nothing to rescue the least of these from their suffering? To deliver them from injustice? Is that response easy for me to accept because my life is not on the line like those Japanese peasants? What about liberation? What about the end of suffering?

It occurred to me that Jesus said something else to Rodrigues: he told him to trample on the fumie. Doing so saved the lives of all the Japanese Christians that were hanging in the pit at that time, just as it did when Ferreira made the same decision.

What if Ferreira was right? What if, paradoxically, the most Christlike thing for Rodrigues to do, the most liberative thing, the most loving thing, was to renounce Christ for the sake of the liberation of the oppressed? That wouldn’t actually be a renunciation at all, but rather the highest expression of allegiance.

Because liberation is also one of God’s answers to suffering. We have to look no further than the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus died as an empathetic witness and he was raised as a liberator of humanity from the powers of sin and death.

Cone captures this sentiment as well in his reflection on the cross and resurrection: “I find nothing redemptive in suffering itself….What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair, as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection.” (150)

Rodrigues, too, comes to see how God speaks to suffering through liberation, and even how God has spoken through Rodrigues to such an end when he concludes:

“Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.”