Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚

Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now.

Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book:

It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

…He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful—the questioning faithful—to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture. Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it exists with faith—truth faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endō understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.