This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, if not the best.

There are four themes that particularly speak to me on my 2nd reading:
1. Pride can easily disguise itself in the form of religion.
2. If God seems silent, it’s often because either we aren’t listening hard enough or we don’t accept that he’s working through people.
3. God loves everyone, including those whom others might justifiably despise.
4. Even if Christians are not trying to be political, teaching people to follow Jesus is often construed as a political act; to ignore that fact is naïve.

First, some historical background. If you need a lot of it, Patheos posted a good analysis in 2014 on the blog The Anxious Bench: "Destroying Japanese Christianity."

The history in a nutshell:

Japan, in the 1600s. In the previous century, Portuguese and Spanish Jesuit missionaries converted hundreds of thousands of Japanese people to Catholicism. After the Dutch and the English (Protestant nations) prompted Japan’s leaders to deeper suspicion of the missionaries and an increase in taxes led to the Shimabara Rebellion in 1637-8 (mostly made up of unhappy Christian peasants), the leadership said "to hell with it," embarking on a campaign to rid Japan of Christianity and eventually of all foreign influence altogether.

Christians were forced to apostasize (renounce their faith) by stepping on a fumie, which was a bronze plaque depicting the Virgin and Child or Jesus Christ. If they didn’t, they would be tortured and martyred.

The novel:

Onto this stage steps Father Sebastian Rodrigues and his friend Father Francisco Garrpe, who risk traveling to Japan to find out why their mentor, Father Cristóvão Ferreira, a real historical figure, renounced his faith. Their training as priests causes them to imagine martyrdom as a glorious privilege and they can’t fathom why a man whom they so respected would apostasize. They also hope that by going there they might serve the remaining Japanese Christians.

After landing in Japan and being hidden away by a group of villagers, Rodrigues gets separated from Garrpe. As he moves closer and closer to his own trial of faith, he is slammed with what he sees as the relentless silence of God in the face of the terrible persecution he witnesses.

He meets Ferreira, who did indeed apostasize as they had heard, but not because of his own torture. He renounced his faith, it turns out, because several other Christians would be spared if he did. Ferreira now lives out a bitter existence, having been forced to take a Japanese name and a wife and write a book denouncing Christianity.

Rodrigues, imprisoned and ready to face martyrdom, is instead, as Ferreira predicted, presented with a choice: Trample on the fumie, or a group of Christians will die. In that moment, Rodrigues hears the voice of Christ call out to him: “Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.”

He does, sacrificing his pride in his faith for the sake of those suffering in that moment, and the captives are released. He must then live out the despised kind of life that he witnessed Ferreira living before him.

Thoughts on Theme #1: Pride

The fumie scene held such incredible power for me the first time I read this book, and it did not disappoint the second time. Ten years ago I was at a stage in my life when I’d converted to Christianity at age nineteen after being agnostic, and had then just spent a year in Japan teaching English away from my home church. When I lived there, I had to decide whether I’d converted because I was trying to please the people around me or because this faith was something truly important to me that belonged in my life. Left to my own devices, and experiencing God in some of the most random and unlikely places in my travels, I chose to keep that faith.

It hasn’t been easy for me, though. When I first became a Christian I thought I had to think and be a certain way, much like Rodrigues with his narrow focus. When I first read about Jesus commanding Rodrigues to publicly renounce his faith to save people against everything that Rodrigues thought was the "right" thing to do (i.e. martyr himself), I was confronted with my own naïve beliefs and the overwhelming knowledge that accepting Christ means to reject pride.

In my second reading, I see that sometimes on the flip side, I can be proud of what a "nice person" I am, which sometimes means hiding that I am a Christian in fear of being judged by others in our current political climate. Jesus as depicted in Silence pierces to the heart of either extreme of vanity—accepting him doesn’t mean I am always right, and at times it will likely also make me unpopular. Way to be a downer, Jesus, lol.

Thoughts on Theme #2: The Silence of God

Although on this reading I noticed that the translator made several typos and there were spots where the writing wasn’t smooth, overall the spare prose works in bringing forth the idea of silence. Even when the word itself isn’t mentioned—and it is mentioned frequently—readers feel like we’re traveling along with Rodrigues in an empty land punctuated by only a few sudden bursts of violence. The image and sound (or lack of sound) of the sea are also emphasized and serve to set the tone of the story.

Throughout his experience, Rodrigues feels like God is silent because he is not stepping into reality in some obvious way to support the missionaries’ work and rescue the Japanese Christians. Yet, one could argue that God does show himself through the actions of the villagers who hide and feed the missionaries, risking their lives so that they might be safe.

This doesn’t fit with the priests’ paradigm that they are the ones who came to help the peasants, so it’s difficult for them to accept help themselves. This forced humility foreshadows the ultimate crisis Rodrigues comes to when he must set aside everything he thought he believed in order to follow what he hears from Jesus. In that way, the voice of God does enter the narrative very loudly and directly, ultimately refuting the idea that God is silent. Or, are the instructions from Jesus nothing more than the hallucination of someone who can’t bear the suffering of others? The novel provides no pat, easy answer.

Thoughts on Theme #3: Loving the Unlovable

Rodrigues often reflects upon and feels shame about his inability to love filthy, ugly peasants as much as he imagines God must. This is especially so in the case of Kichijiro, a Christian apostate who led Rodrigues and Garrpe to Japan and betrayed them more than once. Rodrigues often compares him to Judas.

This quote exemplifies the concept: “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.”

At first, it seems that Rodrigues will be called upon to literally die for the peasants, but instead, again, it’s his pride that has to die. In that sense, one could look at Rodrigues himself as one of the "corrupt," necessitating his visceral acceptance that Christ died for him in order to be able to move forward and turning the original purpose of his trip upside-down, as Jesus tends to do to things in general.

Thoughts on Theme #4: Christian Missions as Political Acts

This one is complex and hard to wrestle with. So, on one hand, we have missionaries who want to spread their faith. Arguably a faith that is able to teach people they are loved when they are considered little more than worthless servants in their society is a good thing. As a Christian, I of course think that the notion of being loved by God is a good thing! However, I’m not sure that the missionaries in this story, or at that time in general, understood why they might face such vicious opposition.

By its very definition, teaching society’s least desirable people that they are loved is a political act. People who believe that they’re loved don’t tolerate poor treatment as well as those who feel worthless and defeated. People who believe that they were created in the image of God may be much less content to live out their prescribed lot in life, growing food and breaking their backs so that the wealthy might have it easier.

The interference from the English and Dutch notwithstanding, then, it is not so surprising that the governing authorities in Japan at the time saw Christianity as a threat. Rulers don’t want people believing in a power greater than theirs.

On a different note, knowing just a little bit about how colonial history went in other countries, despite my faith, part of me feels like Japan’s suspicion was justified. Unfortunately people have used Christianity—a lot—in the past as a political weapon in the name of "taming the heathen" or what have you. What would have happened in Japan if a greater percentage of the population had converted to Catholicism and stuck with it? Would the country have been susceptible to coming under Spain or Portugal’s political power? Were the insidious rumors spread by the English and Dutch partially justified? I’m not enough of a history buff to provide an answer to that here, but it does give me pause, and makes me think that Rodrigues and Garrpe's contemporaries were naïve indeed not to anticipate prior to the Japanese martyrdoms that they could experience politically-motivated religious persecution in that country.

From a purely faith perspective, one could say that spreading Christ’s gospel—that people are loved by God so much that he was willing to die for them—invites persecution because there are powers of good and evil at work in the world, and evil doesn’t go quietly.

When we zoom out a bit from the faith-based perspective, though, it’s easier to see that whether we believe in good and evil or not, we can probably agree that selfish actions by human beings trying to keep their own status quo have broad implications and consequences for any honest transfer of such faith. When I say honest, I mean insofar as the missionaries did not intend conquest or harm. Instead, though, the Japanese peasants, and Rodrigues and Garrpe themselves, became victims caught in the crossfire between great political powers, some of which saw themselves as religious but in fact may have functioned as machines of colonialism.

The novel could be interpreted, therefore, to show Rodrigues’ rejection of legalistic religion and the spread of colonialism in favor of a more personal relationship with God. Perhaps that is the kind of subversive, true Christianity that could actually take root in that "swamp of Japan," let alone the rest of the world.

Which begs a question for these anxious times—in the silence of this broken world of ours, will it take the destruction of organized religion as we know it altogether in order for us to be able to hear God's voice and to pay attention? ( )

The silence is for waiting for God to respond, and not lose your faith. Father Rodrigues doesn't want to renounce his religion out of commitment or fear. He doesn't understand Japan or his people, but wants to impregnate and convert the inhabitants, even though they are being, and will be tortured for converting. Father Ferreira knows all this, and that's wh he apostated, losing his right to come back to Portugal.

Rodrigues: "What do you mean? It's because I believe in the salavation of these people..."
Ferreira: "You make yourself more important than them. You're preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say that you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. They will be saved from suffering. And you refuse to do so. It's because you dread to betray the church. You dread to be dregs of the church, like me"

This is a great story. It's difficult to take all that seriously if you aren't religious, because the suffering can end so easily, but some priests refuse out of honor or fear. But is more out of selfishness and ignorance. ( )

Had it not been for the reviews I had seen from my friends whose tastes and opinions I respect, I probably would not have read this book. Reason being that I hesitate to read religious and atheist books because of the preaching, a condescending tone that is normally vehicle for the rant that boils down to: we are in the right, they are in the wrong and these couple of hundreds of pages will be dedicated to proving my point. And given the short description that accompanied the story I thought that the book would somehow be one of those books, and how wrong I was, and how glad am I that there were reviews that encouraged me to read this book.

It is the first half of the seventeenth century, Christianity has been outlawed in Japan and clergy members and Christians found practicing are tortured, forced to apostatize and killed. Sebastião Rodrigues, a young Jesuit priest journeys to Japan in this age to find out what happened to his mentor Ferreira, who had also been a missionary in Japan for many years, whom he looked up to and admired and still cannot believe the reports concerning his apostatizing.

To provide some historical context, Western powers had already begun their exploits around the world by the period this book is set in. By the 1640s the Americas, Africa, and Asia had all in some way or other already been colonized and occupied, with slavery booming during this period. Japan, which was under an emperor no doubt, must have felt threatened by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other European powers’ interest in Asia. Not to mention the wars the Portuguese and Spanish had been fighting in Asia against Muslims, and their racist and religious disdain for Asians being non-white and non-Christian. And to add to all this, the suspicion that the Christian faith was making the citizenry less loyal to the emperor and state, so Japan cut itself off from the outside world in 1641 and only dealt with foreigners from an artificial island off Nagasaki - an isolation that would last two centuries.

Back to the book, the Portuguese missionaries who had at first enjoyed a great relationship with the government and the lords find themselves in a fix; the relationship turns sour and the persecution of Christians begins. In comes Rodrigues, an enthusiastic priest, filled with ideals as he begins his quest.

Shusaku Endo is an incredible writer. His prose is magnificent, and his ability to describe the inner struggle of the priest as he faces torture and his faith is shaken, and to draw quite a portrait of the time and place was just remarkable. Silence here, the silence of God as cruelty happens is explored.
We journey with Rodrigues as he hides from the authorities, as he communes with Japanese peasants, as he suffers personal losses and loses the romanticized ideals he had on life and faith. Such unforgettable characters Endo built with the treacherous Kichinjiro and the priests, Rodrigues himself, Garpe and Ferreira as well as the Japanese Christians facing persecution and the persecuting Japanese officials.

I appreciate the honesty that the writer gives us with this story, honesty that is rare with books concerning faith or the lack thereof. Even though Shusaku Endo himself was a Catholic, there is no condescending here, just wonderful writing, excellently told. ( )

Beautiful for such a short novel. I appreciate it for asking the questions that many people, including myself, struggle with or at the very least ponder over. In the end, the priest tramples on the image of Christ, thinking to himself that Christ himself would trample on himself to stop the suffering of others. It's very philosophical and gets to the root of the church as an entity with leaders compared to the church as a missionary force in places of the world where Christianity is at direct odds with culture.

It's very fascinating and I really enjoyed the heart with which is was written. Epistolary in format, this isn't a book with a "happy ending". It is a book of questions and a look at what true suffering is, especially faced with the perceived silence of God. ( )

A well written book that brings in moral questions of faith and whether our pride can interfere with our faith. ( )