GOOD FRIDAY
Through the 1980s there was a famous Catholic Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo. One of his most famous books was simply called, Silence. It chronicled the life of Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary from Portugal who embarked for Japan in 1637 with two other companions. Throughout his time in Japan Rodrigues struggles not only to come to terms with the evil and the suffering that he encounters but also his experience of God as apparently as inactive and disinterested. God is silent.
For the novelist, Shusaku Endo, the silence of God is expressed in two ways. The characters experience a sense of despair at the thought of enduring their suffering without God, and, as such, without purpose. But for Endo the characters in the novel, precisely in their questions, at times desperate, are being slowly drawn into the very nature of God as silent. Of the nature of this silence,the writer,Karl Rahner has said,
Our existence is embraced by an ineffable mystery whom we call God. We can exclude him from our day-to-day awareness by the concerns and activity of our daily life; we can drown the all pervading silence of this mystery . . . This ultimate mystery at the root of reality and of our lives is nameless, impenetrable . . .
The journey of Rodrigues is the journey that all of us are drawn into at some level. Our questions rise up from the depth of our experiences and we search for the answers and none come. In the midst of our hurts, our failures, our griefs we wonder, often with great angst, at the meaning of suffering and none is given. Sometimes the silence to our questions becomes all too great, and the silence seems to condemn us and it turns us against even ourselves. It becomes a weight too great for us to bear and it appears that we are left accused by our questions, our struggle to understand, and our failed hopes.
All of us at some stage of our life must meet the silence of God, and we must determine in the silence of our own hearts whether this silence is one of condemnation or one of invitation. Perhaps this is the moment of greatest spiritual crisis that each of us will face in our life. It is the crisis that we bring to mind each Good Friday. It is the crisis that Jesus himself knew. As the theologian Johann Metz declares,
I will describe it tentatively here as a mysticism of suffering unto God. It is found particularly in Israel’s prayer traditions: in the Psalms, in Job, in Lamentations, and last but not least in many passages in the prophetic books. This language of prayer is itself a language of suffering, a language of crisis, a language of affliction and of radical danger, a language of complaint and grieving, a language of crying out and, literally, of the grumbling of the children of Israel. The language of this God-mysticism is not first and foremost one of consoling answers for the suffering one is experiencing, but rather much more a language of passionate questions from the midst of suffering, questions turned toward God, full of highly charged expectation. . . . What occurs in this language is not the repression but rather the acceptance of fear, mourning and pain; it is deeply rooted in the figure of the night, the experience of the soul’s demise. It is less a song of the soul, more a loud crying out from the depths – and not a vague, undirected wailing, but a focused crying-out-to. Jesus’ [own] God-mysticism is also a part of this tradition.
On this day we bring to mind the way in which the fundamental human crisis is played out in the story of Jesus himself.
We also bring to mind how this crisis is resolved in Jesus. For Jesus, as does Rodriguez in Endo’s novel, discovers deep within himself that the very silence of God that he encounters in the depths of his questions is a silence full of invitation and embrace. Rodriguez moves from experiencing an absent God to a God who speaks in the silence and who is that ‘Silence.’
How might we ourselves understand this same resolution in which absence is transformed into presence? Perhaps these words again of the writer Karl Rahner, help us when he says,
If, however, we find the sudden courage still to speak our You into this darkness in hope and trust, if we do this again and again, if we make no arrogant demand that our call into this silent darkness should receive an immediate, particular answer which simply overwhelms us instead of being the soft and silently saving presence of this mystery, we notice that can say You to God, trusting and so waiting for the moment when the mystery of our existence will show his face unveiled as everlasting love, which is an eternal You to You.
Then, we find that, “God is the silence in which we belong, the silence in which every voice is heard, all wounds are healed and all our times have a future.” In other words, the silence of God is full of invitation. It is the silence that speaks to us. And we discover that the silence is a home, full of life, and not a tomb for us. The silence had become a sign of intimacy rather than of isolation.
To realise this also helps us re-orient where we look for God. To look for God in the most powerful of places and in the most obvious of places is at times to miss God and to be deaf to the way in which he speaks to us. When we accept the silence of God, and no longer fight against it, but discover there the source of our invitation to trust and hope, the means of our intimacy with God, then God speaks to us in such diverse ways all around us.
As Rodrigues says at the end of Shusako Endo’s novel,
Even now I am the last priest in the land. But our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.
So, too, does not Jesus life –a self emptying become a self-giving - not speak of the nature of God’s own silence that characterises the experience of this day?
Through the 1980s there was a famous Catholic Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo. One of his most famous books was simply called, Silence. It chronicled the life of Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary from Portugal who embarked for Japan in 1637 with two other companions. Throughout his time in Japan Rodrigues struggles not only to come to terms with the evil and the suffering that he encounters but also his experience of God as apparently as inactive and disinterested. God is silent.
For the novelist, Shusaku Endo, the silence of God is expressed in two ways. The characters experience a sense of despair at the thought of enduring their suffering without God, and, as such, without purpose. But for Endo the characters in the novel, precisely in their questions, at times desperate, are being slowly drawn into the very nature of God as silent. Of the nature of this silence,the writer,Karl Rahner has said,
Our existence is embraced by an ineffable mystery whom we call God. We can exclude him from our day-to-day awareness by the concerns and activity of our daily life; we can drown the all pervading silence of this mystery . . . This ultimate mystery at the root of reality and of our lives is nameless, impenetrable . . .
The journey of Rodrigues is the journey that all of us are drawn into at some level. Our questions rise up from the depth of our experiences and we search for the answers and none come. In the midst of our hurts, our failures, our griefs we wonder, often with great angst, at the meaning of suffering and none is given. Sometimes the silence to our questions becomes all too great, and the silence seems to condemn us and it turns us against even ourselves. It becomes a weight too great for us to bear and it appears that we are left accused by our questions, our struggle to understand, and our failed hopes.
All of us at some stage of our life must meet the silence of God, and we must determine in the silence of our own hearts whether this silence is one of condemnation or one of invitation. Perhaps this is the moment of greatest spiritual crisis that each of us will face in our life. It is the crisis that we bring to mind each Good Friday. It is the crisis that Jesus himself knew. As the theologian Johann Metz declares,
I will describe it tentatively here as a mysticism of suffering unto God. It is found particularly in Israel’s prayer traditions: in the Psalms, in Job, in Lamentations, and last but not least in many passages in the prophetic books. This language of prayer is itself a language of suffering, a language of crisis, a language of affliction and of radical danger, a language of complaint and grieving, a language of crying out and, literally, of the grumbling of the children of Israel. The language of this God-mysticism is not first and foremost one of consoling answers for the suffering one is experiencing, but rather much more a language of passionate questions from the midst of suffering, questions turned toward God, full of highly charged expectation. . . . What occurs in this language is not the repression but rather the acceptance of fear, mourning and pain; it is deeply rooted in the figure of the night, the experience of the soul’s demise. It is less a song of the soul, more a loud crying out from the depths – and not a vague, undirected wailing, but a focused crying-out-to. Jesus’ [own] God-mysticism is also a part of this tradition.
On this day we bring to mind the way in which the fundamental human crisis is played out in the story of Jesus himself.
We also bring to mind how this crisis is resolved in Jesus. For Jesus, as does Rodriguez in Endo’s novel, discovers deep within himself that the very silence of God that he encounters in the depths of his questions is a silence full of invitation and embrace. Rodriguez moves from experiencing an absent God to a God who speaks in the silence and who is that ‘Silence.’
How might we ourselves understand this same resolution in which absence is transformed into presence? Perhaps these words again of the writer Karl Rahner, help us when he says,
If, however, we find the sudden courage still to speak our You into this darkness in hope and trust, if we do this again and again, if we make no arrogant demand that our call into this silent darkness should receive an immediate, particular answer which simply overwhelms us instead of being the soft and silently saving presence of this mystery, we notice that can say You to God, trusting and so waiting for the moment when the mystery of our existence will show his face unveiled as everlasting love, which is an eternal You to You.
Then, we find that, “God is the silence in which we belong, the silence in which every voice is heard, all wounds are healed and all our times have a future.” In other words, the silence of God is full of invitation. It is the silence that speaks to us. And we discover that the silence is a home, full of life, and not a tomb for us. The silence had become a sign of intimacy rather than of isolation.
To realise this also helps us re-orient where we look for God. To look for God in the most powerful of places and in the most obvious of places is at times to miss God and to be deaf to the way in which he speaks to us. When we accept the silence of God, and no longer fight against it, but discover there the source of our invitation to trust and hope, the means of our intimacy with God, then God speaks to us in such diverse ways all around us.
As Rodrigues says at the end of Shusako Endo’s novel,
Even now I am the last priest in the land. But our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.
So, too, does not Jesus life –a self emptying become a self-giving - not speak of the nature of God’s own silence that characterises the experience of this day?
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