Silence (Shusaku Endo)

Last weekend I met someone who is coming into the Church this Easter. We were talking about interests and favorite authors. He mentioned Jesuits and Japan, so I threw out Shusaku Endo's novel Silence as a book he might like to read. I saw him two days later, and he said the book already arrived from Amazon and he was 30 pages into it. I saw him again two days after that, and he had finished it.

We started talking about the book, and I realized he was under the impression that I had read it (sometimes I recommend books I haven't read yet. I suppose that's a misleading habit). I bought the book two years ago while I was visiting Indiana, but it has remained dormant on my shelf since then.

Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author, born and raised Catholic in Japan. The novel is about Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in Japan during the brutal persecution of Catholics that led many to apostatize, even some missionaries themselves. (Almost every thing I've read about him as a novelist compares him to Graham Greene).

After our conversation, I took up the book, and I saw that Martin Scorsese has made a film from the novel, which he has apparently had in mind since the early 90s, set to be released at the end of this year.

Silence, a film adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel, to be released this year.

So, now I'm finally going to read Silence, and I'm looking forward to the film.

The Hidden Power of Kindness

Like many books from Sophia Institute Press, The Hidden Power of Kindness (by Fr. Lawrence Lovasik) is a solid book in a deceptive binding. By looking at the front cover of my copy, with its 90s illustrations of hugs and kite-flying, or the back cover, littered with overblown self-help-style promises, you might not appreciate what is inside - one of the deepest treatments of love-of-neighbor and daily interpersonal justice produced by a modern Catholic author. (The book was originally published as Kindness. Sophia Institute Press republished it in abridged form.)

It is difficult to read even a paragraph of this book without feeling a sting in one's conscience. It is really a kind of book-length examination of conscience; but it is more than that. Where it wounds, it binds and heals. It was written in the middle of last century, a time when there was the kind of moral clarity that is sorely lacking today. Fr. Lovasik does not hesitate to delineate mortal and venial sins. We live in a time when mortal sin has basically been reduced to a few heinous crimes (axe murder and armed bank robbery) and anything related to sex outside of marriage, and most everything else seems to fall into the category of "Aw shucks, better luck next time!" But, there are actually ways in which we gravely violate God's law beyond these, and we do not regard them as mortal sins because our society is so lax and we have poorly-formed consciences, which do not excuse mortal sin. This is where The Hidden Power of Kindness excels, I believe. It might be aptly subtitled, "Forming a Just Conscience in a Degenerate Age."

Here's an example of what I mean, from a section on gossip. "Most gossip is not serious in itself, but gossip can be a mortal sin. To spread a story, for instance, that a neighbor has been unfaithful to his wife is to damage his reputation in a serious way. If the story is false, or even if true, a grave injury has been inflicted upon him, more so than if he had been robbed of a large sum of money. If a number of people are all instrumental in spreading that false story, all of them are guilty of serious wrongdoing." And further: "To say that you are sorry for your careless gossip does not forgive the sin, for that is not true contrition. Contrition is proving that you are sorry. You prove your sorrow by making up to the best of your ability for the harm you have done. If you take away a person's reputation from him, you are obliged to restore that reputation."

I include this passage because it stings my conscience, because, for me, gossip is one of those things with which I tend to dismiss as "Aw shucks, better luck next time! Thank goodness for the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass!" But, in fact, I think my conscience is poorly formed in this area, and after unjustly spreading true or false information that harms the reputation of another, I should make peace and restitution with my injured brother before approaching the altar and Holy Communion.

In all, this is a very solid book, which I hope to re-read attentively and prayerfully.

Four Books on GMH

Thanks to AbeBooks and Christmases, I've got four books on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The first I read (5 years ago as a library book) was Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, by Robert Bernard Martin, professor emeritus of English at Princeton.

This is a very comprehensive biography (~ 420 pages), giving special interest especially to Hopkins' early years. The style is more direct than the one below. If it errs, I think it errs on the side of presenting Hopkins as a genius driven to insanity by his repressed homosexuality in conflict with his (self-imposed) religion and strict life as a Jesuit. Martin had access to the unpublished portions of Hopkins' diaries, which apparently proves his points.

The next I read (3 years ago) is Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, by Paul Mariani, chair in English at Boston College. Another comprehensive book (~ 430 pages) in a more lyrical style, placing more interest in Hopkins' life post-conversion. If it errs, I think it errs on the side of hagiography. Mariani's son is himself a Jesuit. I think Mariani paints a more accurate image of what led Hopkins to become a Catholic and a Jesuit, though his portrayal of what led Hopkins to the brink of despair and suicide is less convincing.

The next is In Extremity, by John Robinson. I haven't read much from this one yet. It is not a comprehensive biography, though it does touch on biographical elements in close-to chronological order. It is a more in-depth analysis of the poetry, as far as I can see. From what I gleaned, the thesis of the book is that Hopkins lived his life intentionally "in extremity." 

The last, not a biography, but a historical fiction novel featuring Hopkins as a main character, is Exiles, by Ron Hansen. I've read about a third of it. Though the dialogue and details had to be invented, they seem closely tied to real events in Hopkins' life, or things he wrote in his journals, or things other people wrote about him. It covers the period of Hopkins' life when he came out of poetic silence by writing The Wreck of the Deutschland, providing the backstories of the nuns who were drowned in the shipwreck.

"I did say yes," he would acknowledge, trembling at the memory of it, when "at lightning and lashed rod" God heard him, "truer than tongue, confess / Thy terror, O Christ, O God." But was that confession a cry of surrender, or the cry of someone unable any longer to hold back the stress of something surging through the very marrow of his soul? It would be the beginning too of his realization that he would have to give up remaining where he was, on ground he understood - the symbolic remembrance of Christ in the Eucharist - because that way of seeing things was no longer enough. He would come to hunger after nothing less than the Real Presence, God actually indwelling in things as simple as bread and wine, and see it as the logical extension of God's indwelling among us, pitching His tent in the desert of ourselves so that He could speak to us as He had with Moses in the tent.

Two look at the world around them. One thinks of oil or gold or another human being and puts a value on it or him or her. Another looks at the world and sees news of God's presence calling. Or two look at a piece of bread or a cup of wine and see bread or wine only - the quotidian, the physical thing itself, while another looks at the same two things and is shaken to the very core by the God-saturated reality brimming in the deepest self. And these ways of seeing come to make all the difference in one's life, one's thoughts, even in the way one comes to taste words.

And so with Hopkins, who for complex reasons needed, he felt, to become a Catholic and (better, worse) a Jesuit priest. Neither choice could possibly lead to preferment or even acceptance in his world, the world of late Victorian England. But they were - those choices - the logical outcome for him of much deep thinking and soul-searching. It would mean going counter to the secular and agnostic cutting-edge thinking of his own day, whether that thinker was Hegel or Lyell, Darwin or Freud. It would mean creating a radically new idiom that would lead to the renewal and possibilities of English, giving it back something of its original Anglo-Saxon force, besides recovering anew the all-but-forgotten beauties of plainchant. It would mean a poetry lettered and saturated with a language shimmering with the possibilities of a sacramental vision of the world around us. It would come to mean the possibility of actually renewing both the world and its words.

So give it a day, a date, a going forth, a crossing over, all in an instant, finally, a yes and a yes again. Call it Wednesday, July 18, 1866. Call it an out-of-the way point somewhere south of London and name it Horsham, on a dull midsummer's day with curds-and-whey clouds faintly appearing and disappearing. Call it what he would with its wondrous, irresistible forces working on him. The instress of it, like the ooze of virgin oil crushed in the presence of God's hands, an anointing, a yes.

(from Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. Such a wonderful book.)