| Deep RiverA little more than a year ago, I got hit with this desire to go to Japan again. I went for a few weeks after my high school graduation, and it was an amazing time. Japanese people are the most hospitable people I have ever met in my life. Home stays gave me a place to sleep, and at each home that I stayed, the family would give me gift after gift. Japanese souvenirs, food, toys, cultural artifacts. One family gave me a piece of pottery that was over 100 years old. Absurd generosity. Disarming generosity.
But I don't just want to go back in order to get more stuff. I was still taking Japanese a year after my visit, when I met God. It was strange to think about Japan and the beautiful culture that I experienced in light of my new faith. I knew that when I was in Japan, I had not met a single Christian, and upon further research, I found that only 1% of Japanese people considered themselves Christians. How striking! These ideas and experiences that have been so moving and important to me seem to have no place in Japanese culture. Why?
I've been asking why ever since. And I don't know all of why, but I have some ideas. Shusaku Endo's book doesn't offer a lot of answers, but he does put Jesus in the body of a Japanese, and he tells the story of redemption in a startling way.
However, I want to talk about Endo before I talk about the book because his life is its own story of redemption. He spent his early years in the United States, and he was raised a Christian. His mother was a strong believer, and like most children, he embraced the religion of his mother. However, his family decided to return to Japan while Shusaku was an adolescent. In Japan, he faced a new and difficult cultural challenge. He was Japanese, but he was raised in the west. He was Japanese, but he went to a Christian church and prayed Christian prayers. His identity didn't fit. He wasn't quite Japanese-enough for his peers and his culture. But he wasn't sure if he really believed this Jesus bit, and he had felt displaced in western churches and western Christianity.
Endo was smart as hell, which served him well in school, but not in the social life of teenagers. Upon graduation, he had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land--that is Israel and the places where Jesus lived. He jumped at the opportunity, searching for an answer to his questions about his identity.
As he studied in Israel and as he walked where Jesus walked, something became very clear. All that he had known of Christianity was about being something very specific. If he was a Christian, he was supposed to act a certain way or he was supposed to associate with certain respectable people and not with others. If he was a Christian, he was supposed to be western--not Japanese, he thought.
The Holy Land taught Shusaku that Jesus died so that being a Christian meant you had to need redemption. Jesus had nothing to do with how someone appeared, but he had everything to do with saving people from the hell of their lives and this world. This thought changed Shusaku's life. He was no longer gripped by shame that he was not Japanese enough, or that he was not Christian enough, or that he was not accomplished enough. Instead, he was not enough, Jesus was enough.
He went on to write books for over thirty years, and Shusaku became Japan's best known and most renowned author. His book, Deep River, was his last major work. I finished it recently, and it's ideas are so interesting. However, I've already written a lot, so I'll come back in a couple of days to write about the book.
For more info on Shusaku Endo, see Philip Yancey's book Soul Survivor. |
