Shusaku Endo Quotes

The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. ~ Shusaku Endo

If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan ... it cannot be a true religion. ~ Shusaku Endo

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. ~ Shusaku Endo

I, too, stood on the sacred image. For a moment this foot was on his face. It was on the face of the man who has been ever in my thoughts, on the face that was before me on the mountains, in my wanderings, in prison, on the best and most beautiful face that any man can ever know, on the face of him whom I have always longed to love. Even now that face is looking at me with eyes of pity from the plaque rubbed flat by many feet. « Trample ! » said those compassionate eyes. « Trample ! Your foot suffers in pain ; it must suffer like all the feet that have stepped on this plaque. But that pain alone is enough. I understand your pain and your suffering. It is for that reason that I am here. »
« Lord, I resented your silence. »
« I was not silent. I suffered beside you. » ~ Shusaku Endo

Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon. ~ Shusaku Endo

His pity for them had been overwhelming; but pity was not action. ~ Shusaku Endo

The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others. ~ Shusaku Endo

People are linked together by enmity than by love. ~ Shusaku Endo

Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent ... ? ~ Shusaku Endo

But pity was not action. It was not love. Pity, like passion, was no more than a kind of instinct. ~ Shusaku Endo

What emotion had filled the breast of Christ when he ordered away the man who was to betray him for thirty pieces of silver. Was it anger? or resentment? Or did these words arise from his love? If it was anger, then at this instant Christ excluded from salvation this man alone of all the men in the world; and then our Lord allowed one man to fall into eternal damnation. But it could not be so. Christ wanted to save even Judas. If not, he would have never made him one of his disciples. And yet why did Christ not stop him when he began to slip from the path of righteousness? This was a problem I had not understood even as a seminarian......If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ. ~ Shusaku Endo

When you were still here, Isobe thought, death seemed so far removed from me. It was as though you stood with both arms outstretched, keeping death from me. But now that you're gone, suddenly it seems right here in front of me. ~ Shusaku Endo

The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this. ~ Shusaku Endo

At the core of her senseless actions, she vaguely perceived that she yearned for something. A something that would provide her with a sure sense of fulfillment. But she could not fathom what that something might be. ~ Shusaku Endo

I do not believe that God has given us this trial to not purpose. I know that the day will come when we will clearly understand why this persecution with all it's sufferings has been bestowed upon us -- for everything that Our Lord does is for our good. And yet, even as I write these words I feel the oppressive weight in my heart of those last stammering words of Kichijiro in the morning of his departure: "Why has Deus Sama imposed this suffering on us?" and then the resentment in those eyes that he turned upon me. "Father", he had said "what evil have we done?"

I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with tall the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God. Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent. ~ Shusaku Endo

The smell of death was thick in the city of Vārāṇasī. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs. ~ Shusaku Endo

And yet, rather than this I know that my Lord is different from the God that is preached in the churches. ~ Shusaku Endo

A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face. ~ Shusaku Endo

I did pray. I kept on Praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering. ~ Shusaku Endo

As for me, perhaps I am so fascinated by his face because the Scriptures make no mention of it...all it's details are left to my imagination. ~ Shusaku Endo

There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong? ~ Shusaku Endo

I don't want to die in darkness any thicker than this. I want to bring some kind of resolution in my life. ~ Shusaku Endo

Stupefied he gazed at the old man who, naïve as a child, returned his glance still rubbing his hands. How could he have recognized one who so utterly betrayed all his expectations? The man whom Valignano had called a devil, who had made the missionaries apostatize one by one--until now he had envisaged the face of this man as pale and crafty. But here before his very eyes sat this understanding, seemingly good, meek man. ~ Shusaku Endo

They were martyred. But what a martyrdom! I had long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints--how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable and painful business it was! ~ Shusaku Endo

Christianity, to be effective in Japan, must change. ~ Shusaku Endo

I became a Catholic against my will. ~ Shusaku Endo

I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts. ~ Shusaku Endo

If we did not believe that truth is universal, why should so many missionaries endure these hardships? It is precisely because truth is common to all countries and all times that we call it truth. If a true doctrine were not true alike in Portugal and Japan we could not call it true. ~ Shusaku Endo

...but what grieved him most was his inability to love these people as Christ had loved them. ~ Shusaku Endo

We priests are in some ways a sad group of men. Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task. ~ Shusaku Endo

The seeds of salvation are buried in every act of evil. ~ Shusaku Endo

Prayer does nothing to alleviate suffering. ~ Shusaku Endo

True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men. ~ Shusaku Endo

Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here. ~ Shusaku Endo

But the scrawny, powerless man with his arms outstretched on the cross had at some point reclaimed Otsu. Still, that doesn't change the fact that I won. With startling rapacity God had merely picked up a man I discarded. ~ Shusaku Endo

Yet one priest remaining in this country has the same significance as a single candle burning in the catacombs. ~ Shusaku Endo

When you suffer, I suffer with you. To the end I am close to you. ~ Shusaku Endo

but our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of Him. ~ Shusaku Endo

To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it? ~ Shusaku Endo

Not all men are handsome and strong. There are some who are cowards from birth. There are some who are weak by nature. There are even some who cry easily. But for such a man, a man both weak and cowardly, to bear the burden of his weakness and struggle valiantly to live a beautiful life-- that's what I call great. The reason I'm so fond of Gaston is not because he has a strong will or a good head. Rather it's because, weakling and coward that he is, he keeps on fighting in his own way. ~ Shusaku Endo

A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society. ~ Shusaku Endo

- Ahh... I've never seen that before.
- What?
- Someone wearing glasses up here.
- Really? Then that should tell how urgent the situation is.

Boris Ivanowich to Kate Mishima, on board of ISS ~ Hiroki Endo

That is life's talent. To accept new things. ~ Hiroki Endo

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the "endo-whatever," had stained so much - my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn't take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made.

I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive syst ~ Padma Lakshmi

It took something massive to shatter a Mimic endo-skeleton in one hit. That it could kill me in the process was beside the point. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears. ~ Peter Sloterdijk