Editor’s Note: This week’s mini-series on the Grace and Truth Blog offers a sample of books that have been influential in the lives and ministries of four different biblical counselors. These books are not published as biblical counseling resources, and hopefully some will be new to you! In our second and third articles, Anna Mondal discusses three themes from Silence and Beauty. In other contributions to the series, Curtis Solomon shares about Leadership by Design and Extreme Ownership, Darryl Burling explains the benefit of Gospel Powered Humility for counselors and counselees, and Ann Maree Goudzwaard describes the impact Leadership and Self-Deception had on her life.
Fresh off the mission field, I watched Martin Scorsese’s film Silence, based on Shusaku Endo’s novel. Set in seventeenth-century Japan during a flashpoint in Christian persecution, the story is a brutal one. Portuguese missionaries sail to the end of the known earth to recover their maybe-apostate mentor and minister to the island’s hidden Christians. It starts like a hero story. But with every scene, the mission devolves: torture, imprisonment, unredemptive deaths, sellout by a chronic betrayer, and finally, an ambiguous ending where the faith heroes become faith deniers.
Silence didn’t fit my neat containers for interpreting life. I read and reread Endo’s haunting novel. Where is God in all of that: when faith fails, missions fall apart, and outcomes are unclear? How do tragedy and trauma play into the life of faith? What possible beauty could be seen in places of (real or symbolic) death?
Makoto Fujimura, an internationally renowned artist, explores these questions and more in Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering. This book is a guide to Endo’s 1966 novel and Scorsese’s 2016 film. But more deeply, it’s a collection of reverent reflections on God, trauma, and faith. It’s part memoir, part literary review, and part gentle theodicy. It includes insight into Japanese history and culture, the Ground Zeros of New York City and Fukushima, and art forms like filmmaking, nihonga painting, and tea ceremonies.
But in this space, I’ll focus on three themes from Silence and Beauty that have meant the most to my life and work: 1.) Suffering invites me to trust in the character of God, not in the quality of my own faith, 2.) Divine forgiveness is deeper than my deepest failures, and 3.) God is not silent in my suffering, but speaks through it.
The Anti-clarity of Suffering
Fujimura was stuck on a New York City subway during the 9/11 attacks. He lived three blocks from the towers, and his children attended school within sight of them. That day’s terror bled into the fabric of his faith. He writes of his “Ground Zero reality” as he struggled to piece his life back together: “My art turned to lament for a decade afterwards as I wrestled with that day’s image of flames and destruction.”[1]
Imagine lamenting for a decade. Fujimura’s post-traumatic art[2] has impacted me deeply, especially as I bear witness to so much suffering in my counseling practice. The Ground Zeroes of life can become sacred spaces to see anew as we see through tears.
But rather than adopting the costly posture of longtime lament, rather than engaging Christ in calamity, “it is tempting to…[play] the role of diviner to ‘understand’ calamity.”[3] We may quickly pass over our pain, striving to cerebrally decode the spiritual “lessons” God must be teaching us. I have seen this; I have done this. It may seem like a holy response in the moment, but surrender is rarely meaningful unless it follows a genuine struggle (Gen. 32:22-32; 2 Cor. 12:1-10). Jesus Himself wrestled with the Father when facing the overwhelming physical and mental pain of His inevitable death (Luke 22:39-44).
Fujimura quotes philosopher-theologian David Bentley Hart, writing after the deadly 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami:
“I do not believe we Christians are obliged ‘or even allowed’ to look upon [devastation]…and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning …resides in so much misery.”[4]
Rather, writes Hart, we are allowed to hate evil, as God does. We are allowed to lament for an unprescribed, unhurried amount of time. God doesn’t ask us to untangle all complexities but to quiet ourselves in His love (Ps. 131). And the act of relaxing into genuine relational trust sometimes means that we struggle a lot at first.
What does this mean for counseling? First, while God is not silent in catastrophe, sometimes we should be. There are deep places we shouldn’t try to speak into, places where it’s appropriate and worshipful to be silent (Ps. 46:10; Job 2:13; 40:4). I think of Peter at Jesus’ transfiguration. He rushed into this sacred moment, speaking from a place of fear: “he did not know what to say, since they were terrified (Mark 9:6).” I can resonate with this—not knowing what to say and speaking recklessly. But on the sacred ground of overwhelming events, God might be inviting us into silence and worship: “Listen to My Beloved Son (see Mark 9:7).”
Secondly, this unhurried approach to lament has informed the way I engage my own suffering and the suffering of others. When calamity-surviving counselees question their faith, it’s not my job to talk them back into believing. In most cases, the deeper need is relational. We need to reimagine a safe Father, lament to a Someone who can handle it. It is only from a place of growing relational attachment and security in God that we can receive the gift of faith in our suffering (John 13-17). This might take years.
“Rather than having faith in faith itself, as a point of certainty that relies on our volition only, true faith is a childlike trust in God, who allows his children to question him…and to do so in the certainty of the relational knowledge and trust of the Father.”[5]
The focus of my faith isn’t my faith. It’s Jesus. This is good news not only for people who suffer, but also for people who fail.
The Anti-heroism of Christian Disciples
The persecuted Christians of Silence faced a choiceless choice: deny Christ and therefore rescue the lives of family and friends, or refuse and stand by as they’re butchered. Recant, and save everyone. Or, keep the faith and kill your family. Eager to stamp out Christianity, Japanese officials knew threatening to slaughter a Christian’s community would be the most effective way to breed fear.
In this cultural context, denying Christ was more than words. Christians were commanded to prove their faithlessness by trampling a fumi-e, or “stepping block” etched with Christ’s face. In this visual culture, dishonoring a beautiful symbol of truth is a deeper desecration than denial by words. The scene is replayed in village after village: a huddled knot of terrorized farmers—threatened, screamed at. They’re presented with the bronze or wooden fumi-e, ordered to step on it. Some have just witnessed a friend beheaded for refusing to recant. Anguished faces, anguished trampling.
Were they Christians or not? Conquerors or cowards? Endo is intentionally ambiguous about this and avoids the convenient narrative of heroes versus villains, victory versus defeat. He creates space for the withering effects of trauma. “Endo seems to argue that none of us are exempt from the possibility of complete failure if we face extraordinary torture and dehumanization.”[6] The novel captures the paradoxical complexity of human nature. We are the image of God, and we are made of dust (Gen. 1:27; 2:7). We are both. Silence doesn’t worship heroes, but rather, “Endo stands with those sitting in the pews who feel inadequate and uncertain, who doubt whether they can be strong, heroic, and faith-filled.”[7]
The more I work with people who have survived terrible trauma, the less I’m inclined to judge their presumed “failures” of faith. I don’t know what it’s like to be them. I don’t know what they were surviving. We all step on our own fumi-es; we all betray people and ideals and the God we love.
With a growing awareness of my own fractures and failures, I feel the relief of Christ’s infinite forgiveness. I’m less afraid to admit my deficiencies—they’re inevitable. This shouldn’t lead to a posture of triumphant failurism or an over-glorification of brokenness. Rather, practicing repentance, acknowledging my creatureliness, and celebrating God’s forgiveness invites me into deeper God-dependence. It empowers me to live into each new day, relying on His new mercies (Lam. 3:1-27). At the end of the day, the story isn’t about me. My small stories, my rises and falls, are meant to display the glory of God (2 Cor. 4:1-12).
In the same way, while a book like Endo’s Silence may “depict humanity at its worst and faith at its weakest, [its] more insistent theme is that through such a broken lens the light of God’s grace and power is refracted into the world.”[8]
In Part Two, we’ll continue looking at Silence and Beauty, with an emphasis on how human anti-heroism points us to the cross, and how the voice of God is not silent in our suffering but speaks through it.
Questions for Reflection
- How might God be inviting you to engage Him in your suffering?
- What is blocking you or rushing you?
[1] Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering (Downers Grover, IL, InterVarsity Press, 2016), 92.
[2] For a beginning, see “Gallery: Four Quartets” by Mako Fujimura, https://makotofujimura.com/art/four-quartets.
[3] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 95.
[4] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 95, citing David Bentley Hart, “Tsunami and Theodicy,” First Things 151 (March 2005): 6-9, www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/tsunami-and-theodicy.
[5] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 85.
[6] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 165.
[7] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 41. Fujimura notes that Endo was a “novelist of pain” who “experienced trauma as a universal language that can connect cultures (38).” A Japanese who studied in France, and then in the United States during the outbreak of World War II, Endo experienced hostility and felt his outcast status wherever he went. He battled recurrent sickness and was repeatedly hospitalized (and operated on) in countries not his home—which, as I know, is vulnerability at its highest. Endo struggled with his faith, with his identity, for most of his life, and his novels reflect this deep, honest struggle of vulnerable, anti heroic outsiders.
[8] Fujimura, Silence and Beauty, 145. Fujimura notes the similarities between Endo’s Silence and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory—a book Endo admired and reread while working on the novel.
