Shusaku Endo was a prolific Japanese author who passed away in 1996.  A life long Catholic, Endo wove religious themes into everything he wrote.  One of his most memorable novels was Silence.  Silence tells the story of an American priest who comes to Japan to evangelize one of the least Christianized nations on the planet.  Unsurprisingly, the priest encounters much apathy, even antagonism, as he attempts to carry out his mission.

    Eventually, the priest is arrested.  He subsequently endures what I can only describe as spiritual torture.  Slowly and steadily, his captors force him to confront the full import of the silence of God, to ask himself why God seems to be doing nothing to help him.  Why God seems absent and gone.  Why God has abandoned him.

    Subsequently, the priest appears to change his perspective. He rejects the Christian God and embraces the Buddhism of his captors.  His life is good.  Along the way, however, he sees numerous Christians, native Japanese who have converted as a result of Western evangelism, choosing to endure horrendous torture and painful deaths rather than abandon Jesus.  Even if God seems to do nothing for them.

    Even if God seems silent.

    Many years later, the priest dies.  Per custom, his body is placed in an urn to be burned.  As his material self slowly immolates, however, we read that he still has  one thing in his hand:  a crucifix.

    What of faith?  Even if God seems silent, be it for a moment or be it for decades, he is still there.  Transcendence may be elusive, but it is never gone.