When Silence Really Does Speak Volumes
“But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.”
This is the very last line of Silence, a novel written by Shūsaku Endō and translated from Japanese into English by William Johnston. Yes, a part of me is apologetic for spoiling the very last line of the book, but I don’t think it is spoiling very much. If anything, it leaves so many more questions that might be worth thinking of as you (if you choose to, and I highly recommend you do!) read the book.
Silence takes place in seventeenth-century Japan, when the persecution of Christians is rampant. And yet, Rodrigues, a priest from Portugal, has set off to Japan with the mission of carrying out the Gospel and finding another priest named Ferriera who reportedly apostatized and has lost contact with the Church.
Rodrigues and another priest both try to carry out their priestly duties throughout small villages with Christians in hiding. But inevitably, the dangers become too high, they split, and eventually are taken as prisoners. Through this journey, Rodrigues witnesses the death and persecution of Christians—peasants who are strung up on crosses at sea and left to die by exhaustion from the rising and waning tide. Christians are beheaded, drowned, and hung upside down in a pit of human feces, waiting to die. In this suffering, Rodrigues cannot help but lose a little faith and question the existence of God. He wonders throughout the book how God could be so silent in the face of so much suffering.
It is a question that I have always had, and I’m sure everyone—both religious and nonreligious people—have. If there is a God, and this God is benevolent, how could he possibly be silent in the face of extreme suffering?
Believe me, I’ve beat this question to death. Every couple months or so I take some time to cry out to God and question his goodness and existence. I even took a class called, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” where we explored how Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism answered that question. And no, I did not leave that class with an answer.
And so, while reading Silence, I couldn’t help but empathize with a little bit of the torment Rodrigues experienced. How could God simply watch his believers die and suffer mercilessly without doing anything to save them?
Towards the end, as expressed in the last line, he declares, “But our Lord was not silent.” I won’t get into the big plot points, but to vaguely contextualize this line, I think Rodrigues, after doubting God’s existence, realizes that God was working behind the scenes after all. He was always present, always speaking to him and to others if not by words, then by emotions and actions.
What perplexes me the most is when Rodrigues says, “Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.” What does this mean? To be honest, I’m coming up with these answers off the cuff as I am writing this blog post right now. But perhaps the meaning behind this line is that, even if God had been silent, Rodrigues’ experiences spoke for him.
Even if God was simply watching passively, that would not matter—because someone else, Rodrigues, was speaking for God, representing him. God used Rodrigues: God himself may not have spoken out into the void with his own voice. But God was there, working through Rodrigues, using him as a mouthpiece.
I guess this explanation basically implies that it is up to us to “be the change we want to see.” But if we take the meaning of being “the change we want to see,” on its own, it is a very lonely endeavor. It entails that we are left to our own devices to be humanitarians and the saviors of ourselves.
But when our lives speak of God, we are not alone. He does not simply throw us into the deep end to save ourselves by ourselves. God is actively working through us to use our stories to do good. We have His story to depend on. It is a mutual partnership in which God works through us, using us as we then rely on him and the legacy he has and continues to lead.
The Lord, though he may at times be silent in that he does not use his own voice or actions to intervene into our lives, uses us to speak of him and his life.
For Rodrigues, his life was a reflection of Christ’s life. And by reflecting Christ’s life, Christ was speaking through him.
When I try to mirror Christ in all his goodness and love, not only am I simply obeying his command and trying to love him more and learn about him more, but God is working through me, using me to speak of him. In reflecting Christ’s love, in loving others as he did and does, God speaks.
Victoria Choe is a senior in CC studying history. In her free time, she enjoys going on runs and scrolling through Pinterest to find new Winnie-the-Pooh quotes to pin to her board.