13 December 2024 University of York
This lecture was given as this year’s St William of York Lecture in Theology at the University of York.
‘Be Holy!’ (1 Peter 1.16): The Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity in Anxious Times
Holiness is a notion we struggle to make sense of now. Confronted with claims to holiness, we instinctively seek to discredit them. The assumption of counterfeit runs deep. To be ‘holier-than-thou’ is to bask in a self-assigned, self-satisfied sense of superiority that reeks sourly of hypocrisy. If we exclaim of someone, ‘What a saint!’, it is usually to point out some variety of blatant and absurd pharisaical display.
I have occasion to observe popular responses to ‘holiness’ close at hand. Norway’s patron saint, St Olav, was killed in 1030. The millennium of his martyrdom draws near inexorably. The government has announced a ‘national jubilee’ cast as a grand hoorah for our nation, abstracting the protagonist as far as possible. That a modern, secular, multi-cultural state struggles to frame a response to a Catholic saint is understandable. What is striking, though, is that in so far as Olav is mentioned at all, it is almost always disapprovingly. He is painted in the grim palette of a Netflix viking series, rapacious, with horns on his hat, and with an uncontrolled libido.
The fact that Olav was of royal stock, moving easily in princely courts; that we have gracious poems from his hand, songs of swift horses and blushing maidens; that his baptism shows every sign of having been sincere; that he implemented a Christian code of law that raised up the lowly and cast down the proud; that he was known for cheerful kindness; that his cult, upon his defeat in battle, spread fast worldwide; that Christians pilgrimaged secretly to his shrines for centuries after the Reformers had sternly outlawed such practice: all this is pooh-poohed as irrelevant.
At stake is not the relative attractiveness or merit of a particular human destiny. I believe it is the category of ‘holiness’ as such that causes scandal. That it should be so makes sense. Nowadays we like to project an image of ourselves to the world on the basis of self-affirmation, expecting others to greet it with a Halleluja chorus. If I admit ‘holiness’ into my conceptual vocabulary — that is, if I admit the possibility that a human life can be profoundly and durably transformed — who is to say I couldn’t, and shouldn’t, change my life? The thought is uncomfortable.
Have we lost the very ability to portray uncommon goodness? It could seem so. It is damned hard, now, to write up the lives of saints credibly. To label a biography ‘hagiography’ is to condemn it as idealised drivel. Even sympathetic accounts fall flat. I think of Shusako Endo’s novel A Wonderful Foolfrom 1959, an attempt to describe the irruption of holiness into a modern, secular setting. The fool in question, a Frenchman named Gaston, steps off a ship in Yokohama one day to visit his Japanese penpal Takamori. Gaston is like a visitor from another planet. He is kind and generous, yes, but hopelessly unrealistic; a misfit even in his unruly physiognomy. Endo, who was a Catholic and wrote as one, sought, it would seem, to create a character in the mould of the yurodivy or holy fool canonised in Russian literature. The result, though, reads like a two-dimensional, rather tedious cartoon.
I thought of Endo’s novel recently while watching Alice Rohrwacher’s movie from 2018, Lazzaro Felice. I love the work of Rohrwacher, who, with a keen eye for societal dysfunction and human quirks, makes work that is at the same time critical and uncynical — a delicate balance to tread. There is poetry in all her films; there is mirth, tenderness, intimations of greatness. Lazzaro, meanwhile, stands apart among her dramatis personae, for he is wholly good, moving in shabby society as an unlikely incarnation of prelapsarian bliss, happy to let himself be taunted, used, exploited. By narrative and cinematographic means, Rohrwacher lets us see that Lazzaro transcends common human limitations; for one thing, he stands, unageing, beyond chronology. It also becomes clear that he is one for whom the world as it is has neither space nor time. He is shot dead in a high place of pragmatic transaction, a bank, where people around him fatally misread his pure intentions. Poor, naive, foolish Lazzaro! His bright happiness was too much for crepuscular mankind.
The works I have cited, representative of trends, are secular in form. Whatever their authors’ beliefs, they do not set out to be explicitly religious. They are certainly not evangelising. What, then, about the Church? Surely she must be an expert on sanctity? Does she have any luck in portraying the inward essence of holy women and men? Thank God, she has the liturgy whose texts, poetry, and forms carry a timeless treasury that does convey, to those with eyes to see, ears to hear, compelling testimonies. When it comes to contemporary expression, though, even she struggles. To see what I mean, try putting an altarpiece by Fra Angelico or Cimambue, works that take our breath away by probingly displaying humanity imbued with an otherworldliness that does not estrange but perfect it, next to one of the inexplicably ubiquitous mosaics of Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit, whose serialised saints have teletubby bodies and empty, lightless eyes. An observation will impose itself: even officially commissioned and sanctioned representations of holiness tend, now, to presuppose dissimilarity from actual, lifelike women and men. Sanctity has come to seem corny, somehow, even slightly sinister.
One of the reasons we are in a rut is this: we have come to think of holiness as behavioural perfectibility. We imagine saints as flawless super-persons, nice to all, always patient, not slurping soup, never uttering invective, never crossing the street on a red light. The mere thought of such a person is intolerable. When we see a life projected according to such criteria, it seems unreal. Sniffing fake news, we are only relieved when revelations are made of embarrassing weaknesses or peccadilloes that cause the house of cards, precarious from the start, to come tumbling down.
A glance at the Church’s catalogue of canonised saints will explode such a limited view of holiness, of course. To list just a few examples: St Jerome, patron saint of Biblical scholars, was famous for his prickly temperament and salty tongue; St Maria Skobtsova, murdered at Ravensbrück, would in Paris throw back her veiled head and put up her feet puffing cigarettes; St John Henry Newman descended into doldrums of self-pity; St Catherine of Siena spoke her mind to princes in ways that left crowned and tiaraed heads spinning. The saint is no exsanguine transhuman. No, a true saint shows forth what a human being is with luminous intensity. We honour the saints not as pupils in life’s school who, by swotting, have learnt at last to recite by rote and follow all the rules; we venerate them as graced, gracious human beings in whom the mystery of God flares up like substantial fire.
Likening holiness to fire I am not just picking a simile out of thin air. When holiness emerges as a Biblical category, it is in connection with fire. The setting is Egyptian, likely in the fifteenth century BC. Moses, the Hebrew adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, ostensibly an orphan, though nursed by his mother, must flee from Pharaoh. His innate instinct for justice had made him commit deeds that drew the establishment’s wrath, setting him explicitly apart as the outsider he always, in his heart of hearts, knew he was. Moses, grown up within the known world’s stablest structure of power, had become a nomad, erring in the wilderness while seeking pasture for the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian. Out there,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ Then he said, ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ And he said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
There is much going on in this passage. Moses, thinking himself alone in the desert, is surprised by an angelic presence. The angel is not to be identified with God: he is a messenger, carrying God’s word; but thereby he does carry something of God’s presence, for God is what he speaks. The angel, we might say, is a being made to cross the ontological gap between eternity and time, charged to be a vehicle of God’s self-revelation. What is God? An answer to that question cannot be spoken; but is tentatively shown in the figure of fire that burns without consuming. This fire visits the thorn bush like a guest, beautifully seated within it. The thorn bush sustains this visitation. The meeting of super-substantial fire and matter draws Moses’s attention, making him turn aside from his itinerary, wanting and needing to see.
Set on the pursuit of sight, he hears. ‘God called to him out of the bush’. He called him by name. The twofold, ‘Moses, Moses!’, recalls the ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ by which God called out on Mount Moriah, having tested Abraham by seeing his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the son whom he loved, as a burnt offering. It further makes us think of the call, ‘Jacob, Jacob!’, resounding in visions of the night when the father of Israel’s tribes had learnt that Joseph, thought dead, was alive and expecting him in Egypt. There is a note at once of affection and emphasis in the repetition of the name. It is God’s way of saying, ‘I know you’. He, the maker of all, boundless in his absolute being, knows his creatures particularly and intimately.
It is when Moses responds to this call and says, ‘Here I am’, that he receives the instruction: ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground [אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ].’ Holiness is introduced into Biblical vocabulary as a way of expressing the impact of Uncreated Being on creation. The place in which the Lord through his angel appears is transformed; it is no longer a patch of ground like any other. Something of God’s otherness rubs off on it, eliciting from man extraordinary comportment. To take off one’s shoes is to show reverence. It is also to enable immediacy. Moses is asked to step into the radius of epiphany without a layer between his own self and God’s radiance. He must make himself vulnerable to this encounter in order to be changed by it.
There follows an exchange that explicates the purpose of change. Moses is called into the realm of eternity not just as a reward for private virtue; he is to be an instrument in God’s hands for the realisation of a providential plan. Having given through fire an inkling of what he is like, God reveals who he is with reference to past revelations: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ This supra-temporal, burning Godhead makes himself incrementally known in time. Moses is chosen as a link in the chain of revelation lodged in the patriarchal stories. He, the intrepid, responds with fear. Why?
We can propose a philosophical answer. Man is in himself ephemeral: ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls’. Faced with the source of Reality, which has no beginning, no end, such a fragile thing recoils, unfit to bear the weight of glory. Moses’s fear can be understood as the spontaneous worship later generations would call, precisely, ‘fear of God’, intending the appropriate response of fallen creatures to God’s nearness.
Permit me to propose a further interpretation of Moses’s fear. It complements, without contradicting, the one we have considered. Originating with Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, it has been cogently expounded by Jonathan Sacks. Sacks sets out from Moses’s passion for justice. When Moses saw a slave maltreated, or people fighting, or women ill treated, he acted; he did not stand around the corner saying: ‘Tut!’ The sages of Israel tell us that Moses was haunted by the scandal of evil in the world. The thought of innocent suffering, the treading-down of justice and truth, tormented him. Remember the audacity with which he later took the Lord to task when Pharaoh brutalised his Hebrew workforce. Moses told God: ‘Since I first came to Pharaoh so speak in your name, he has mistreated his people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.’ There is righteous passion here, all right.
Such passion is possible, and licit, in a worldview founded on the notion that justice is structural to the way in which the world is made. Such is the Biblical view. Scripture presents the universe as an intelligent kosmos in which each part is attuned elegantly to others, a compositional model intended to apply to human society as well. The ‘way of the Lord’ is ‘righteousness and justice’. This principle has been axiomatic since the days of Abraham. What, then, when it does not work out? What can we say faced with the failure of good and the triumph of wickedness, with the tears of orphans, the rage of the oppressed, the terror of the sick and persecuted?
The Bible allows for this perplexity, tracing it to an immanent wound in humanity’s constitution that caused the chronicle of our race to originate in fratricide. Indeed, not only does Scripture affirm that circumstances of pain may obtain in our life; it tells us that they are sometimes necessary, that at times evil must be borne patiently by those who are not its agents. Thereby an economy of salvation and healing works out in history, shockingly slowly to our perception, yet assuredly in the eyes of the Lord, for whom a thousand years are like a day. In human affairs there are moments, writes Sacks, ‘when we must silence our most human instincts if we are to bring about good in the long run’, accepting that not each deliverance is instantaneous and that suffering, an ill in itself, is sometimes purposeful, requisite.
Rabbi Rabinovitch maintained that it was of this that Moses was afraid. Was looking at the face of God not tantamount to seeing history as God sees it? And was this not a proposition whose price was too high? How could Moses ‘still be moved by the cry of slaves, the anguish of the oppressed, if he understood its place in the scheme of things, if he knew that it was necessary in the long run?’
Such knowledge is divine, not human – and to have it means saying goodbye to our most human instincts: compassion, sympathy, identification with the plight of the innocent, the wronged, the afflicted and oppressed. If to look at the face of God is to understand why suffering is sometimes necessary, then Moses was afraid to look – afraid that it would rob him of the one thing he felt in his very bones, the thing that made him the leader he was: his anger at the sight of evil which drove him […] to intervene in the name of justice.
The God whom Moses met in the bush is called Elohim, a name the rabbis associate with God’s justice. It took Moses years to integrate the further name revealed in that epiphany: the ineffable Tetragrammaton Jewish tradition transcribes as Hashem, ‘the Name’, a manifestation of divine compassion. When, later in the story, on and after Sinai, Moses looks fearlessly at God, it is Hashem he sees. Whereas God’s justice can unsettle our minds, even appear to us cruel, his compassion illumines us in ways that supersede reason, letting us intuit his salvific grace where we cannot grasp it.
To step into the orbit of holiness, to risk sanctification, requires assent to phenomenal tension as we resolve to construct our lives justly while agreeing to be formed by compassion in unsettlingly palpable experiences of, precisely, ‘suffering with’. For while the world is sick, afflicted with iniquity, there will be pangs of healing to sustain; and humankind is so composed that a part can effectively carry out work on behalf of the whole. In Israel’s mature reflection, holiness is an attribute of God. The vision of Isaiah, in which he saw the Lord on a throne surrounded by angels calling out, ‘Holy, holy, holy [קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ] is the Lord of hosts’, constitutes a paradigm. Human beings perceive holiness in so far as they glimpse something of God’s glory; they are made holy, meanwhile, by configuration to the Holy and Perfect One, ‘full of compassion’, in the midst of realities racked by imperfection. For Christians, this incursion of glory into trauma is crystallised in Christ’s incarnation that renews our nature, opening it to communion with God, letting us hear the cross-shaped call, ‘Be holy!’, as one we can follow without presumption, for it spells a broadening of being and mind intended and worked on divine purpose.
To see this process at work in a human being is to sense something of what Moses sensed at the bush, the bewildering presence of the Holy One in the here-and-now. An example of sanctification which has long haunted me is that of Takashi Nagai, born near Hiroshima in 1908, when Japan, after centuries of isolationism, had catapulted itself into modernity. Takashi was formed in the Japanese classics, whose limpid poetry he loved; at the same time he was drawn to new science. He studied medicine (from German manuals) in Nagasaki, where circumstances of health and chance got him interested in radiology. He would become one of Japan’s best experts in this field in which he practised assiduously as a clinician, exposing himself to rays that would provoke severe leukaemia. He spent two periods of military service in China, first in 1933, then for three years from 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, appalled at the brutality he saw, but strengthened in his humanitarian ethos.
This ethos, at first quite secular, was little by little enlightened from another source. As a youth, Takashi had spurned faith. He reconsidered his position at his mother’s deathbed. A urgent telegram from his father summoned him home in late March 1930. He found his mother Tsune, a descendant of samurai, immobilised and mute after a cerebral haemorrhage. She spent her last strength awaiting Takashi’s arrival. Just minutes after he had come to her, she expired. He later wrote:
I rushed to her bedside. She was still breathing. She looked fixedly at me, and that is how the end came. My mother in that last penetrating gaze knocked down the ideological framework I had constructed. […] Her eyes spoke to mine, and with finality, saying: ‘Your mother now takes leave in death, but her living spirit will be beside her little one, Takashi!’ I who was so sure that there was no such thing as a spirit was now told otherwise; and I could not but believe. My mother’s eyes told me that the human spirit lives on after death. All this was by way of intuition, an intuition carrying conviction.
Many people might be pierced by such intuition for an instant, then let it go. That was no option for Takashi, whose rigorous intellect would not permit him to abandon a loose thread of such import. Picking it up, he began to spool it.
He was given two leads. The first was Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher whom Takashi had discovered while studying literature at school. Pascal’s aphoristic style, familiar to an ear attuned to Japanese poetry, pleased him. He later learnt that Pascal was also a scientist. Takashi procured a copy of his Pensées, a school of metaphysical reasoning and Christian perception. The book confirmed him in his compassion for mankind, but added a challenging dimension by stating: ‘Our wretchedness is that of a dispossessed king’. Takashi might assimilate notions of grace, first innocence, sin, and forgiveness, but his scientist’s mind balked at Pascal’s insistence that faith is a suprarational gift from God, presupposing prayer.
What prayer is he learnt from living persons. The year following his mother’s death, he took lodgings in Nagasaki with a family sprung from the stock of Christians who trace their faith back to St Francis Xavier. From the outset, Japanese authorities had viewed Christianity hostilely. Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film The Silence, based on a book by Endo, has made the ensuing cultural battle well known. It shows how, in the 1630s, while Pascal was an adolescent, European clergy in Japan were crucified and the Church was forced underground, there to become a movement of ‘hidden Christians’. This movement, concentrated in the region of Urakami, just north of Nagasaki, had formed the faith of Takashi’s landlords, the Moriyamas. Several waves of persecution rose during two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. A final campaign took place upon the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Takashi knew several survivors of the prison camps that, between 1868 and 1873, produced heroic martyrs. The faith he came to know in person had been purified by fire.
This cursory account enables us to trace four decisive factors in Takashi’s Christian journey: the death of his mother in 1930; immersion in Pascal; exposure to the horrors of war; then, acquaintance with the Urakami Christians. Takashi was baptised in Urakami’s new cathedral in June 1934. Two months later he married the Moriyamas’ daughter Midori, a woman of great inner and outward strength.
During the decade that followed, Takashi’s life assumed adult consistency. It was shaped, like any life, by joy and pain. He and Midori had three children. One died in infancy. Three years of conscription in China taught Takashi to pray. His research in radiology prospered. The more he immersed himself in science he found that, contrary to his first assumption, it confirmed his faith. ‘On one occasion, while studying a kidney case and looking at the brilliant formation of urine crystals, he “felt a great urge to kneel”. He saw “that a laboratory could be the same as the cell of a monk”’. In June 1945, Takashi, long exposed to powerful radiation, was found to be in an advanced stage of blood cancer. He was peacefully reconciled to his mortality, but as unprepared as anyone for the force with which death would sweep over Nagasaki on 9 August, when the A-bomb was dropped on the city.
We know that the bomb was intended for another location, some 200 km to the north. Weather conditions and a technical issue in the carrying plane made this target unreachable. The pilot honed in instead on Urakami. Takashi has described what happened just past 11, when, at work in the hospital, he saw a blinding light:
A giant hand seemed to grab me and hurl me ten feet. Fragments of glass flew about like leaves in a whirlwind. My eyes were open, and I had a glimpse of the outside—planks, beams, clothing were doing a weird dance in the air. […] The giant invisible hand had gone berserk and was smashing everything in the office. Various objects fell on top of me while I listened to strange noises like mountains rumbling back and forth. Then came pitch darkness, as if the reinforced concrete hospital were an express train that had just rushed headlong into a tunnel. I had felt no pain as yet, but panic gripped my heart when I heard crackling flames and sniffed acrid smoke.
Takashi heard himself say, ‘Midori, it’s the end; I’m dying.’ When he came to, what struck him was the silence. He was alive, but the world seemed dead, still, wholly burnt. Then, outside, he noticed pitiful shapes crawling about, their bodies swollen, their skin peeling as they joined in a sepulchral chorus: ‘I am burning! Water!’ With a handful of colleagues, he attended to this scene of devastation, caring for mangled bodies, trying to keep afflicted minds from surrender to madness.
There was evening and morning, evening again, then another morning. On 11 August, Takashi could at last return to what had been his home. There was nothing there but ash. In the midst of it he found a heap of bones. It was Midori, holding in her right hand a melted lump that, by a fragment of the chain and the still visible cross, Takashi identified as her rosary. He has written of how he buried her, asking forgiveness for the ways in which his love had been imperfect; only to hear her voice in his heart saying, ‘No forgive me; I ask for forgiveness’. In a strange sweetness of reconciliation that transcended calculable culpability, Takashi buried his wife.
Sick with cancer, sustaining the impact of the bomb, Takashi’s body gave in. By September, haemorrhaging incurably, he accepted that the end had come. He took leave of his children, who had been absent from Nagasaki on 9 August. While auto-diagnosing the rapid breathing that heralds final agony, an inspiration came to him to pray to Fr Maximilian Kolbe. We think of him now as the martyr of Auschwitz. To Takashi he was an old acquaintance he had x-rayed for tuberculosis. He did pray. To his colleagues’ astonishment his bleeding stopped. Takashi’s mother-in-law, having no idea what was going on in Takashi’s mind and heart, gave him water from a nearby Lourdes grotto, one that Fr Kolbe had built. Again, against the odds, Takashi had been snatched from death’s jaw. He knew it was for a purpose.
His life thenceforth carried a supernatural sheen all the more impressive for shining within resolute attachment to present, material reality. He devoted himself to the rebuilding of Nagasaki. He built a hut where his house had stood, determined to make this wasteland reflourish. He must live right there, he said, to contemplate the meaning of what had taken place. Of this contemplation he had occasion to speak on 23 November 1945, when Nagasaki’s bishop offered an open-air Mass for the dead. Well in advance, he had asked Takashi to speak on behalf of the laity. What could a man possibly say in such conditions, to people who had lost everything?
Three considerations merged in Takashi’s mind. The first was a story he had heard of girls from the convent school of Junshin, where Midori had taught. After the blast, horribly burnt, they were heard singing a hymn learnt at school: ‘Mary, Mother! I offer myself to you, body, soul, and spirit!’ This story conjured up for Takashi the image from Revelation of the Lamb, slaughtered for the world’s redemption, followed by white-robed, chanting virgins. He wrote a poem: ‘Maidens like white lilies/Consumed in the burning flames/As a whole burnt sacrifice/And they were singing.’ A second consideration was this: just as the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Supreme Council of War was in session in Tokyo. Many generals opposed surrender. The council was deadlocked. Talks continued throughout the day. At midnight, the emperor cut through, and declared capitulation. At midnight, likewise, Urakami’s smouldering cathedral burst into full flames and was consumed. The third consideration sprang from what Takashi had learnt from the descendants of the ‘hidden Christians’: that Urakami was irrigated by the blood of martyrs.
On that late-November day, at Mass, in the context of Christ’s saving sacrifice, among ruins, Takashi rose unkempt before his fellow citizens and asked:
Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?
Several in the congregation, appalled to hear the carnage spoken of as providence, responded with anger. Takashi, though, went on, broadening the perspective:
We are inheritors of Adam’s sin, of Cain’s sin. He killed his brother. Yes, we have forgotten we are God’s children. We have turned to idols and forgotten love. Hating one another, killing one another, joyfully killing one another! At last the evil and horrific conflict came to an end, but mere repentance was not enough for peace. We had to offer a stupendous sacrifice. […] Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted. We must walk the way of reparation, ridiculed, whipped, punished for our crimes, sweaty and bloody. But we can turn our mind’s eyes to Jesus carrying his Cross up the hill to Calvary. The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice. Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world, and religious freedom to Japan.
When he finished, the silence was as deep as after the explosion. People needed time to absorb the mere possibility of such a point of view. Takashi did not loudly canvas for it. But he sought to put it into comprehensible words. He turned to writing. After producing a scientific treatise on the condition of A-bomb victims, he adopted a different genre. This enterprise grew out of a madcap scheme to unearth a bell from the ruins of Urakami’s cathedral. The southern bell-tower had collapsed into itself. There was a chance its bell might still be intact. In Advent 1945, Takashi and a few friends dug for it. They uncovered it on Christmas Eve, set up a tripod of logs, hung the bell, then rang the Angelus at 6 p.m. The Christians of Urakami were amazed to hear this familiar, well-loved bell proclaim: ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ Takashi’s first popular book, The Bells of Nagasaki, was born of that sound. It stated that no human devilry can undermine God’s serene, redemptive plan.
First ridiculed as defeatist, Takashi was gradually hailed as an agent in the reconstruction of Japan. By the end of 1948 everyone was reading him. The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a film. He told survivors that they had work to do; that nothing is in vain; that realities impervious to the question, ‘Why?’, may release their secret asked, ‘What for?’ At the requiem in the ruins, he cited Job. Like Job, he had known unconscionable loss. He had looked into the abyss, yet refused to despair, affirming that God is surely present in his apparent absence. Perceiving light in darkness, he acquired a new sense of who God, the righteous and compassionate, is; thereby seeing — ‘my eyes shall see and not another’ — the emergence of a new heaven, a new earth. What Job glimpsed in figures, Takashi scrutinised in the light of the Word’s incarnation, a joyful but unsentimental mystery whose emblem is, and remains, the cross. He would say, ‘Let us climb the Mountain of the Beatitudes’, then remind himself and others that it arises out of the valley of the shadow of death. For unless ‘you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.’ Joy, marked by zany humour, radiated from him until he expired on 1 May 1950. Before he died, he used savings to have 1000 cherry-blossom trees planted in Urakami.
Takashi Nagai was no wonderful fool like Gaston or Lazzaro. He was a lucid, observant man. His holiness was not at odds with the world of terror and tears in which he lived; it articulated that world. That makes him an exemplar for our times of menace and wide-spread anguish. Not only do conceptual, cultural, and political structures fall around us like dominoes; we have lost a consensual understanding of what man is, so have trouble sustaining society. To proffer the Biblical vocation to holiness as a response to such a predicament amounts to more than saying that we must do our very best to be very, very good. It calls on us to remove our shoes and step, vulnerable, into the orbit of God’s fiery presence, to be cleansed by it in order to become that fire’s bearers. To respond to this call is risky. It may involve sacrifice. But it will burst barriers that, in a purely pragmatic existence, suffocate us. It will release breath, and joy. Each woman or man will live this process differently, but certain traits will be constant, criteria of authenticity. I think of Pascal’s famous mémorial, his testament to an illumination received after vehement searching, a statement so vital to him that he carried it on him always, having the text of it sewn into his clothes. The mémorial is dated 23 November 1653. That same day 292 years later, Takashi Nagai exegeted the conflagration of Nagasaki in a public address at a requiem. The coincidence will not have been lost on that assiduous reader of Pascal. The mémorial begins with a monosyllabic exclamation: Feu!, ’Fire!’ It goes on:
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Affection. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
‘I have come’, said our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!’ His aspiration concerns us directly. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we find this story of a conversation between two old friends:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become fire’.
This is the scandal and challenge presented to us, before which we must position ourselves with freedom. Let us be mindful, simply, that the answer we give does not concern ourselves alone. The call to each is given for the sake of all. The wholehearted Yes of one, be it hidden, can bring about the comfort of multitudes.
