This is the second post that features portions deleted from “Interpret Carefully: Balancing Caution and Hope in Responding to Shusaku Endo’s Novel Silence,” just published in Christ and Pop Culture.
(Incidentally, here’s the first “cutting-room floor” post.)
This was an extra conclusion, not needed for the article’s internal logic, but connecting to an anecdote I included at the beginning (which, alas, didn’t make the cut, either). You can see how these paragraphs, exciting though they were to compose, were good candidates for the “kill your darlings” treatment.
Here, then, the paragraphs attempting to vindicate the effort of sorting good from ill in Endo’s signature novel:
Why bother with such a reading? Why bother to seek vindication for truth when it seems so futile, when the interpreter’s arguments begin to sound so plausible to us? Here is where we consider Rogue One and the kakure kirishitan. In Episode IV of Star Wars, the “new hope” spoken of in the title is the resumption of the Jedi line–of a discipline that guides its practitioners to right use of a talent invisibly implanted within them–after the destruction of all the Jedi by Darth Vader. The genius of Rogue One, I argue, is in convincingly depicting the era when those who had heard of the Force, who were sensitive to it or were aligned with the benevolent goals of the Jedi, were scattered “like sheep without a shepherd.” Rebel factions protested each other, fought and undermined each other; lone Force sensitives marched into dangerous situations full of devotion to what they remembered but untutored and without well-founded hope. Goodness, hope, reverence do recur in such situations, and Rogue One bears compelling witness to the beauty and tragedy of those who achieve great things in such terrible times.
But finally, Rogue One describes a generation that lived and died without any well-founded hope that their desire to do good was anything but a futile refusal to acquiesce in evil. Under those circumstances, we see people who want good things justify terrible acts; we see leaders of men fatalistically embrace death, families torn apart, whole lives lived in alienation from what is best in humanity. It is beautiful, I suggest, when a voice tears through all that, determined to do at least one thing that is definitely good, and to reject futility; it is fitting that such a voice should become identified with the word “hope.” But consider those Christian villagers, well portrayed in Silence, who were forced to find whatever ways they could to maintain a partially-taught Christian faith over not just a generation, but over centuries of official persecution and separation from the teaching office of the Church. How could we not, like Jesus, be “moved to compassion” when we see them? How can we not long for their descendants to know the fulness of the faith they lived and died desiring? How can we not choose Garrpe’s way, and dive into the ocean, swimming as long as we can, to bolster their faith?
