Lent

Lent, the forty-day season of fasting and penance preceding Easter, appears in Shusaku Endo's Silence as a liturgical framework that the persecuted Japanese Christians maintain through their secret organization, even after all priests have been expelled or killed. The crypto-Christians of Tomogi, who have not seen a priest for six years, continue to observe the Church's calendar, including Lent, through the efforts of lay leaders known as Tossama, who teach the faithful the prayers and feasts. The novel's translator notes that the crypto-Christians who emerged in 1865, after Japan's reopening, still recalled the observance of Lent, demonstrating the season's deep embedding in their transmitted faith.

Observance Through the Secret Organization

The Christians of Tomogi, a fishing village near Nagasaki, have preserved their faith through a clandestine hierarchy. The Tossama, responsible for instructing the faithful in prayer and catechism, have made a calendar of all the Church's feasts, including Lent, and teach the faithful accordingly. Without priests, they cannot celebrate Mass during Lent, but they secretly gather in a house before a holy picture, reciting prayers in Latin—the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and others—and between prayers they chat about everyday matters, all while remaining ready to claim they are simply holding a meeting if officials burst in. This adaptation allows the season of penance to survive in a context where open worship is impossible.

The Season's Significance for Persecuted Believers

For the Japanese peasants, who work like beasts and die like beasts under crushing taxation and feudal oppression, Lent takes on a meaning tied to their earthly suffering. The priest Sebastian Rodrigues reflects that the peasants' faith gives them a hope beyond their miserable existence, a path to a Paradise where there will be no taxation or hard labor. The season of penance, with its emphasis on sacrifice and anticipation of Easter, resonates with their own lives of deprivation. When Rodrigues baptizes a baby in a charcoal hut, using a broken cup for holy water, he is struck by the realization that Christ died not for the good and beautiful but for the miserable and corrupt—a truth that Lent's focus on human frailty underscores.

Lent and the Silence of God

The season's themes of waiting and suffering are amplified by the novel's central crisis: the silence of God in the face of relentless persecution. As Mokichi and Ichizo are martyred by the water torture, bound to stakes as the tide rises, Rodrigues hears their hymn, "We're on our way to the temple of Paradise," a melody filled with dark sadness. The hymn, sung by Christians being led to execution, expresses their reliance on the promise of Paradise to endure a life too painful to bear. Lent, as a season of waiting for the Resurrection, mirrors this eschatological hope, but the novel questions whether God will break his silence. Rodrigues, tormented by the groans of Christians hanging in the pit, ultimately apostatizes, trampling on the fumie—an act he interprets as Christ himself commanding him to share in human pain. The season of Lent, with its call to penance and conversion, is thus inverted: Rodrigues' apostasy becomes, in his own understanding, a painful act of love, not a betrayal.

The Persistence of Lent in Crypto-Christian Memory

The translator's preface records that when Japan was reopened in 1865, the crypto-Christians came out of hiding, asking for the statue of Santa Maria, speaking about Christmas and Lent, and recalling the celibacy of the priests. This historical detail confirms that the observance of Lent, along with other liturgical seasons, was transmitted orally and through practice across generations of clandestine believers. In the novel, the Tossama's calendar and the secret gatherings ensure that Lent remains a living reality, even when the Church's visible structures have been destroyed. The season thus functions as a thread connecting the persecuted community to the universal Church, a marker of identity that persecution cannot erase.

Thematic Resonance: Lent as a Lens for the Novel's Central Conflicts

Lent's themes of sacrifice, penance, and waiting for divine intervention directly parallel the novel's exploration of faith under duress. The forty days of Lent echo the prolonged suffering of the Japanese Christians, who endure years of persecution without priests. The season's call to self-denial is mirrored in the peasants' willingness to give up their lives rather than trample on the sacred image. Yet the novel also interrogates the meaning of such sacrifice: when Rodrigues apostatizes to save the lives of Christians hanging in the pit, he performs what he believes is a greater act of love than martyrdom. Lent, traditionally a time of preparation for the celebration of Christ's resurrection, becomes in Silence a season of unresolved tension, where the silence of God challenges the very structure of Christian hope. The persistence of Lent among the crypto-Christians, however, testifies to a faith that endures even when the divine response remains hidden.