Columban Fr Seamus Cullen has spent more than 40 years as a missionary in Japan. He shares with us how working in Japan has enriched him personally and also how Japanese culture can contribute to the wider Church.
The majority of the small group of us Columbans now left in Japan have been appointed to other regions for a period, and have then been re-appointed to Japan. We were happy to return to Japan but maybe we have never spelled out for ourselves why we wanted to continue to be there. I would like to put words now on what being on mission in Japan has done for me.
It is no exaggeration to say that with people in Japan I experienced an incarnation of God that resonates with God in me. It resonates with me in many different ways, from the ease with which the Japanese people relate to the contemplative dimension of spirituality, to the ordinary commonplace culture of bowing to each other that is the usual form of greeting.
That the Japanese have successfully resisted the advent of Christianity is significant. Certainly no effort has been spared to establish the Catholic Church in Japan and the basic church structure has long been in place. But, the prospect of that church’s burgeoning is rather bleak. I am now inclined to make the following analogy when I think of the commonly held attitude to missionary work in Japan.
For centuries God had prepared and nurtured the soil of Japan, through the various religions (Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucianism). Then the Christian missionaries came along and, figuratively, spread a slab of concrete over this rich soil and sowed the seeds of Christianity on this concrete. Our own contact with Buddhism and Shintoism was inescapable and inevitable, but generally it was not a very positive thing. I recall Columban John Crowe’s lamenting, just before he died, how he had been forbidden to attend the funeral of a Buddhist friend. 
In Japan the Church is seen as a teaching organisation. I think it is this basic thinking that needs to change. The Church needs to facilitate the experience of God, instead of teaching about God. This is essentially what Zen meditation is about. It is contained in the phrase from Isaiah which says, “Be still and know that I am God”. 'Knowing' in the Bible means 'Becoming one with'. It is Japan which has taught me that the Gospel incarnate in me is what resonates with other people, and enables them to discover God incarnate in them, and that they are made in the image and likeness of God.
Japan, like China, is an ancient culture. Japan is our closest contact with our original mission field in China. We have been enriched enormously by our contact with Japan. In the West, we used to have a tradition of contemplation. This died and was effectively replaced with an exclusively rational perspective on reality. This resulted in a culture which saw the human being’s capacity to rationalise and analyse as his/ her only way of knowing. The ability to know through contemplation was no longer recognised, and spiritual realities were dismissed as things that belonged in a world that did not exist.
I blush now when I remember thinking gleefully that the Japanese people were inferior, because rational, logical thinking was beyond them. The Westerner was superior because abstract thinking was his or her forte. How wrong I was! Why didn’t I see that the very use of Chinese characters, which are originally pictures or ideograms, reflects a culture which sees the whole of reality and everything in it, without interpreting it, or presuming to contain it in one way or another? The Chinese character for God is a classic example; it is a symbol of an altar and of lightning. The altar depicts the attitude of worship and adoration. The lightning icon reflects reverential fear. Both are dispositions to be found in the person who has experienced God. The character does not presume to say anything about God. It is only the person who has not experienced God who would be so presumptuous.
When Fr William Johnston S.J. said that the time has come for the East to share its treasures with the West, it was this contemplative attitude to which he was referring. We in Japan have discovered this and would like to share it with the rest of the world. This is a distinctive gift, one not readily found in China, a gift from Japanese culture to the world that badly needs it.
When Theologian Karl Rahner wrote that the Christian of the future must needs be a contemplative, he was describing the kind of church that is trying to be born. Japan has the capacity to be one of the main sources of guidance for the contemplative church that the world needs so badly.
Columban Fr Seamus Cullen has been a missionary in Japan since 1967.
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LISTEN TO: What being a missionary in Japan has done for me (Duration: 6:06mins. MP3, 2.78MB) |