Silence and Beauty Quotes

“Our failure is not that we chose earth over heaven: it is that we fail to see the divine in the earth, already active and working, pouring forth grace and spilling glory into our lives. Artists, whether they are professed believers or not, tap into this grace and glory. There is a "terrible beauty" operating throughout creation. If Christ announced his postresurrection reality into the darkness, even into hell, as the Bible and Christian catechism suggests, then, as theologian Abraham Kuyper put it, there is not one inch of earth that Christ does not call "Mine!”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“According to Flaubert, the artist inhabits his or her work as God does: present everywhere, but visible nowhere.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“The surface of my “slow art” is prismatic, so at first glance the malachite surface looks green. But if the eye is allowed to linger on the surface—it usually takes ten minutes for the eye to adjust—the observer can begin to see the rainbow created by layer upon layer of broken shards of minerals. Such a contemplative experience can be a deep sensory journey toward wisdom. Willingness to spend time truly seeing can change how we view the world, moving us away from our fast-food culture of superficially scanning what we see and becoming surfeited with images that do not delve below the surface.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“If we care to know how deep the suffering of Christ goes—and how vast and even violent is the restoration process through Christ’s suffering—then we had better start with knowing the dark, cruel reality of the fallen world. If we care to embrace hope despite what encompasses us, the impossibility of life and the inevitability of death, then we must embrace a vision that will endure beyond our failures. We should not journey toward a world in which”solutions” to the “problems” are sought, but a world that acknowledges the possibility of the existence of grace beyond even the greatest of traumas, the Ground-Zero realities of our lives.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“Japanese often use the expression shikata-ga-nai (there is nothing you can do) as a fatalistic response to a given circumstance. They assume that circumstance is all there is; they face that shikata-ga-nai with stoic resignation. But the Christian God offers a reality far greater, a possibility of the infinite breaking through, even though the fallen world is cursed and operates within the limitations of a natural, closed mechanism.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“When we cross borders culturally, we experience some alienation from our own culture and gain an objective perspective toward our own culture at the same time. A bicultural individual comes to identify home as a culture outside his or her original identity, and may vacillate in commitment and loyalty to both cultures.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“Art reveals the power of the intuitive, capturing the reality hiding beneath the culture. The”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“One might say that Japanese faith developed as negative space around the forbidden faith of Christianity. So while the Tokugawa era successfully purged Christians from Japan, an unanticipated outcome was that in banning Christianity they created an imprint of it, a negative space within culture. In a culture that honors the hidden, the weak and the unspoken, Christianity became a hidden reality of Japanese culture.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“Silence is a profoundly missional novel, despite the fact that it describes the failures of faith. Its mission is not about triumphantly regarding the island of Japan as an imperialistic exploit; rather, it is the mission of entering deeply into the psyche of Japanese hearts struggling with trauma. By doing so, Endo captures the possibility that the good news of the Bible can heal that trauma and provide a way for Japanese to be truly liberated.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering