You raise some interesting question from the last letter that I sent you. This story is indeed an inspiring illustration of the nobility to which humanity can aspire and achieve. But it also points out how far away each of us is from that holiness which sees the world and creation in general as a place filled with God’s presence. What makes the testimony of this man so powerful is what he lived through and this authenticates every word that he speaks.

He was a physician who was channeled into becoming a radiologist, a field that was just beginning to develop in Japan in the 1930’s. Little was known about radiation in those days and the protection offered to physicians was woefully inadequate to protect them from the ravages of radiation. He came down with leukemia and his prognosis was that he had a very short span of life left and his life would end in extreme pain.

It was this man who, looking out of the university hospital saw the terrifying impact of the atomic bomb which demolished his home. He ran there because his wife, Midori, was there. But the home had been completely devastated and all that he saw were remains of some of his wife’s charred bones. He found the bones of his wife’s right hand clutching a rosary that had been partially melted from the heat of the explosion. He knew that his wife had died in prayer and this somehow made it a little bit easier to face up to her death. He saw his medals he got for serving in the Japanese army, the medals now melted into blobs of distorted metal, showing what their real value was – none.

He came back, a little later with his two children, a daughter and a son, who had been moved into the country to stay with their grandmother and this is what saved them from certain death. He gathered the remains of Midori’s bones into a bucket to bring for burial. And he made sure that his wife received a proper Christian burial.

This man, when he speaks, he speaks from the experiences that life threw at him and he came through with a faith invincible to everything that evil could test him with. It is his life that validates his words and makes them worth listening to. He personifies what is said of saints – they honor and love all of God’s creation including what we sometimes see as mistakes, as repulsive, as something denying the existence of God.

I must confess to you that I am so far away from this faith that I find it hard to comprehend what people live through and come away even stronger in their belief.

It is touching to read the words that he leaves for his children because he knew that they would soon become orphans. He is speaking like Christ in the final discourses in the Gospel of John. ‘My death will leave you orphans, vulnerable and alone in the world. You will weep. Yes, you might even weep your hearts out, and that will be good – provided you weep before your Father in heaven. We have it on the authority of His Son, and I have experienced the truth of it personally: Happy are those who weep, for they shall be comforted. Spill your tears before him, and he will always dry them. That is the Sermon on the Mount, the place where you can find all the answers.

Right now, all I have to leave you in the way of possessions is this hut. Ah! But Jesus tells us to love our eternal selves rather than our material possessions. Yes, each of us is a child of the Heavenly Father! That gives us tremendous worth. Do you realize that you are of more worth in your Father’s eyes than that beautiful star that keeps our earth alive, the sun?

Love everyone and trust in his Providence, and you will find peace. I have tried it and can assure you it is so. But persevere! He is fitting us for eternal companionship with him and our loved ones in heaven. When your mother died, your bluebird of happiness, alas, flew away. You will not find your bluebird, again, except in heaven.’

One afternoon his daughter was late coming home from school. She came in and placed a cup before him. ‘What is it?’ he asked. Kayano replied that it was something new that they had received at school and it was so good that she wanted to bring for her ailing father so that he would feel better. It was pineapple juice that she came close to spilling but carefully and slowly walked home to share with her father.

When this physician was close to death in 1951, it became clear what he had gone through in terms of physical suffering. From Shintoism he had traveled the road to conversion and became a catholic on the support and urgings of his wife Midori. Until his death he kept writing books and answering letters in spite of the heavy physical cost that this demanded of him. Holy men, and women, often met God in the desert, the most unpromising of terrains. It was precisely in a nuclear desert, darkened by a nuclear mushroom, that this radiologist tasted God’s closeness and contemplation. To many, this nuclear symbol, the radioactive cloud, was a sign calling for despair but for him, it spoke of the depth of friendship with God. This was a sign of another Exodus leading into redemptive peace. He practises a theology born of cruel and all-encompassing suffering which brings conversion of the heart. His becomes a prophetic voice where the flames of atomic fission were transformed into a theophany.

Much more can be written but I want to concentrate on three points. The first is that we often see death as the ultimate evil and this is true to the extent that he who would destroy creation uses death and the threat of death as his ultimate weapon so that we will acquiesce to his will. This sufferer of the atomic bomb shows through his life and his writings that death is not the ultimate victor – it has been dealt with and destroyed by Christ – who transformed it into a passover, a passage to a fuller eternal life. The empirical evidence of people dying seems to challenge this but through the life of saints we do see that it is goodness that has the final word and not evil and death.

‘Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don’t understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. Unless you have looked into the eyes of menacing death, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.’ This is what makes the testimony of this physician so powerful – it is spoken through the experience of life and not merely as a theoretical statement.

The second point that I want to make to you, because you have indicated that you feel this way, is to see in what is said in Church services, in religious writings is merely a metaphorical description divorced from reality. I have already tried to address this in some of the earlier letters but this is such a difficult point to bring across that it bears repetition. But I think a lot of us display our lack of faith in not taking the words of our faith seriously because lurking in the background is the idea that somehow they are too good to be true. We have been fooled so many times that we don’t dare to believe because the thought lurks in our subconscious – all of earth is just one big cemetery and all these stories are intended only to comfort us, but they are not really true. That is why we listen so attentively to what science supposedly says because here, we feel a stamp of authenticity.

And the last point that I want to make, and this comes through in the sermon we read earlier, is that there is a truly deep mystery in the creation project of God. Through our freedom, which He grants us because He loves us, He calls on us to join Him in completing this project. In a sense, strange as it may sound, He is ‘dependent’ on us to see that creation comes into what it was intended for. We have a reference to it already in Mary’s acceptance to bear the Word. She could have said no and stymied God’s plans. The Christians of Nagasaki contributed to the creation project by becoming ‘the lamb without blemish’ which would be immolated to save the lives of millions of others and would bring the end of war. Christ tells us that as he suffered so will we – we, as St. Paul says, complete Christ’s suffering. It is this terrible realization that gives meaning and purpose to suffering undergone in this world. This is difficult to comprehend by the brain, but it can be understood by the heart. Indeed, the love of God is ‘terrible’ but without it we end up in the void which brings us into the complete nothingness of non-existence.

The name of the physician was Takashi Nagai, the Saint of Nagasaki.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas