Jesus leaving the court, I just love this picture by Doré. White clothes, untainted by the public gaze, Barabbas, the felon, is released and Jesus’ sentence is set. Determined to die, he gazes at the phenomenon before him faster than he can think or ponder.
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!” Mark 11:10
As a child, I wanted to wipe the dirt from Jesus’ face as he walked down the hill of Golgotha. That may have been my first contact with Jesus in my mind’s eye. I was incapable of understanding the human heart. I was afraid I wouldn’t understand the human heart, and maybe I still don’t. But when people love me, I answer them, and when I love them, I can’t stop myself. Feelings of emotional brokenness were very real. I could only love others ( love of one’s neighbors.), people misunderstood my defects as kindness.
So I was building reason.I went to England for psychology, I do not understand people’s minds, I do not see people subjectively. Because I have no preconceptions, through analysis I can see what others want. I thought I could use this advantage to analyse calmly.
Love, indeed this word had cultivated my life. I don’t know if people love me or not because I don’t know anything about them. Without feeling that I wanted to be loved by others, I focused on loving. If the object to be loved does not exist, the love is lost. Love with a destination, that’s what I wanted. I have it now. From friendship, to abandonment, to love, to devotion, to family love, I was rational while I was in love, but when the instinct of desire entered the picture, I went mad. This has been my weakness and will continue to be so.
People are always in a labyrinth of love. The annual resurrection of Jesus is a pause in the labyrinth. Even if we celebrate Easter this year, we will have to suffer again in our lifetime. Let’s celebrate it again this year.
Why are the words of Jesus so haunting to me? The soul is seeking, rising, there is Jesus.For a moment, in my dreams, I run to wipe the dirt from his face. Always I am a child.
Then I fall asleep again and summer comes. And one day the real death will come.
Until then, enjoy life, spring, summer, autumn, winter.
It would be a dizzying abyss for man to face, and his face reflected in the abyss would clearly show the ugliness of his ego. However, sadly, one does not see one's own face reflected in the depths at such a time.
Takehiko Fukunaga,
Attempt at Love
Whether the end of the profound is an abyss, I don’t think it can be said so. The spirit can be cut down and the abyss can be simulated by being tortured by people with shallow ideas.
Jesus Christ did not only deal with the wise Pharisees. He had his share of abuse from idiots. However, the audience still finds in Jesus an abyss. Language and imagery, whether imagery becomes language or language takes on imagery, has always been a constant for me, but the writer loves language at the very least. The writer loves language at the very least, and waits to be discovered by Image.
Otherwise, it will not be understood by others. If others do not understand not only the language but also the image, it is meaningless.
Learning to love someone makes an abyss realised. This may be a Greek philosophical aion, perhaps, but love is a strong thing. And yet, it is also weak. It is the quality of the person who, after loving another person as if he or she were a part of his or her body, has become a part of him/her, and who, when becoming another person at a distance, becomes either the devil or the good Samaritan. Dreaming of the abyss is shaken by the other, but it is the quality of the person who holds the image.
As I said last time, it is difficult to understand why it is “consent” for a Catholic priest to hold a woman for any reason whatsoever. By their ” Ordination oaths” they are supposedly forbidden to give consent, which is a betrayal of God.I am a moderate and would not have a problem with it if the woman had “love”.
However, I only pursued this issue for a period of time because it seemed to me that there was no “love” involved. I know the name and face of the priest concerned, but I will not divulge it. I will probably take it to my grave. In my view, even if the facts are agreed, if the woman objects, the priest should resign. Even if the woman is paranoid, I believe it is retribution for breaking God’s vows. Under Japanese law, a man and a woman in a locked room can certainly be considered to have consented to sex, but in this case the woman enters with the understanding that she is Catholic and the priest is in no position to do so.
I don’t know the facts as I left this interview in the middle of the day, but my only wish was to see clearly the demand for the resignation of this priest. But to do so would require a ” wide-scale ” attack on Catholicism. But to do so would require a “widespread” attack on Catholics, for that is what a revolution is, and people will not act otherwise.
As a journalist, I was not prepared for that. I could not prepare myself as a journalist because I had sisters and bishops whom I trusted. I wonder if this priest has ever felt the cruelty of having to attack this ” wide scale”. I would like to ask this with a prayer.
In closing, I would like to explain why I have quoted the abyss in Takehiko Fukunaga’s book, because it is an apt description.
This quote was about love between a man and a woman, but the abyss itself makes no such distinction.
It is often questioned why so many of these issues remain in Catholicism, a question that is easily dismissed as “blind faith”. In fact, blind faith does exist. Some of them focus on the “abyss”.
Some of us do. I am one of them. Perhaps at least those Christians who understand the issue are looking at the abyss. After Jesus cried out ēli ēli lemā sabachthani (My God, my God, Why have You abandoned me?) on the eve of his crucifixion, why was God silent?It was the theologian Fr. Mikio Wada who asked this question. He spoke of the abyss. He spoke of an abyss, deeper than Freud’s unconscious or Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the abyss. If you go through it slowly，
It was the theologian Father Mikio Wada who asked this. He spoke of the abyss. He spoke of an abyss, deeper than Freud’s unconscious or Jung’s collective unconscious. It is the abyss. If you go through it slowly
If you experience it slowly, you will see it as a big vortex.
An abyss is not necessarily a sublime place. Nietzsche has his abysses.
I have my own abyss. There is no criterion for whose abyss is greater. The abyss is the common human God, where the values of love and death also lie. Takehiko went on to say that egoism is also reflected. So it is. If we focus on the abyss, we can indeed leave the injustice and suffering of the same community as our own abyss. Each of us has our own feelings, our own vision. We love even the darkness, that is what makes us human. Yes, man is incapable of facing egoism. That is why it is called blind faith, and believers may be guilty of it.
We must be aware, even if only a little, of what is right and what we should be, after all, following the love of Jesus.
I hope you will continue to make decisions, not only in this case, but also in the future.
The victim, as you can see from the article, tried to return to the church many times.
The victim, as you can see from the article, tried to return to the church many times. He has not been understood there and has suffered secondary and tertiary damage in the church.
Victims are not only hurt by a definite accident or incident. They are also hurt by the society that surrounds them.
They are also hurt by the society that surrounds them. If you are a Christian, you should be a little more concerned.
So why are we so widely attacked? I want you to think deeply about why we have been attacked on a wide scale.
Certainly the abyss is important.
But it is a mortal sin for a Christian not to confront egoism.
Death is the end of human life, the “Sein zum Tod”, Heidegger’s way of saying that we are on our way to death. What constitutes death has been debated for centuries, and science has decided that it begins with brain death. In Japan, the first indication of brain death began on 28 February 1999. In Japan, this is limited to cases where a legal determination of brain death has been made for organ donation. A person is not legally brain dead if they are considered clinically brain dead but do not donate their organs. While we are conscious, we can only dream about the reality of death. In “La Mori”, Maeterlinck violates the realm of the occult and leaves us with a reflection on our own near-death experience and death, which cannot be measured by the consciousness of death. The literary world actually deals more with death than with love. The most common combination is probably that of ‘love’ and ‘death’.
The story centres on a love triangle in which the protagonist of Takehiko Fukunaga’s “Isle of the Dead“, an aspiring writer, falls in love with two women, Ayako Aimi and Motoko Moegi, and cannot choose between them.
The story is structured around the atomic bomb, the idea of death and the idealism of the artist. Their story lives fantastically as a literary world, with the fact that life has gone mad. Fukunaga’s world on the ”Isle of the Dead” is like the dissociative symptoms of trauma in our time. Motoko has lived her inner time as a result of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Epoché or Abstraction her very existence in a phenomenological way. What she touches is always unfeeling. Ayako has eloped with a lover in the past, but was abandoned and attempted suicide. She lives her inner time trapped by the end of her love. However, in the chapter of the monologue “K”, the man who abandoned her lover, the author really writes about a parallel phenomenon, that is, the fact that he really loved Ayako and left her, and that they could not overlap.
In this story, it is necessary to arrange the structure of the story: the time of Kronos (Saturn), which proceeds linearly with the main character, the chapter of Kronos’ remembrance, the characters told by Kronos, Motoko’s monologue, and a man’s monologue. There, the sorrow of being left behind as people change from post-war to high economic growth is depicted. Kronos is the God of Time, and in Greek mythology, the parent of Zeus. There are two kinds of time, the weight of Kronos and the opportunity of Kairos.
While the living have much to think and say, the dead are silent in the face of the mystery of the soul.
This story is an intersection of objective tense and inner world. And the atomic bomb is represented as “Saturn” (a coterminous setting in the story). Kronos is the Greek word for Saturn. I don’t know if the author intended it, but it also has an astrological meaning (Saturn in transit brings death to many). The narrative, which has told us so much and has been winding down, comes to an end with the suicides of Motoko and Ayako. In the face of death, the living are transformed into thought forms. Despite this, the illusion of the living is still present in the life of the aspiring writer Iiba, who becomes a proxy for the wounds left by the atomic bombing on the Japanese people, and for the two women whose souls are wasting away, no matter how high the economic growth of the Japan. It seems as if the only way for the illusion of the living to have any substance is to write about it. We are living in the face of death. The moment we are alive is constantly disappearing and being renewed. Mortality was previously an illusion, a dream. But to witness the death of a loved one gives such grief that it makes the living illusory. The glory and shadow of death are so strong. Without love, the living – yes, the writer Takehiko Fukunaga’s ‘attempts at love’, Agape and Eros (Christian interpretations of the Greek) – are eclipsed by the cruelty of the world if love is lost.
Well, then," "what about me? "What am I then, he mutters to himself. We are alienated from the dead, and he stands there now, futile. Is it true that life is nothing but a vain effort? Is it all just an empty void? As he reflects on this, the thick emptiness that covers the canopy gradually fades away, just as the clouds that have burned out on the distant horizon fade away (just as in a dream).
Then his consciousness is completely and noiselessly swallowed up by it.
(Takehiko Fukunaga, Isle of the Dead )
He (the protagonist) then ends up discovering through the novel the “actuation of death”, the materialisation of the living through the speaking of the living as thought bodies. Each time this happens, Japan decides to keep alive the “death” that has been left behind. As a sign that even after such misfortunes, people can still live with love knocking against love.
A ray of light shone out of the dark window in which he was standing, like an awakening, drawing a clear glow.
A ray of light shone in.
(Takehiko Fukunaga, Isle of the Dead)
Love makes the heart grow fonder, but it also makes it sadder. Something that is not a big deal to someone else can be seen as a disgrace to the person you love. I understand the importance of being in love, but I don’t like it very much. I don’t like it, but I can’t help opening my heart to someone unexpectedly. It’s human fate.
Love is the kind of love that turns childish in the smallest of ways. When you wait for your partner to come home, when you talk to （him/her） at certain times of the day, the emptiness you feel when you lose him/her is terrible. You don’t feel lonely because of a discrepancy in values, which is normally nothing. Human beings are of relative value, so things that are not important to others become more important when it comes to love. It takes me a long time to heal from that. As I grew older, my immunity and resistance to disease gradually weakened, and I began to suffer from fevers and illnesses. At that time, I guess I opened my heart without realizing it.
In love, we know each other’s hideousness. It is unavoidable. Where you can forgive and improve is not something that can be calculated. If we can love the other person’s soul as agape, even if we have to say a terrible goodbye in the end, then God will forgive us a little.
A love that has matured over a long period of time will have less of the passion of a novel or drama. There is a high tendency to see the lack of sex between couples as a problem, but I think this is a mistake. If you don’t need to know your partner to have sex, and if you can forgive everything about your partner, you won’t feel ashamed to take off your clothes. It is because you don’t know the person that you can take off your clothes, isn’t it? You need skin to fill the emptiness. If you don’t want pleasure, it’s a sign that the emptiness is gone. It’s not the end of the world.
It is true that some marriages are cold. But if you can’t leave your partner, if you are angry with （him/her） but not with you, if you love him/her that much, you have to respect that.
There is a tendency to say that love is better than romance, and I think that love is not inferior to romance.
Even if love sparks for a moment and then cools down, a crystal remains.
Whether you can find it or throw it away will change your life.
One day we will grow old.
And one day death will come.
We may have many unfulfilled loves
Or live with the love you have matured
You can live as you like.
The soul may sing, the spirit may be sick
The soul always tries to be strong.
If only we knew that.
The light will find you.
If you’re Catholic, you’re going to get a lot of flak.
The name Ishmael is not common in the Christian world. It seems to be treated as a rather odious name.
It seems to be treated as the name of an Old Testament character, but in Herman Melville’s The White Whale, the narrator, who seems to be the protagonist, says
“Call me Ishmael”, begins with “Let my name be Ishmael”.
The White Whale seems to be very important for Nobel Prize winners in literature and international writers, many of whom try to analyse this difficult novel. Even if you are not a literary person, the origin of Starbucks is partly based on the name of this white whale character. (XO Starbuck, 1st class)
In the Old Testament, Abraham’s (Abram’s) wife, who was 75 years old and therefore unable to bear children, brought a young slave woman, Hagar, to her husband and impregnated her with a child.
Sarah ran away when Hagar became an obstacle and was treated harshly. However, she met an angel of the Lord at a spring in the wilderness and was told to return to her master. He told her to name her unborn child Ishmael and that he would be her brother’s enemy. (Genesis: Chapter 16)
An older Sarah, whose moon thing is long gone, is pregnant (Genesis: chapter 18) The child Sarah carried safely through childbirth and was named Isaac (Genesis: chapter 21). Sarah tried again to drive out Hagar and Ishmael, claiming that Ishmael was making fun of her son Isaac. This was told to Abraham and the angel of the Lord told him to do as Sarah said. Abraham gave Hagar a leather water pouch and Hagar and Ishmael were left to wander in the wilderness (desert). When the water runs out, Ishmael cries out before his death and is saved by the angel of the Lord.
As the son of iniquity and the enemy of his brothers, a name that has never made a good impression throughout its long history.
It has spread mainly in the Christian world, with the exception of the Muslim world.
In White Whale, as in the Old Testament, the protagonist Ishmael (we don’t know if that’s really his name) miraculously survives, and the divine trials and blessings he undergoes are cast in a light that is unimaginable to those who know what the Bible means.
The white whale (Moby-Dick), called the devil by the sailors, is found off the coast of Japan, a white whale that has been there for a long time but has never shown itself. A terrible battle to the death ensues. Captain Ahab and the entire crew are pulled into the white whale. In an epilogue, we are told that Ishmael miraculously survived, changing from first-person to third-person perspective. In ancient times, whales and fish were thought to be monosexual animals with only one sex. Even Aristotle thought so. According to ancient Babylonian legend, in the first year of the earth’s creation, Oannes, the god of wisdom, appeared on land in the form of a fish and gave knowledge to mankind. The Indian god Vishnu is said to have incarnated as a fish and saved the founders of modern mankind from a flood. A fish sacrament existed in Syrian goddess rituals. This custom derives from the idea that salvation is seen in fish as a symbol of resurrection.
In the Old Testament, in the Book of Jonah, the prophet Jonah is famous for rebelling against God. This is because God tells him to love his enemies.
In the book of Jonah, the prophet is portrayed as a criminal and the pagan sailor as a humble being. Jonah refused to go to Nineveh, which he hated, and fled to the boat of the pagans. The storm was so bad that when the sailors tried to find the cause of it, they thought it was Jonah. Jonah said he could throw himself into the sea under the guise of self-sacrifice. This was because he did not want to go to Nineveh. So the sailors threw Jonah into the sea and apologised to God. There was a big fish waiting for him as a grave that God had made possible. The fish swallowed Jonah and he lived in it, not in the grave. When Jonah apologised to God, God made him spit out of the fish. Jonah went to Nineveh as God had commanded, saying that after 40 days Nineveh would be destroyed. Why did Jonah refuse to go to Nineveh?
Because God loves Nineveh, his enemy. God asked. You are angry, but is this right?” (Jonah 4:4).
God healed Jonah by stretching out a ‘sesame tree’ for shade. Jonah was happy with this for a time, but what did God think the next time he let insects crawl up the tree and kill it? Jonah became angry again. So God said. You have not even bothered to take care of the tree or to work at it, and when it withers you spare it. Why will I not spare this great city of Nineveh? (Jonah 4:4).
The Lord makes man like a fish in the sea (Habakkuk 1:14), and the prophet Habakkuk also laments his dissatisfaction with God, but in the biblical world the fish is deeply connected to God, and the belly of the fish is the abyss, the space between life and death.
The sequence of letters in Ichthys, representing the fish, is.Ichthys by joining the initials Jesus (Iesous) Christos Theou Hyios Soter. The symbolism took on more meaning: ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Redeemer.’
The writer Herman Melville was born into a wealthy family, but from the age of 11 his family fell apart and his father died. He was poor and got a job on a whaling ship. This is the model for The White Whale.
The work, which was suppressed by Puritan public opinion and not appreciated at the time because it was named after a child of iniquity, was eventually appreciated.
The story of the white whale itself is simple, but getting into the biology of the whale and the structure of the story is not. This is also reflected in the fact that the whales are only encountered a few times, which is tedious.
Which brings us back to the white whale.
While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”
The importance of the letter ‘H’ is conveyed at the beginning of the book: “While you take it in hand to educate others and try to tell them what the whale (whale-fish) is called, we, in our ignorance, omit the important letter H, and you deliver what is not true”. It is not clear at this point whether this is a map or a code in the life-and-death, or rather divine, destiny of the future. Different races share the vengeance and destiny of a captain. The whale, which becomes a great sea monster, is created by God, as in Genesis 1:21. It may be a novel with everything symbolic, like an order in a bible, but it’s also an everyday life of a working man, challenging himself but engulfed by a stormy sea. There are chapters and chapters of daily life that bore the reader, but the people themselves are always exhausted just trying to survive the day. In the epilogue, the Old Testament’s Job,
And I only escaped alone to tell you, quoted. What scene was this?
In the first chapter of the Book of Job, Job’s servant tells him that his territory has suddenly been attacked and he has fled to tell Job. All this in one quotation.
Does it not sum up the state of mind of Ishmael, the hero of Melvilu? Even if we fight to the death in the great sea, what remains is no different from what we fought for on land. What God has given and created strikes you like a demon. That is the daily toil. It is the scholars and drinkers who enjoy the cryptanalysis of the letter “H”, who try to make it more beautiful than it is. No matter how much we try to explain it in biology, in the end it cannot be fully explained.
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for a timid untravelled man to try to comprehend this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (AmazonClassics Edition).Chapter103
My interpretation is that the meaning of the acronym ‘H’ can be summed up here. We don’t try to understand what seafarers go through.
Of course, we write that it hurts, but unless we have experienced it, we cannot feel the pain. The further away we get from a working environment like a whaling ship, the more the pain becomes a fairy tale. But fiction is not non-fiction, so there is absolutely no need to convey pain. Melville’s experience is now a story.
When a similar situation arises, some scholar or influencer will again tell us to learn from the white whale, as if they know what they’re talking about.
It is still the white whale, swimming without its stupidity and ridiculousness. A fate that is unknowable, it has existed like man since the creation of God, but under the surface, spinning knowledge with words, the whale has sometimes been responsible for its fate. Whales are not like natural disasters.
Man challenges and attacks them. We too as perpetrators, apart from natural disasters, have challenged （or People still challenge them.) such beings with an emotional one, such as revenge.
It would be a symbol of that.
It is true that when we miraculously come back alive from the rough seas of fate, we sometimes rejoice as if we were turning over our palms to God’s grace, but we cannot understand the ‘white whale’ with that emotion. You can’t grasp it, and that’s the point. Grace, coming back alive, it is indeed important to rejoice, but it is also important not to forget the storm.
While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (AmazonClassics Edition) .Chapter103
Fr. Kabundi Honoré’ ” Biblical Real image of Angels”
The meaning of my love for the Bible
①Reading the Bible makes us aware of various psychological functions. Whether this is a figment of our imagination or an archaeological fact, we experience rational (thoughts and feelings) and irrational (sensations and intuition) functions before the factual conclusion. The proposal of psychological functions is based on C. G. Jung, but those of us for whom Christianity is not the state religion will first judge whether we like the story or not (feelings). Next, we will reach to capture the system of the Bible (feeling). Then we analyses the content (thoughts), and intuitively we may temporarily try to explain the nature of Adam and Eve in Genesis, for example, and talk passionately about why women suffer. There are many choices: to repeat it again and again with changing thoughts, or to stop reading it because you don’t like it; but the person who does not let go of the Bible connects the experience of the outer world to the growth of the inner world. Following Jesus is when we reach out from our built-up inner world to the outer world.
It is service. It is love. It is evangelization.
At the same time, reading the biblical world requires a dynamic of imagination. Whether imaginary, dreamy or pictorial, what is clear is that there are no glib metaphors in the Bible. Many obstacles lie in the way of faith. This is because people’s psychological functions are processed differently from person to person, whether they become occultists and cults or exemplary Christians like Edith Stein.
The theologian Balthasar declared Angels as Mirrors of the Human. It is the way of theology. I leave behind those who dismiss this as pictorial. The Catholic Catechism states that angels are Messengers. As I wrote above, angels do not appear to people whose inner world is clouded. Angels play an important role in proving that one’s inner world is not clouded. Throughout history, poets and writers have attempted to return to nature through various poetic inspirations, which have also preceded philosophy and psychology. If not for German mysticism, philosophy would not have been derived until the present day. The Bible is a necessary part of the history of human wisdom, and we must not forget that there are still unknowns. It is important to read it again and again, to repeat its psychological functions and to grasp how it moves towards the existence of the world.
② I love angels first of all because as a feeling I find them beautiful, and because intuitively they do not seem to be the product of a pictorial imagination. Although I have been thinking about how to express and prove this sense and intuition for a long time, angels have not been dealt with much even in Catholicism; in 2018 the Pope talked about angels, but for a while they did not seem to be a topic of conversation in Japan. So I gradually gave up the pursuit of angels.
Recently, I came across a good book.
③Fr. Kabundi Honoré’sbook ” Biblical Real image of Angels” was published by the Orient Institute of Religion. I had given up the pursuit of angels. The fog that had been clouding the mirror seemed to have lifted. The mirror shone with light.
I found it fortunate and opportune that Father was living in Japan, so I contacted him. He was very kind and told me why he had written this book. He told me that he had been travelling around Japan with his silent retreats, communing with the faithful and felt the need to draw their attention to the presence and work of the angels in order to help them develop their spirituality.
Father Honoré’s book was both scholarly and beautifully written, as if the Holy Spirit were present in the words.
Book index
Ⅰ:Angels created by God
Ⅱ:The Angelic Ranks
Ⅲ:Exceptional angels mentioned in the Bible
Ⅳ:The appearance of angels
Ⅴ:Angels’ sins and destiny
Ⅵ:Demonic means of control over man
Ⅶ:Following the angels in the spiritual life
This work is wonderful because it includes the angels of the Old Testament book of Daniel, which is not often explained by Catholics. It is important to note that angels do not float, but fly. The popular non-biblical view of angels equates angels with God and does not understand angels as floating messengers. By biblical, I mean that angels have a purpose. Flight is having a purpose. This book is a very clear explanation of the whole of biblical angels and the purpose for which they appear.
The book not only deepens our spirituality, but the stories of angels in the Bible, which are mystical in their own right, can be used to interpret the images of angels left behind by many great writers. For example, even the works of Balzac, Rilke and Shelley, who professed to be non-Catholic, often drew on the Bible for their angelic attributes. The unity and difference between the love we seek and the love angels give, the fact that angels are not gendered, the dynamism of people’s imagination and creation.
Only when people contemplate can the mystery live on. How does it happen that the dreaming of man coincides with the works of God? It is to trace what the flight of angels is like.
It might be to realize “the reflection of the purest thing” (André Paul Guillaume Gide)
It is only through faith that forgetfulness can become a mystery to accumulated memories, experiences and paradoxes.
Shakespeare said: “All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.”The stage is full of tragedy, comedy, folly, despair and cruelty. Nothing in his work has ever been made happy by breaking a biblical commandment. Hamlet completely loses his reason and even loses his beloved Ophelia to madness. Shakespeare could not have created such a tragedy without the foundation of the Bible and faith. He was well aware of the retribution brought about by the god of the script. A life that does not go mad like Hamlet’s is an angel’s inner mirror (Balthazar).
Tragedy repeats itself, but the life God has given us in this world can be made meaningful through agape and gratitude. That is certain. Simply writing about human hatred does not capture the essence of the story. In order to find the divine retribution and miracles, we need to feel our own heat through faith.
To do this, we need to know the angels better. Angels are complicated when it comes to explaining their relationship to the Trinity, but this labyrinth is the purest space of existence. Because it is pure, there are fallen angels. Even the angels let us know that we are losing the light.
It is rare to find a book so dedicated to the angels of the Bible.
Quotes
Angels are mentioned at least one hundred and eight times in the Old Testament and one hundred and sixty-five times in the New Testament.
Chapter Ⅰ – God’s Creation of Angels
Thus, the angels, before the Fall, were revealed to be very noble, sublime angels, full of wisdom and crystal.
Chapter V‐The sins and destiny of the Angels
The angels are not omniscient.
Chapter Ⅶ – Spiritual life in imitation of Angels
God does not allow us to worship angels. The Apostle Paul clearly warns against it.
それを説明するかのように神学者のバルタザールはAngels as Mirrors of the Humanと言った。ここからが、神学の道となる。これを絵空事として切り捨ててしまうのか、私はここで切り捨てた人を置いていく。人間の鏡とする天使、とはカトリックのカテキズムにあるように天使はMessengerである事を表している。先程の説明にあったように内面世界が曇った人間には、天使は映らない。天使は自分の内面世界が曇っていないかどうかを証明する重要な役割なのである。長い歴史の中で詩人や文学者は様々な詩的霊感によって自然に戻ろうとし、哲学や心理学の先行ともなっている。ドイツ神秘主義がなければ現代まで哲学は派生していない。聖書は人間の知恵の歴史として必要な存在であり、まだ未知のものがあることを忘れてはならない。何度も読んで心理的機能を繰り返し、世界の存在に向かってどう進んでいくのかを捉えていくことが重要である。
(Paul Ricoeur, Love and Justice, a book I would recommend to young philosophers and theologians)
If justice is possible because of love, can we call it love when a person is punished for doing justice, for example, the ” Capital Punishment “? Thus, love and justice are always dichotomous. Paul Ricœur’s book is a dialectical meditation on this dichotomy, trying to bridge the gap.
The point to be kept in mind is that “love” refers to Jesus Christ and “justice” to Moses.
Justice is concerned with social practice, while love is at best a motive. Justice, on the contrary, is more likely to have a narrow effect and less likely to be widely applied. We can see this in the history of Moses, when we consider the number of deaths. Even though the love of Jesus is slow in spreading, it spreads to many people. That movement is also called the grace of God. Justice is the spear, love is the shield. What non-Christians misunderstand is that they do not distinguish between God’s love and justice. (I don’t mean that as an evil thing.)
Particularly the Catholic emphasis on “God is love” has led to a number of misunderstandings.
And these misunderstandings are not limited to misunderstandings, they are also flaws in social practice due to the distorted interpretation of love. At the point where crimes committed by the clergy are covered up, for example, when clergy talk about God’s forgiveness for crimes, they are criticized in social practice as “they are distorting love”. However, through my experience as a journalist, I have also witnessed victim fraud. This experience has made me realize that the distortion of “love” is not enough. The testimony of victims, between lies and illness, takes advantage of people’s conscience and justice. It causes us to lose sight of the direction of justice.
To contemplate the dichotomy between love and justice is labour intensive and unrewarding. Many Hebrews would not have been saved if the revolution had not taken place in the time of Moses. This was the proper love and justice of the time. At the time of Jesus’ birth, it was hoped that he would be a revolutionary like Moses, but he did not make any great revolution. At first people were disappointed, but Jesus went to the poor on his own feet and saved them through love. Love is thus slow to progress and is attacked and persecuted by those who fail to understand it. Jesus’ quintessence of ‘love’ is that his justice was not in escaping justice, but in accepting the death penalty.
His justice was not in escaping justice, it was in accepting the death penalty, which is the essence of “sacrifice”, of love, of covering up all the sins of others. For those who follow Jesus, the practice of this supreme justice is no different from suicide, and whether or not Jesus himself would want people to do this has yet to be archaeologically proven. The same is true of martyrdom itself, which is not yet clear whether Jesus would have wanted it or not. But nowadays martyrdom is considered a virtue and worthy of praise, provided that the conditions are fulfilled. (Song of Solomon: Love is as strong as death)
Reading the Bible is like looking into the mirror of one’s self, a chapter which was originally in the book but was left out in the Japanese version because it was incomplete as a philosophy. This imperfection must be challenged by us, the next generation. We must return to the question of what the Bible exists for. We should read it honestly before we listen to the answers of the clergy. I urge young people to do this especially. The question that arises in the Bible is the self itself. It is a mistake to look for answers in a story, but the questions raised by the story are a guide on the journey to reality. As Paul Ricoeur says of love, it can be spoken of in both shallow and deep ways. The same is true of stories. They are made both shallow and deep. The Bible is considered a deep book, but it is less and less necessary for modern people. It was known that the world was falling according to gravity, though it was also the fall of the world. Probably the reason for the lack of attention is that there is something about Christians and the clergy that is not respected.
The bible has been around for a long time and has been interpreted by many different people. It was important that there were great men in it that we would still want to study. But we don’t have them today. They may exist, but they are not easy to find. When we lose our bearings, we need to go back to the basics of self-image as seen in the Bible. That is why the inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which existed before the Bible, says: “Know thyself”.
When you ask a Catholic priest a question, you will get a dozen different answers. The views of the Pope and theologians continue to change. However, we will come to realise this. People touched by the love of Jesus do good works voluntarily. It is not that Jesus is the only one, but that people are voluntarily awakening their conscience. I want people to know this glimmer in this age of information overload.
Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, although it is an application of earlier phenomenology, is a “narrative theology”, the origin of the idea of the existence of Jesus. We recommend his book to many believers and students of theology who, in the future, will encounter incredible absurdities and disappointments. Paul Ricœur is a philosophy of problematic regression.
Remark.
The thought which seeks to understand God is always brought back to the story. God’s thought can only be conceived as a narrated version of a story in which the concept is carefully checked. Thus, if a thought is to think of God, it must hear the story being told.
And again, ” God seeks to be told”
Paul Ricœur (from Love and Justice, original notes)
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
2 Corinthians 4：8，9
In chapter 4 Paul refers to himself as “We have this treasure in earthen vessels… (v.7). I am weak, yet the Lord works mightily in my weakness to reveal his glory to me. It struck me that the Bible Missionary is a man who carries his treasure in an earthen vessel. It is such a simple thing to be a Missionary, to take the gifts and abilities of God and put them in something as simple as a clay vessel. In England we were Anglican, so we had Evangelists. I was in the psychology department at Oxford University, but I was drawn to the theology department. By the time I was there, there were Muslims and many future clergymen. The faith itself seemed to be fading in England, but I found the lectures by the Bible preachers in Christ Church interesting. Most of the Bible expositors were talking about other worlds, but this one had a way of intertwining the unseen with the seen, speaking to dreams and thoughts that we had not yet verbalised or imagined. I was not then as sure as I am now, but this kind of evangelism made me want to be a writer like *George MacDonald.
I returned home, but the image of the writer I wanted to be in Japan was a difficult one. Then in 2018, for various reasons, I gave up the idea of becoming a preacher. I became more aware of fiction and writing rather than faith, and for a while I did an apprenticeship as a journalist, but I was also dealing with the medical and resentful side of things, and the threats were certainly coming, as they say. Most troubling of all were the death threats to my cat, Adam, and the persistent unauthorised access to my information on twitter and leaking of information through logins.
I retired from all secular writing in order to be able to live with my cat. In 2020, with the support of my church and Bishop Sakai, I will be able to return as an Missionary. Nowadays, logic is more and more used as a confrontation or an attack, but it can also be used as a reconciliation. What is more vicious is that people who mistake it for logic and send death threats to others can live without any punishment. I wondered if I had to fight this cowardly dustbunny, but then I realised that I didn’t have to. A trash is a trash and not worthy of being a man. Paul had many allies, but he had just as many attackers. Those who are baptized suffer as much as those who are doing the right thing. There is a time, Kairos and Kronos, that surrounds human beings. To struggle in vain for approval is to live in Kronos and waste time. Living in kairos is to improve the self. During this time we are not allowed to throw mud at others. You will find that the only way to use sorrow and misfortune is to turn them into good deeds. Otherwise, you will just grow old in vain and your confidence will be as dust as the perpetrator. It will fade away with the passage of time. It is important, especially if you want to be a preacher, to keep your precious jewels in a humble earthenware vessel and ponder them until the time is right. There will probably be hard days ahead, but as a Baptised person I am strong and will not give in. There is no need to constantly polish or decorate the earthenware vessels in which we store our treasures. That’s how Christians overcome trials, and that’s how we are evangelists.
reference
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.( 2 Corinthians 4:18)
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.（2 Corinthians 12:10）
There is no profession of evangelist in Catholicism at the moment, but writers can still take on this role. In today’s Japan, it is difficult, yet perhaps it is precisely because it is difficult that life has meaning.
George MacDonald, Scottish writer and clergyman.
Tolkien, the Bible preacher, Lewis Carroll and others have been influenced by him. His work called Lilith, influenced by the Bible, is very beautiful.
Chris Kyogetu 