Punctuation Mark

When we got off the ship yesterday in Taipei, Taiwan and flew to Narita just outside of Tokyo, I thought I had been “templed-out.”

But. . . .

I had already decided that when we got to Narita I would visit Narita-san. It is not merely the place from which this city takes its name, it is also one of the most ancient and venerable Shinto shrines in Japan.

Now, you have to understand. In North Carolina we have a Baptist Church on every other corner. But if you can imagine a country with 2 major religions, like Buddhism and Shinto, then you double the number of religious buildings in a town. That’s Japan.

Every time you turn a corner there is another Shinto shrine or a statue of the Buddha with a special function, like prosperous farming or highway safety. I don’t mean to disparage either religion, but there are a lot of shrines of both sects everywhere—in small towns and large.

But today in Narita we saw the largest and most opulently beautiful Shinto shrines we have seen anywhere. Narita-san (or the Venerable Narita) is magnificent. It consists of a complex of dozens of large buildings ranging from the bell tower to the shrine building itself. I glanced inside (but was not allowed to take photos) at a golden shrine festooned with invisible threads coming down from heaven, loaded with tiny golden flakes that looked like moving, sparkling butterflies. Clouds of sandalwood incense further shrouded the temple. Worshippers in front of me clapped twice, then bowed and made their supplications to the divine. It was moving to watch.

The holy sanctuary up front was secluded in semi-darkness, but its gleaming wood and sparkling golden flecks served notice that this is a special place. Whatever one’s own religious background may be, it is hard to deny that something or someone sacred is here.

We have seen dozens of shrines and temples on this trip, and I have reported on many of them. I don’t blame you if you lost track of all of them. But somehow, it is not just the size and grandeur of Narita-san that impressed me. It was, rather, the disturbing hint that perhaps God is bigger than I had previously believed, that God speaks in many languages and that the one God may be more complex—more manifold than I had thought. What is the Trinity? How can three be one? Is it possible for the one God to somehow be plural?

Maybe not. I don’t know. But neither do you, and it is something we must consider.

Maybe the disturbing part is the realization the God will not allow Himself to be corralled into my limited conceptual framework. Maybe both the simplicity and the complexity of the divine is something we learned as children:

Little ones to Him belong,
We are weak, but He is strong.

These words imply that God does not belong to us. Whether we are Americans or Christians or Democrats or Vegetarians or Buddhists, God does not belong to us. We belong to Him. He is the boss. We are not.

We belong to a God who can and will, without our permission, reveal Himself in the most unexpected ways—even as a Jewish baby in an obscure outpost of the Roman Empire when that is the last thing in the world anyone expects.

Whenever the world has thought that it had God all figured out, God has always surprised us. When I think I have finally exhaustively described God, I always learn later that there is more to say.

If one believes that the everlasting timeless, spaceless, eternal God can transform Himself into one human being, and then for God to do the impossible—that is, to die a physical death—is it too much to imagine that He may also be able to transform into shapes, forms and names that could be accepted by other cultures, languages and belief systems?

Narita-san functioned today as a theological punctuation mark. It is the last religious shrine we will see on this trip. The sentence is finished, at least for now. But it is not ended with a period, but rather with an ellipsis.Les mer