Soldier for Christ
A Novel
John Zeugner
Soldier for Christ
A Novel
Copyright © 2013 John Zeugner. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-932-0
EISBN 13: 978-1-62189-601-2
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
for Alice
“The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark, 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . .”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, July, 1944
“For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.”
—Romans, 11:32
1
Foreigners sometimes came through on Sundays to the church toward which Owen walked, but they came in black chauffeured vehicles and behind darkened windows so that their alien faces never upset the scene, or intruded on the dazzling views down toward Kobe harbor. But this gaijin was carless . Worse yet, as he walked he was visibly sweating. Had no one told him to purchase those thick towel-like handkerchiefs by which the Japanese fought off the summer heat and rainy season humidity? The greatest mischief in summery Japan was to be seen glistening, copiously gushing that meat-saturated sweat redolent even at a distance. The required white short sleeved shirt soaked onto his back, so that even the over-the-shoulder draped poplin jacket had darkened on its right lapel from his exertion.
Owen separated the ascent to the Kobe Union Church from Rokko Station off the Hankyu line into two parts: the initial trudge up the mountain beyond the drab/dirty concrete university buildings, via the macadam ribbon between rows of attached housing, stuccoed and with metal roofs; and then as perspiration began to gather along his sides, the more glorious struggle on the suddenly cobblestoned roadway flanked on either side by larger and larger Japanese single family houses with garages, tiled water drainways edging the cobblestone, and terracota tile roofs with cocked satellite dishes—tiny, immaculate gardens viewable over narrow granite flecked walls—the constant delicate rush of artificially falling water within those gardens, and occasionally very frail, elderly Japanese in lightweight summer yukatas standing at the end of the glistening driveways to their garages watching him, measuring him somehow, their puzzlement reminding him how out of place a foreigner was in this richest area of suburban Kobe. What was this youngish, overweight gaijin doing among such opulence , at the restricted top of the mountain?
The climb to the Kobe Union Church, not quite at the summit of the mountain (Owen imagined that position was reserved for a Buddhist temple, either actual or contemplated) was not equivalent to the Via Dolorosa of Owen’s imaginings. Nonetheless he liked equating his own perspiration with Jesus’ travail. The arrogance of the equation amused Owen and filled his blossoming sense of irony concerning the Word in Japan. Besides, the son of the living God didn’t have to deal with the constant humidity of Japan, did he? Jerusalem was dry, parched, stark, hostile. Japan was warm, muggy, welcoming, puzzled, green, cooperative and abhorrent of judgment, castigation, suffering itself. That was perhaps the difference and why conversion never occurred, or if it occurred had no recognition of, no conception of, redemption. What was sin in silk-soft Japan?
A month ago when Owen had tried to explain Jesus’ redemption of the world through agony and suffering, to an elderly Japanese who listened so respectfully in the vestibule of the Kobe Union church, who finally said, with apparent instant grasp. “Like Hiroshima.” In answer Owen mumbled in Japanese, “So desho” (“I guess”). And the conversation terminated. The old gentleman bowed and back-stepped out of the narthex.
As a sometime assistant, would-be curate, to the rector, Owen had volunteered to lead the adult Sunday school class, and today he was determined to try something new—something to forge at least a common ground among his well heeled students: gaijin vice-presidents of Proctor and Gamble and their flowery wives fresh up from enormous western style apartments (homats) on Rokko Island, the latest filled-in real estate in Kobe harbor; a lean and committed missionary couple, Jena and Archie Hesseltine, who peppered their conversation with Japanese phrases and puns; and three Japanese women who were regulars at the service—Yasuko the church secretary, who may have come only because she felt it was expected of her position, Myumi whose children attended Christian elementary school and should therefore have a mother who, she explained, understood “what the very kindly teachers of that school believed”; and Mariko who was a simultaneous translator and needed to keep her edge speaking English, as well provide Owen with exquisite distractions of aggressive sinning. They were the core students around the gleaming varnished table on the church’s third floor. Sometimes the core group was joined by visiting gaijin, a lonely American college student or two, or military types who had strayed far from the bases in Iwakuni or Yokosuka, and heard that the brunch after the Sunday service at the Kobe Union Church was free and plentiful.
The church Rector, Father Bob Bonneau, often mentioned in his homilies his own long attachment as a Navy Chaplain in the pacific fleet, and perhaps that nautical connection accounted for the sailors who also turned up at very specific and predictable times. “God is most evident in burning bilges and mortar-fired foxholes,” Reverend Bob frequently said, either during the homily or afterwards at the brunch. And those who listened always nodded smiling. Owen had never been in a fox hole or a bilge, and therefore resented, if he thought about it, the implied camaraderie of combat. Still he envied the apparent linkage between deprivation, fear, and conversion. What could account for the near total absence of conversion experience among Japanese Christians? Certainly they knew throttling and sudden panic at disasters, yet at no time did they link such experiences with ultimate power beyond nature itself, or so it seemed to Owen. Indeed if conversion required acknowledgment, then the Japanese preference of silence was literally unthinkable, or at the lower frequencies unattainable. Did that make the “practice” of Christian worship any less valid for them or for Owen himself? Was redemption merely the form of religion, its most evident ritual recitation, with no more meaning, as the poet noted, than “tomorrow’s bread?” Saved or slain one trudged up the mountain to the Kobe Union Church. One waved to the chauffeurs out of their Mercedes dusting them with large feather dusters, white sweatfree shirts in the soft sunlight of the mountain top, slicked down black hair, thick waists and sparkling black shoes. Nodding back to Owen in that silently assented camaraderie of subservience to nobler masters—or at least better heeled ones.
Owen admired the selfless arrogance of the Proctor and Gamble VPs—“This church ought to be more Christ-centered and helping toward the Philippines,” they might have said during their tenure of two years in Kobe. “Money is a given. The church needs to involve younger people more directly in service,” they intoned. “We need more potluck suppers.” And most emphatically, “This church should never invade principal. The endowment guarantees