Word: prayers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early as 1947.1 always felt I was one step ahead of my time. Yet, I was horrified to read your glowing account of Maestro Pierre Boulez's newest "creation" that was recently performed in France [Dec. 28]. Repons is certainly not the answer to this listener's prayer. Compositions made with the aid of a computer negate everything that music stands for. Andor Foldes Herrliberg, Switzerland
Neither does anyone else. The men at prayer are among 10,000 surviving Kakure Kirishitan (crypto-Christians)-members of a fossilized faith that is unique in church annals. The poignant tale of the sect begins in 1549, when Jesuit Missionary Francis Xavier brought Roman Catholicism to Japan. The new creed soon gathered 300,000 followers, including most of the inhabitants of Ikitsuki, but its success also spelled its doom. Fearing the Christians' growth and foreign links, the warlord ruler Hideyoshi and later shogun mounted terror campaigns in which tens of thousands perished, often gruesomely. Christianity was all but stamped...
...Christians on Ikitsuki and neighboring islands, who were among the first to suffer, early on developed a way to preserve elements of their faith. Adopting a complex sham, they worshiped publicly at Buddhist temples, then slipped away at night to hold secret Christian prayer meetings. At home, they prayed overtly before Buddhist and Shinto altars, but their real altar became the nan do garni (closet god), innocuous-looking bundles of cloth in which revered Christian statues and medallions were hidden. For 2½ centuries, their fierce faith endured, but it inevitably also turned inward. Because their prayers and rituals...
Today on Ikitsuki, the center of the Kakure population, there are 80 house churches with their closet god. At such public ceremonies as Kakure funerals, a Buddhist priest is always asked to officiate, but, says one of them, "these people make sure to give a prayer in secret to erase the effect of ours." The sect's leader, the Ojisama (Revered Uncle), conducts a baptism-like ceremony with water drawn from a site of 17th century martyrdom...
...window of the Reagans' bedroom with an artist's alchemy of oil and watercolor, a small golden rectangle of warmth and hope. It is a reminder that joy and thanks, for the moment, can overwhelm chaos and brutality, and the simple human ritual of a midnight prayer or a final package wrapping can replace those rumbles of nations marching...