Life that Is Kept Alive
By the Rev. Shigenori Yamasaki
Konko Church of Fukuoka-minami
(Reprinted from the July 2016 issue of Konkokyo-ho Ametsuchi)
Getting to Know Kami through Sickness
I became sick as soon as I entered senior high school, and when I went to a hospital to be examined, the doctor diagnosed that I had asthmatic bronchitis. I had been blessed with good health until I got this disease, but I gradually became bedridden. When you have asthma, you often have an extremely hard time breathing. In the beginning, I didn’t take my sickness very seriously, but my condition increasingly got worse. Consequently, we had to ask a doctor to come to see and treat me every day. The doctor’s daily visits and his treatments didn’t cure my disease at all. To make the matter worse, the doctor even said to me, “I cannot guarantee that you will get better as you grow older.”
Because I was suffering so much, my grandfather seems to have said to himself, “Oh, dear…this IS serious.” Grandfather had me request a year’s leave of absence from school and he took me to Konko Church of Yobuko in SagaPrefecture, where he practiced faith. Being taken care of at a Konko church was how I encountered the Konko Faith.
A new chapter of my life started at Konko Church of Yobuko. My chronic coughing spasms were terrible especially at night. The wife of the church’s head minister kindly visited me often and she put Sacred Rice on my chest. She then would place absorbent cotton that had been soaked in boiled Sacred sake onto the Sacred Rice. She then would pray to our Parent Deity for me. Whenever the church’s head minister’s wife did these things for me, I was able to breathe a bit more easily, and she did this for me over and over again for many nights. I gradually became able to be up and around more often. Soon, I could even help the ministers clean the church. Until that time, I had literally been gasping for air, often saying to myself, “This could be the last breath I’ll take. After this, I may not able to breathe anymore.” But I came to feel that my respiratory tract becoming stronger and I found myself breathing easily and smoothly. Soon after I began to engage in cleaning service at the Yobuko church, and was even able to return to high school. It was a remarkable blessing that our Divine Parent gave me concerning my health, and this is how I started to practice faith.
My Self-Centered Faith
I was unable to attend school for almost a half of the school year when I was a freshman at high school. However, I was later blessed with good health, and I was able to graduate from high school in three years, just as everybody else did. After my graduation, I became a trainee at Konko Church of Yobuko because I was inspired by the following words from the wife of the head minister of the Yobuko church, when she visited me after I graduated from high school: “Life is life no matter how it is lived. Some people do nothing but eat and drink what they like until they finish their lives. Others help the people around them as valuable human resources until they leave this world. If you do nothing but eat and drink while you are alive, you must realize that even cats or dogs eat and drink in their lifetime.” When I heard these words, I thought, “Every single person will die sooner or later. If I am destined to die sometime in future, I want to contribute to the people around me, being useful to them.” And so I entered Konko Church of Yobuko as its trainee.
I was still a teenager when I began my religious training. Being still quite young, I was basically an unpredictable boy. I must confess that back in those days, my faith was all but based upon my egocentric desires. In the beginning, I often made blunders such as heating an empty bathtub. During such occasions, the Rev. Yamane, the Head Minister of the Yobuko church and his wife would scold me, exclaiming with an exasperated sigh, “There is no one like you.”
In those days, there was a brazier in the worship hall of Konko Church of Yobuko. We usually gathered around the brazier to warm ourselves up in winter. In the backroom of the worship hall, I was assigned to put heated reddened charcoal into a charcoal brazier and bring it to the worship hall. The portable charcoal brazier had a handgrip, and I carried it holding the handgrip with one hand. The Reverend Yamane, the Head Minister, sat at the Okekkai Mediation Seat and kindly warned me, saying “There’s chance something dangerous could happen, so put the other hand on the bottom of the charcoal brazier, Shigenori.” At the time, I obeyed him and placed the other hand of mine on the bottom of the portable brazier. Several days later, however, I returned to my old habit and I again carried around the portable charcoal brazier, gripping the handle with only one hand. One day, the handgrip accidentally came off from the charcoal brazier when I was carrying it as usual, and the brazier fell down to the tatami mat of the worship hall. The Rev. Yamane was shocked to see the horrible event. He tried to throw away the heated charcoal brazier through a window but could not do so. The charcoal brazier hit the tatami mat and broke into pieces. The reddened, heated charcoal touched the tatami mat and set it on fire. We put out the small fire right away, but there was a mark on the tatami mat of the church’s worship hall. You can see that I wasn’t really an obedient trainee and I often made one mistake after another. When the Rev. Yamane told me to do something or even gave me some teachings at the Mediation Seat, I responded, “Yes, Sir!” but in fact failed to follow his advice and/or instructions. This is exactly how I was at the beginning of my faith life.
If You Truly Understand Your Parents’ Feelings for You
About four years after I became a trainee at Konko Church of Yobuko, I entered the Konko Seminary with wish to become a Konko minister. One day during my training days at the Seminary, I received a letter from the Rev. Yamane. Earlier, I sent him a letter in which I wrote, “I was allowed to enter the Seminary without trouble, and I started my Seminary life with my classmates with several Seminary alumni taking care of us for the first ten days. The alumni helped us to adjust to the daily routines at the Seminary and then they went home. Now our real training gets started.” My mentor kindly responded to my written correspondence. In the letter, the Rev. Yamane said, “I wanted you to write to me earlier. I’ve been worried about you ever since you entered the Konko Seminary. I’ve been praying to our Parent Deity for you ever since you entered it.” The Rev. Yamane continued in his letter, “You should appreciate each adversity that you may undergo while you are at the Seminary, because Konko ministers regard painful experiences as their valuable assets. I, therefore, hope that you will go through a lot of difficulties in your Seminary life and that those tough experiences will help your faith develop.” As I said earlier, I had had four years of spiritual training at a local Konko church before I entered the Konko Seminary. Because of this, the Seminary, to me, was a very comfortable place. If I am allowed to be quite honest, I almost said to myself, “Gee, can my Seminary life be so easy like this?” The Rev. Yamane warned to me in the letter, “Even if the place where you are now is less severe than my church, don’t let that fact spoil you. Do not relax too much in the Seminary.” At that time, I didn’t really understand the Rev. Yamane’s feelings behind his warning.
After my graduation from the Konko Seminary, I was ordained as a Konko minister. One day, the Rev. Yamane assigned me to attend a general assembly of the Konko Youth Association of our parish. As I was about to leave for the meeting wearing a pair of wooden clogs on our Head Minister’s wife asked me, “Don’t you have a pair of ordinary shoes?” I had a pair of shoes of course, but I thought wooden clogs were “cooler.” So I replied her, “No, I don’t.” The lady minister then said to me, “You really should wear shoes.” Right before leaving for the meeting, I went to the Mediation Seat for Sacred Mediation with my mentor. The Rev. Yamane said, “The late Reverend Norio Sato often said that we, Konko ministers, were supposed to wear bowler hats and sticks when we go to official meetings. You should be dressed in a proper way so that people can easily identify you as a Konko minister.” I did not follow the advice. Being young back then, I knew my choice was cooler than their recommendation. “I just don’t care what they say,” I said to myself. When I was assigned to go somewhere for goyo (selfless service for our Divine Parent), I knew that I was going not for my personal pleasure but for goyo. Still, I felt enormous joy at being able to go out. On such occasions, I liked to wear casual shirts, jeans and a pair of wooden clogs, finding it cool to make the sounds I did as I clumped along in the wooden clogs.
A member of our church kindly gave the Head Minister’s wife and me a ride to the nearest railway station. Arriving at the station, we both got out of the automobile. At the time, the church member driver, said to me, “The late Reverend Matsutaro Yasutake, the founding minister of Konko Church of Amagi, said the following thing one day: there was a son of admirably filial piety. One day, the boy’s father said to him, ‘It’s going to rain today, so you’d better wear a pair of tall wooden clogs.’ Shortly after that, the boy’s mother said to him, ‘No, no, it is not going to rain today. You can simply wear a pair of Japanese straw sandals.’ Do you have any idea what the boy did? He went out, wearing one high-length wooden clog on one foot and one straw sandal on the other. The little boy did so in order to honor the two pieces of advice he had received from his father and mother. This is why the boy was called an estimably filial child.”
When I heard the story from the gentleman, I finally realized that I was doing something totally opposite from what a filial child would do. My mentors said to me, “Put on shoes” but I wore wooden clogs. They said to me, “Put on a suit and make yourself look neat” but I wore jeans and I was prideful. As they looked at me, the Rev. Yamane and his wife must have thought, “How can this guy be dressed like that and not be ashamed of himself?” Even though my spiritual trainers of the Yobuko church often told me to “be neatly dressed as a Konko minister,” I didn’t quite follow their advice and did what I wanted to do.
This episode took place more than forty years ago, but I still feel emotional and sentimental whenever I reminisce the event. We can be filial when we understand and appreciate our parents’ feelings for us. If we fail to understand the sentiments of our parents, we are apt to maintain our own opinions and demands. When practicing faith, it is important to understand the warm, considerate heart of our Divine Parent for us. In other words, it is important to understand the heart of the Head Minister of the Konko church to which we regularly go. Why? Because he or she is the one who conducts Sacred Mediation for us. If we succeed in understanding our parents’ heart, we will be given the chance to practice faith, which would make our Divine Parent very pleased.
Receiving Sacred Mediation from Your Mentor
We, the adherents of the Konko Faith, are taught that the Divine Parent of the Universe is the “deity to nurture all lives of the universe.” We are also taught that our Parent Deity says, “Kami exists because of people.” This is the deity who said to the Founder of the Konko Faith, “Please continue to practice faith in Kami and save people in distress by performing Sacred Mediation for them.” By saying so, the Divine Parent of the Universe asked the Founder to give up his farming career and start devoting himself to serving the Deity as the first-ever Sacred Mediator between Kami and people. The Divine Parent of the Universe is kind and caring enough to say, “When people are saved, I am also saved.” The Divine Parent of the Universe prays for the salvation of us, the children of Kami, from the bottom of Kami’s heart. I am sure that we will be able to receive Kami’s blessings at will if we understand the heart of the Konko ministers who conduct Sacred Mediation for us and come to worship the Head Minister of the local Konko church we regularly visit. On the other hand, you cannot receive blessings as long as you criticize acts of your Head Minister or his wife.
Even if we don’t say to our Parent Deity, “Please give me your blessings,” we will be given blessings from the Deity we believe in. I am sure that our Divine Parent is generous and merciful enough to do so for all of us. Kami says to us, “Practice faith and be sure to receive divine blessings.” It is, therefore, important that we train ourselves spiritually so that we will develop our respective faiths in Kami. My mentors, the Head Minister and his wife of Konko Church of Yobuko, passed away and they are no longer with us. But as time passes by, I feel more strongly the need to train myself spiritually as I live my faith life on a daily basis. In order to practice true faith, and in order to receive true blessings from our Divine Parent, I strongly believe that I must become a person who looks up to his mentor and follows his or her spiritual guidance given at the Mediation Seat as much as possible.
In the beginning of my faith life, my mentor warmly said to me, “If you ever become a person to appreciate the wonderfulness of practicing faith in Kami even if a little bit, you’ll be allowed to find enormous joy in your life, and we will also be very happy for you.” I would once again like to know and understand the heart/feelings of my mentor when he said so for me. Very lastly, please allow me to hope and pray that we will continue to live our spiritual lives from now on too and that we will take good care to polish our faiths in Kami so that our parents will be pleased and relieved with us. I say this, because if we aim to polish our faiths and always strive for it, we will be awarded with divine blessings, and the blessings from Kami will provide another powerful motivation for us. Let us practice faith in Kami from now on too.
(THE END)