Hope Springs Eternal
Masaru excerpt
Photo by Max Saeling on Unsplash
“Do you remember the day you saved me from the inoshishi?”
“I should hope I remember. There haven’t been too many occasions on which I’ve saved someone from a charging wild boar!”
Shiro laughed. “I don’t know all you’d been up to after you left home!” He took another deep breath of cold air. “What would you have done if the boar had wounded me?”
“Well,” replied Tomi, “I suppose instead of carrying the beast back to the village as we did, I would have been forced to carry you.” Tomi paused for a moment. “Although I suppose I could have just left you for the buzzards.”
“Indeed, you could have done that. As it turned out, I needed you that day to save me. I was helpless, pinned against the side of that hill directly in the path of that brute.”
“So, I see you’ve cleverly managed to change the subject. If you don’t have answers to my theological questions, you could at least display some humility and admit as much. Humility is a Christian virtue, yes?”
“What I want to say is that fallen humanity is like those who have been wounded by a wild animal. They require a physician to be healed. But on that day in the forest, you saved me with your arrow before the boar’s tusks could reach me. In a similar way, God saved Maria from the mark of sin before it could even touch her.”
About the Author
After spending four years living in Japan, Michael Thomas Cibenko then spent fifteen years as a Catholic high school educator (Theology, German, Japanese). His essays have appeared in The New Oxford Review, and his first book, Masaru, a historical novel based on the early Church in Japan, was recently released by Arx Publishing.
