6 Feb – Memorial for Sts. Paul Miki and Companions, martyrs (in Japan)
St. Paul Miki (1562-1597) was one of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born into a rich family and educated by Jesuits in Azuchi and Takatsuki. He joined the Society of Jesus and preached the gospel for his fellow citizens. The Japanese government feared Jesuit influences and persecuted them. He was jailed among others.
He and his Christian peers were forced to walk 600 miles from Kyoto while singing ‘Te Deum’ as a punishment for the community. Finally they arrived at Nagasaki, the city which had the most conversions to Christianity, and he was crucified on 5 February 1597. He preached his last sermon from the cross, and it is maintained that he forgave his executioners stating that he himself was Japanese. Alongside him died Joan Soan (de Goto) and Santiago Kisai, of the Society of Jesus, in addition to 23 clergy and laity, all of whom were canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862.
On 15 August 1549, St. Francis Xavier, Father Cosme de Torres, SJ, and Father John Fernandez arrived in Kagoshima, Japan, from Spain with hopes of bringing Catholicism to Japan. On Sep 29, St. Francis Xavier visited Shimazu Takahisa, the daimyo of Kagoshima, asking for permission to build the first Catholic mission in Japan. The daimyo agreed in hopes of creating a trade relationship with Europe.
A promising beginning to those missions – perhaps as many as 300,000 Christians by the end of the 16th century – met complications from competition between the missionary groups, political difficulty between Spain and Portugal, and factions within the government of Japan. Christianity was suppressed. By 1630, Christianity was driven underground.
The first Martyrs of Japan are commemorated on Feb 5 when, on that date in 1597, 26 missionaries and converts were killed by crucifixion. 250 years later, when Christian missionaries returned to Japan, they found a community of Japanese Christians that had survived underground.
- Wikipedia
Ecc 47:2-13
Mk 6:14-29
The king was deeply distressed...
One of my favourite Christian classics, to which I return time and again, is The Great Divorce. In this seminal work by C.S. Lewis, the author sees a throng of people in a place in the afterlife called the ‘grey town’, which can viewed as hell or purgatory. Some of the residents of this town choose to board a bus on an excursion to heaven, where upon reaching, they are approached by people whom they knew when they were alive. These people begin to persuade them to let go of their attachments so that they can journey on to heaven, but most of them choose to return to the grey town, giving various excuses for doing so. A former bishop insists upon his warped and erroneous beliefs about Christine doctrine, a cynic thinks that heaven is a trick, and a mother prefers to cling to the memory of her dead son than see him face-to-face in heaven.
In today’s gospel reading, we see King Herod facing a major moral dilemma. His beloved daughter had asked him to behead a person whom he actually liked and had no intention of killing. While he had the power to refuse to do something that was against his conscience, he felt that he could not afford to do so, as he had made the promise to his daughter in front of many important people at his birthday banquet. Going back on his word would cause him to risk losing others’ respect and could tarnish his reputation. Ultimately, he might have to relinquish his seat of power, and for him, that was too high a price to pay to save someone’s life. Therefore, he made his choice, and the herald of Christ was executed.
What do you fear losing? Would this attachment to someone or something prevent you from acting according to the values of Christ? In his book Catholicism: Journey to the heart of the faith, Bishop Robert Barron writes: “One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honour…we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us.” Each of us would surely have an addiction, whether we want to admit it or not, to one or more of these four substitutes. When they become top priority, they take the place of what is most important — to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. No matter how enticing and how much satisfaction these addictions bring us, they are ultimately devoid of meaning and can never be a substitute for what our heart truly desires.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Edith Koh)
Prayer: Abba Father, on our journey of life and faith, we pray that we will come to realise that only You can fulfil all of heart’s desires and fill the void within us.
Thanksgiving: We thank you Lord for patiently calling us beyond our false attachments, and to choose what truly gives life. May we learn to love You above all things.
OXYGEN 
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