I was visiting Japan to meet new sisters and brothers in Christ, to bring Our Lady of Combermere and Catherine to some of them, and to reverence the many martyrs who gave their lives for their faith in Christ.

As I watched this precious woman praying the prayer to Our Lady of Combermere, I felt I was touching the Japanese Catholic heart. I didn’t know the word at the time, but I was having an experience of wabi.

This Japanese word, which is untranslatable, has gone through a gradual change in meaning over the centuries. It is made up of three characters which together mean "the wretched, desolate feeling one has when looking at a feeble, old, housebound person."

But as time went on, the poets began saying that, if one was looking at a much-loved elderly person, one would see an inner beauty beneath the feeble body, and this emotion was wabi.

Wabi gradually also came to refer to the emotion experienced in seeing beauty in the ordinary and commonplace.

As one poet expressed it: "There are people who only wait for cherry blossoms. But what about the grass already thrusting through late winter snow?"

Finally, the Zen masters used the word to refer to seeing with the eyes of the heart, the Absolute hidden behind all phenomena.

I believe I had something of wabi from my Catholic faith before going to Japan, but in learning the Japanese word for it, I felt a spiritual relationship with Japanese people.

I had known before I visited Japan about their martyrs, and I knew that there are at present very few Christians there. The total Christian population is less than 1%, and the Catholic less than .5 %. So I was already alert to look for "the grass in the snow."

Discovering the Japanese word for "hidden beauty" helped me focus my attention even more, as I began to experience Japan, on the grass of the Church in the snow of Japan.

My first experience of wabi occurred only a few hours after I arrived, when I read the life of the lovely Satoko Kitahara-san, a young Japanese woman whose cause is up for canonization.

I discovered this book at the Franciscan Catholic Center in Tokyo, my main base of operations, when I started rummaging through their showcase of books and religious articles. I was attracted by the book, The Smile of a Ragpicker by Paul Glynn.

Satoko, a wealthy young woman who had become a Catholic, became aware of the children living on the garbage heaps in Tokyo through Brother Zeno, a missionary who had come to Japan with St. Maximillian Kolbe in 1930.

Satoko gave up everything and went to live with these children on the garbage heaps. She died young, and it was seeing the picture of her emaciated body when she was dying that was for me an experience of wabi.

My next experience of wabi occurred in the small downstairs chapel of the center. I was praying there at about 6 a.m. when a young woman came in with a vase of flowers.

She placed them in front of a statue of Our Lady and knelt in front of it in perfect stillness for perhaps fifteen minutes. In her I experienced that tender love for Mary is present in Japan.

The Franciscans I was staying with, especially Fr. Bart, arranged for me to give some talks.

In each place I said, through a translator, that there are holy people in all parts of the Catholic Church, but often they are only known locally, like your Satoko here in Japan. I have come, I told them, to introduce you to a great and holy woman of North America, Catherine Doherty.

I talked about her life, her apostolate, and her cause for canonization, and I passed out some of the MH literature which has been translated into Japanese—the Little Mandate, the prayer to Our Lady of Combermere, and Poustinia.

I spoke at the Franciscan seminary in Tokyo and at several convents: Poor Clares, Precious Blood, the Sisters at the Akita shrine, and Trappistines.

I had been a Trappist before joining Madonna House, and so perhaps the highlight was when I addressed the 45 Trappistine nuns.

There are a number of Trappist and Trappistine monasteries in Japan. Perhaps their love for, and understanding of, the monastic life, has been nourished by the Buddhist tradition of monasticism.

In the monastery at Otawara, where I gave my talk, over half the Sisters are fairly young.

Seeing those Trappistine Sisters was certainly another experience for me of wabi.

Before going to Japan, I had purchased a rail pass, and I traveled all over Japan on the train, and so I was able to see much of the country.

One of the people I visited was Fr. Joseph, an Italian missionary who has been in Japan for fifty years and who has an especially effective method of making converts. Japanese parents do not mind if their children are taught the Catholic faith; and there is no law against it. So this is what he does, and it was through the children’s faith and instruction that many parents were attracted to Christ.

Another highpoint of my visit was the shrine at Akita.

It is there that in 1975 a carved wooden statue of Our Lady of All Nations began weeping. This occurred over a hundred times until it stopped in 1981. The tears were analyzed and found to be human. I saw a glass case that contains the hundred or so pieces of cotton batting used to soak up the tears.

The bishop of the time did not pronounce one way or another about this, but he said there was nothing about it that was contrary to the faith, and he allowed pilgrimages to go there.

I spent several hours in front of this statue, and I believe that the tears are miraculous. While praying there, I found myself meditating on the question the angel asked Mary Magdalene in the garden: "Woman, why are you weeping?"

I think Mary of Akita was weeping over Japan, over its indifference to her divine Son, and for the thousands who were tortured and martyred for trying to follow him.

I had several meals with the Sisters who live at the shrine. The superior, Sr. Keiko, had been very much influenced by Satoko when she read her life.

A touching moment for me was when I handed out a copy of the Madonna House Little Mandate, which contains the essence of our spirituality, and Fr. Bart suggested they recite it together. Hearing the Little Mandate read in Japanese I experienced the heart of Catherine being communicated to them.

In part 2 of my account of my time in Japan, I will tell you about my visit to Nagasaki, the city which is at the heart of Japanese Catholicism. Throughout the centuries of persecution, it was the home of countless thousands of hidden Christians and martyrs. And it was Nagasaki, along with Hiroshima, which was destroyed by an atomic bomb and rose like a phoenix from the ashes.

to be continued