Monastic experience in Japan

The monastic experience concluded with a last three-day stay at Eiheiji, the first monastery and center of the S?t? school of Zen Buddhism, founded by the great master D?gen (1200–1253). Here the group received the great gift of various times of dialogue with the of the monastery masters.

Besides the visit provided for in the program to the enchanting ancient capital Kyoto, in the last days of his stay br Matteo was able to visit also the center of spirituality and inter-religious dialogue of Shinmeizan on Ky?sh?, which seeks to incarnate the Christian spiritual tradition in Japan’s traditional culture. Founded by father Franco Sottocornola, a Xaverian missionary, the center is administered by him together with sister Maria De Giorgi, also a Xaverian missionary, and father Pietro Sonoda, a Japanese Conventual Franciscan. Together they are trying to built relations of knowledge, of confidence, and of friendship with exponents of the various religions in Japan, convinced that this is the first and essential stage or building — perhaps in a few decades or centuries — true dialogue…

This three-day stay was truly a good intermediate period of a slow and progressive return to the Christian spiritual world, after some days of hospitality in another’s house. The spaces, the prayer, the atmosphere at Shinmeizan all speak of a border place between spiritual worlds — Christian, Shinto, Buddhist — that are trying to speak to and derive fruit from each other.

After a brief visit to Nagasaki, tragic theater of atomic destruction and beginning of Christian history in Japan, as well as a significant center of Japanese Catholicism even today, the trip ended in Tokyo, where br Matteo was a guest for his last hours in Japan of the PIME missionaries in their regional house.