Loose Him and Let Him Go - Eric B. Shumway

Loose Him and Let Him Go - Eric B. Shumway

Katsuhiro Kajiyama was among the first students who came (to BYU Hawaii) from Japan. Now a professor of Japanese on our campus, he reminisced about his rescue, Lazarus-like, from soul death. His tomb was a dark hopelessness; his graveclothes a bitter cynicism and hatred toward Americans. As he said in the account he sent to me: “I lived numbly, desensitized, and cold.”
He remembered as a child the joy of his family, his prayers to the Buddha and Kami. But especially he remembered his mother—beautiful, soft, kind, gentle. His home was a place of peace. Their hometown was Hiroshima. On the morning of August 6, 1945, Kats was playing with a friend at school. He was just seven years old. These are his words:
The loud air raid alarm pierced our ears. . . . As I crouched down to the edge of the front door, an extraordinarily bright flash of light exploded as if a thousand flash photos had been taken, the light enveloping the whole building and sky. . . . There was a thunderous blast and a gust of force so strong that it shook the entire building and ground. . . . I screamed. . . . All around me there were noises of things being crushed and of shattered glass cascading to the floor.
Kats described the panic that ensued. Covered with blood, he escaped from under heavy fallen doors and ran out into a world surreal in its horror: houses on fire, whirling dust and smoke, hysterical crying and screaming from every direction. “Floating, groping along in the chaos,” he had visions of his beautiful mother waiting for him at home. He longed for her comfort, her soft, gentle touch. However, when he arrived at the spot, he said:
I [encountered] a strange woman in baked, dirty clothes with a grotesquely swollen face and burnt, short, kinky hair. . . . Severe burns disfigured my beautiful mother into a stranger of bloated face with red and dark-brown blotches and scratches. I looked on in disbelief as her sweet voice called my name, “Kacchan.” I cried for relief that it was she, but also [in terror for her dreadful look].
It took 20 agonizing days for his mother to finally die. His brother was never found, except for the remnant of a sock with his name written on it with a black marker.
Motherless and reduced to abject poverty, Kats was tormented by the images of the pain and death of his mother and brother. He longed to hear “the sweet, gentle call” of his mother. “It seemed that [he] would never find peace in this cruel and harsh existence,” until one day an American named Elder Gary Roper spoke to him: “How is school? Do you live nearby? I see you often in the streetcar. Would you like to join an activity for young people?”
Kats said he was amazed by this American’s indescribably tender smile.
I was unfamiliar with this type of gentleness from foreigners. . . . Until then I had [believed] all Americans were heartless monsters who willingly sought to hurt and degrade the Japanese people.
After Elder Roper, it was Elder Green. One year had passed since his first introduction to the Church. He was still reluctant to join, but at a district conference in Hiroshima, the voice of Christ from the mouth of mission president Paul C. Andrus commanded, “’Come forth.’ Be baptized.”
In contrast to the horrific flash of light in the atomic bomb blast, Kats wrote of his baptism:
At that moment . . . I felt as though the brightest sun had broken through the clouds and streamed through the building. The whole auditorium seemed to be brightly lit and glowing. I was . . . filled with incomprehensible happiness and joy.
You can guess the rest of the story. The graveclothes of his tortured past were now unwrapped. The cynicism, hatred, and bitterness were gone. Kats was called on a mission to his native Japan. As a missionary he helped teach and baptize 80 people.
After his mission, thanks to generous donors and a work-study scholarship program, he went to BYU—Hawaii, which was then the Church College of Hawaii. He married his wife, Hilda, in the temple. He had further schooling, coming to the Provo campus to finish his bachelor’s degree and to complete his master’s degree in art. The graveclothes of ignorance and prejudice were further removed. He and his wife have raised a family of brilliant, devoted children. Both their daughters are now embarking on missions for the Church—one to Japan and one to Hong Kong.
Nearly every true conversion or repentance sequence is an analogue of the story of Lazarus.
One interesting question is: What if Lazarus, exercising his agency even as a spirit, had decided he did not want to return to a decaying, tortured body? He might prefer to let dead bodies lie. Or what if those present were squeamishly reluctant to touch the death wrappings of a man who clearly had been dead? It is not difficult to identify parallels among us today: people who would not be inclined to obey either commandment. Obedience to both commandments is central to the restoration of life.
Sometimes the wrappings of death are manifest in the clothes of addiction and behavioral patterns that paralyze righteous thought and action, such as alcoholism, gambling, drug use, pornography, anger, and violence. These wrappings are made of coarse cloth and smell of hell, and they bind people in a tomb of hopeless illusion and despair.
But what about the death wrappings of a finer texture: the silken wrappings of pride and self-importance, of obsession with one’s appearance, of wealth devoid of any generous impulse? Many of these finer-textured addictions are mutations of things that satisfy basic needs; for example, the need we all have for encouragement morphing into a desperate search for praise and flattery. A dependency on “praise from above and flattery from below” has doomed more than one rising leader in nearly every profession (Stanley M. Herman, The Tao at Work: On Leading and Following [San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994], 40).

The acts of helping to remove someone’s “graveclothes,” as it were, are the essence of a Latter-day Saint’s errand from the Lord. You may ask yourself, “Am I an unbinder or am I a binder? Do I help loose or remove the graveclothes of others, or do I wrap their graveclothes more tightly around them?”