Great Construction

Recovery!

     In efforts to harm our church, there are individuals who employ a variety of measures and who are now engaged in a campaign of sending anonymous letters to the authorities. Just the other day, when the national radio network broadcast a street interview program conducted in Takayama in Gifu Prefecture, our opponents gathered many persons to hurl arrows of censure toward our work. A sizeable number of decoys were also planted among the interviewees to blare out complete fabrications. In addition to the letter campaign, opponents use other avenues of mass communication to spread rumors and agitate. These tactics appear to have spurred the authorities to check us even more closely.
     This campaign of slander has not only not had any success in stopping the church’s growth, rather it seems to have spurred it forward. The church simply proceeds with the will of God in guiding as many individuals as possible to the good news of salvation. Ministers and members alike devote themselves sincerely to this task, maintaining circumspection in word and deed, working diligently day and night, so those people who do try to investigate our church in depth, come to repent their mistaken view of our work. Such words of apology often reach my ears.
     The actions of those who would strike blows at our church should be seen in exactly the same light as the attacks of Devadatta against Shakyamuni, and these days it is clear that the tactics of last resort are to try to disturb our healing activities using provisions of the Medical Practitioners Law and attempting to make it appear that we obstruct medical treatment. It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, that those who slander the church are those related in some manner to the medical or pharmacological fields or are some kind of medical practitioner themselves.
     There are also those critics who pretend to view our healing work in a favorable light, and they should be detested as the most incorrigible. The goal of our church, which we continually stress, is to build a world without disease, poverty, conflict, and the center of the activities to eliminate humanity’s three misfortunes is to bring everyone to a complete state of health. Salvation is nothing without health. We occasionally find those believers who say they are saved even as they continue to groan under the sufferings of disease, but such thinking is a great fallacy. They may be saved spiritually, but they are not saved physically. Salvation is only halfway. Halfway salvation results because, regrettable as it may be, until the present, the power of religions was insufficient, so religion could only be concerned with the spiritual and did not have the power to save the physical. As it was taken for a long period that religion should only save the spiritual, those involved with religion fashioned the clever logic that a religion which treated the physical was heretical. This paradoxical viewpoint is quite a flagrant error because it arises from the concept that religions that heal disease and allow their believers to escape from poverty are only low-level religions concerned with material blessings.
     Members of our religion are able to abundantly receive the material blessings that are said to be impossible to receive from existing religions. Recovery from illness and disease is an astonishing fact for those whom no treatment had worked, forsaken by doctors, who responded well to our treatment, and this fact creates a great dilemma especially for doctors. So, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there is a group of doctors who act blindly as I describe above. In spite of the continuing censorious attacks by certain elements in society, however, those who come to us for help receive complete salvation, thus it is only natural that the growth of our church is not lessened in the least, but rather continues to grow.
     Those involved in bringing salvation to all do not concern themselves much with the religious affairs of the sick. In response to the request of the ill, they simply channel what we call Johrei to purify the spirit. When the spirit is purified, illness naturally heals. We are not healing patients per se. They are being healed. This is a very important point. There are no provisions of any laws or ordinances in which this action can be said to harm society. Criticisms based on legal aspects can only be described as incomprehensible. The reports sent in by those who have been healed through Johrei for which they are full of joy and gratitude are so numerous that there is not enough space to publish all of them in our periodicals, the monthly Chijôtengoku and the weekly Hikari. These accounts clearly show the extent to which we are saving people’s lives and contributing to the welfare of society, so we heartily welcome any investigation of our work. The reports are not exaggerated in any way and as a rule are written by the person involved about what actually occurred. Those who cannot physically write dictate their accounts to a third person. Names and addresses are given in the account as completely as possible, so anyone who may have a question is welcome to visit and ask themselves.
     We press forward with the immense goal of helping to reconstruct Japan, and it is truly deplorable that there are rash individuals who would impede our work, either knowingly or unknowingly. I struggle to find the words to describe how to evaluate the slanderous way these people seek to crush a way of healing that is so much more superior to other existing healing treatments, that is able to save human beings from disease, the greatest misfortune of all humanity. The public and private sectors should rather be encouraging our efforts.
     As knowledge about and the practice of Johrei spread more widely, it will become evident that all forms of disease, even those that medical science finds difficult to cure such as tuberculosis and contagious diseases, will gradually decrease, so the birth of a disease-free Japan will not be that difficult an undertaking at all. The current efforts to hinder our salvation work are nothing more than a social evil that postpones the appearance of a healthy Japan. We pray that our opponents awaken to the error of their ways as soon as possible. 

 Hikari, Issue 3, March 30, 1949
translated by cynndd

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A little over half of the content of “Naoru n Da” previously appeared as “It Can Be Cured” in True Health, page 124, 1987.