JMJ. The vast majority of my reading in religious matters falls into the apologetics category. I usually have little interest in reading about the saints since I can so seldom see myself in their lives. St. Augustine is a notable exception. He was a scoundrel for much of his lifetime just as I have been an unmitigated sinner for much of mine. Not to say that I am not now--I am--it's just that now I'm making an honest effort to change that.
I just read a book, though, called A Song For Nagasaki by Paul Glynn. I can't recommend it highly enough. It details the life of Dr. Takashi Nagai, a Buddhist Japanese physician who found Christ prior to the second world war. Only the second radiologist in Nagasaki, Japan, Nagai was already diagnosed and dying of radiation-induced leukemia before the fateful day in 1945 when America unleashed hell above the Catholic cathedral of his home town.
Dr. Nagai's two children were mercifully visiting their grandmother in the next town but his wife was incinerated in the blast of the second atomic bomb. He found her charred bones and ashes in what was left of their home along with her fused rosary which she must have been praying at the time. Miraculously, he never questioned God's plan for him, he never questioned God's mercy, nor did he ever question the manner of his own death which found him at the age of 43.
If ever a person suffered his purgatory here on earth, this must have been one. Dr. Takashi Nagai is truly a saint for one to model one's life after and not a day goes by that I don't seek his intercession before the throne of our Lord whose simple servant he was. But don't take my word for it, read the book. There are few lives like the one found within those pages.
