Prayer Center excerpt
"Seimeisan, set amid bamboo and cedar forests on a mountain overlooking rice fields and farms, opened in 1987. It offers retreat facilities and short courses aimed at furthering interreligious dialogue and inculturation. Among these are courses on "ikebana", the Japanese art of flower arranging, and how it could complement Christian liturgy, and on the Japanese tea ceremony and its kinship to the Catholic Mass. Prayers are held five times daily, with the locations and times determined based on the season and the rising and setting of the sun. Catholic priests and nuns, Japanese students, senior citizens and heads of local Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines are frequently seen among the hundreds of people that visit Seimeisan each year. "One of the goals of this center is to reacquaint Japanese with their own belief systems and then demonstrate how this belief in an ultimate reality is found in Christianity also," Father Sottocornola said. Noting the various levels of the Zen rock garden, a popular spot at Seimeisan, he explained that beneath the vicissitudes of life and the multiple layers of human existence there lies a rock-bottom foundation, God. Facilitating experience of ultimate reality or interreligious encounter, though, is only part of Seimeisan's mission, according to Father Sottocornola. "We do not want to isolate people from the world and its concerns, but rather to bring people into contact with the true essence of the world, God, and (for them), then to share this discovery with others," he said."
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