Happy New Year!
I am Fr. Paul A. Kunori OCD. I am now serving the Kanazawa Hirosaka church. One of the faithful in charge of church’s HP asked me to write an article every two months. So let me introduce myself at first.
I was born in Yokosuka, the United States Naval Base in Kanagawa Prefecture after the World War II. In my family there were my parents, four brothers and a grandma who passed away when I was four years old.
My family belongs to the Buddhist Amitabha Sect. The chief priest of Buddhist temple near my house used to come to hold a memorial service once a month. The children had to sit on the floor in Japanese fashion hearing the priest chant a sutra. Fortunately this devotion continued only in my elementary school days.
In Sophia University I studied philosophy for a long time (about 13 years including study years in Germany). In my adolescence I was deeply worried about the meaning of life so that I entered the department of philosophy to get an answer. However, if I look back on the past, I could not get the answer from philosophy. When I was studying philosophy in the master’s course, a sister forced me to attend a Bible class of Fr. Klaus Riesenhuber, a German Jesuit. After that, I came to participate in his various classes, retreats and Zen meditations, as often as I can. You could say I spared much more time to attend his religious activities than classes and seminars of philosophy.
After two years of my baptism I joined Society of Jesus. But I left there soon because of my inexperience. After I was a teacher in a missionary school for a few years, I entered the Discalced Carmelite Order through an encounter with Fr. Augustine I. Okumura OCD, for my desire to follow Jesus Christ radically was not extinguished. Now I am filled with a feeling of thanks to God.
After my ordination I served Kaminoge Church (Tokyo). Then I went to Spain to study Spiritual Theology. After I returned to Japan, I lived in Tokyo (Kaminoge) for several years, in Kyoto (Uji) for three years, and in Nagoya (Hibino) for six years. In 2017 I moved to Kyoto (Uji) again. But this May I was all of a sudden transferred to Kanazawa.
Anyway, I would like to devote myself willingly to God and to Christ Church to my last breath.
Fr. Paul A. Kunori OCD