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John Candotti had once waded into a street fight simply because he thought the odds were too lopsided. He got his big nose broken for his trouble and the guy he helped wasn’t notably grateful. Still, it was the right thing to do. No matter how badly Sandoz stumbled on Rakhat, John thought, he needs a friend now, so what the hell? It may as well be me.
“Sometimes,” he told her, leaning forward over the table, speaking without realizing how it would sound, “I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present.”
She could think of dozens of things to say: that nobody can make anyone else love them, that half the world’s misery was wanting someone who didn’t want you, that unavailability was a powerful aphrodisiac,
“Well. They’ve got radio. That implies vacuum tubes at least, right?” “No,” George disagreed. “Vacuum tubes were actually kind of a fluke. You could just as easily go straight to solid state. But they would have to understand electricity.” There was a short pause, everyone chewing on the ideas, the only sound that of the music as Emilio slowed it down and repeated sections, correcting his notes. “And chemistry, for sure,” George continued. “They’d have to know something about metals and nonmetals, conductors. Microphones need carbon or some kind of variable resistor. Batteries—zinc and lead.”
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Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.
When your great-grandparents got on the boat from Europe, they may as well have been going to another planet. They left everyone behind, too!
He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers, he thought in the darkness.
Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. once told him, “Son, sometimes it’s enough just to act less like a shithead.
“I believe in God the way I believe in quarks,” she said coolly. “People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did.”
“You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they’re religious. I do what I do,” Anne said, biting off each word, “without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much.”
“Well, folks, where I come from the only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos,”
“Kinda spooky, ain’t it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own.”
What she knew of Catholicism was repellent, with its persecutions, its focus on death, on martyrdom, its central symbol an instrument of Roman criminal justice, appalling in its violence. In the beginning, it was an act of heroic self-control to work with Sandoz: a Spaniard, dressed for mourning, heir to the Inquisition and the expulsion, the representative of a pirate religion that took the bread and wine of Shabbat and turned it into a cannibalistic rite of flesh and blood.
“Consider the Star of David,” he said quietly. “Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space.” His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. “I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made
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There were Jews who believed that God is in the world, active, purposeful. After the Holocaust, it was difficult to sustain such an idea. Certainly her own life had taught her that prayers for deliverance go unheard,
Once an air squadron commander, he knew there were many things one could not control when engaged in battle, and that knowledge dictated an iron-willed insistence that what could be controlled must be brought to perfection.
Most exciting, in some ways, was that individual Singers came to be recognized, after a time. Of these, the most compelling had a voice of breathtaking power and sweetness, operatic in dimension but so plainly used in hypnotic, graceful chant that the listener hardly noticed its gorgeousness except to think of beauty and of truth. This was the voice of Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, who would one day destroy Emilio Sandoz.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you. Priests differ in their ability to hold themselves to the vow. This is common knowledge, yes? If a priest goes secretly to a woman once a month, he may be stretching his self-control to its limit and he may also be having sex more often than some married men. And yet, the ideal of celibacy still exists for him. And as time goes on, such a priest may come closer and closer to consolidating his celibacy. It’s not that we don’t feel desire. It’s that we hope to reach a point, spiritually, that makes the struggle meaningful.”
“We all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever,” she said. “Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we really truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement.”
People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we’ve had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people.”
When wearing clericals, he did feel as though he had a sign over his head flashing NO LEGITIMATE SEX LIFE. Laypeople assumed they knew something fundamental about him. They had opinions about his life. Without any understanding of what celibacy was about, they found his choice laughable, or sick.
“A good-sized moon keeps a planet’s precession steady enough for stable weather patterns to develop. If there’s open water, moons make tides, and tides breed life.” Anne looked at him, brows up, the question unasked. The naturalist smiled. “Because that’s the way God likes it, Madame.”
“You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love?” she asked him. “You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you.”
ALL OF THEM, in their own ways, prepared that night both for death and for a kind of resurrection. Some confessed, some made love, some slept exhausted and dreamed of childhood friends or long-forgotten moments with grandparents. They all, in their own ways, tried to let their fear go, to reconcile themselves to their lives prior to this night, and to what might come tomorrow.
And when the time came, each of them privately felt a calm ratification of those reconciliations, even as the noise and heat and buffeting built to a terrifying violence, as it seemed less and less likely that the plane would hold together, more and more likely that they’d be burned alive in the atmosphere of a planet whose name they did not know. I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God’s will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.
Those who saw his face as he pushed himself to his feet, laughing and crying, and turned back to them, incandescent, arms flung wide, recognized that they stood witness to a soul’s transcendence and would remember that moment for the rest of their lives. Each of them felt some of the same dizzying exultation as they emerged from the lander, spilling from their technological womb wobbly and blinking, and felt themselves reborn in a new world.
“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”
“Sailing is the perfect antidote for age, Reyes. Everything you do on a sailboat is done slowly and thoughtfully. Most of the time, an old body is entirely capable of doing whatever needs to be done while you’re cruising. And if the sea is determined to teach you a lesson, well, a young back is no more capable than an old one of resisting an ocean, so experience counts more than ever.
“And you’d feel perfectly entitled to be whatever you wanted to be, right? You’re smart, you’re educated, you work hard. You deserve to be who you are, what you are, where you are.” The Father General didn’t reply, but he didn’t deny the observation’s truth. “You know what I’d be, if I weren’t a priest? A thief. Or worse. I was already stealing when Emilio took an interest in me. He knew about some of it, but he didn’t know I was already busting into cars. Nine years old. I would have graduated to grand theft auto before I was thirteen.”
“Look,” Felipe said, caught up now in the stark contrast between his life, Emilio’s life, and the lives of men like Vincenzo Giuliani, who were born to money and position and security, “there are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I’ve been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever—” He stopped talking,
“There is a difference between being responsible and being culpable,” John insisted.
He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God’s love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical,
careful to mimic her own posture as closely as possible.
Maybe that’s what it meant to find God: to see what you have been given, to know divine generosity, to appreciate the large things and the small…
The staff at the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico was about to begin a serious Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) on October 12, 1992, and like many science fiction fans, I wondered what would happen if we found incontestable evidence that there were other sentient species in the universe. And what if it were possible to get to them in a single human lifespan? Who would attempt the mission? It would take an international organization with scientific expertise, the money to back the mission, and a compelling motive to go. What about the Jesuits?
In Children of God, a sequel to The Sparrow,
Science fiction has to be plausible. Real life is not thus handicapped.
I tried not to dwell on technical details of my fictional future because characters in books shouldn’t stop to marvel at things that are ordinary in their world.
I believe that music—the phenomenon that Ursula LeGuin charmingly defined as “a game with pitch and tone and time”—will always appeal to us.
