The Sparrow (The Sparrow, #1)

by Mary Doria Russell

subtlety and indirection were not indoor sports in Chicago.

The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters.

He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.

His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived.

settling into the comfort with no more thought than a cat.

“I would have to say that I find God in serving His children. ‘For I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, imprisoned and you came to me.’ ” The words lingered in the air as the fire popped and hissed softly. Sandoz had stopped pacing and stood motionless in a far corner of the room, his face in shadows, firelight glittering on the metallic exoskeletons of his hands. “Don’t hope for more than that, John,” he said. “God will break your heart.” And then he left.

‘God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try,’ ”

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.

“Lord, I believe. Help me in my disbelief.”

After all, 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.

So, while he hoped someday to find his way to a place in his soul that was closed to him now, he was content to be where he was.

“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.”

“Explain this Mass to me!” There was a silence as he sat still, apparently looking at the dinner plates and chicken bones. “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 sacred.”

“Padre, c’è qualcuno che vuol vedervi.”

“Ecco fatto,

Maybe Lazarus was a disappointment to everyone, too.

“No me conoces.”

What a burden men like Sandoz carried into the field. Over four hundred of Ours to set the standard, he thought, and remembered his days as a novice, studying the lives of sainted, blessed and venerated Jesuits. What was that wonderful line? “Men astutely trained in letters and in fortitude.” Enduring hardship, loneliness, exhaustion and sickness with courage and resourcefulness. Meeting torture and death with a joy that defies easy understanding, even by those who share their religion, if not their faith. So many Homeric stories. So many martyrs like Isaac Jogues. Trekking eight hundred miles into the interior of the New World—a land as alien to a European in 1637 as Rakhat is to us now, Giuliani suddenly realized. Feared as a witch, ridiculed, reviled for his mildness by the Indians he’d hoped to gain for Christ. Beaten regularly, his fingers cut off joint by joint with clamshell blades—no wonder Jogues had come to Emilio’s mind. Rescued, after years of abuse and deprivation, by Dutch traders who arranged for his return to France, where he recovered, against all odds. Astonishing, really: Jogues went back. He must have known what would happen but he sailed back to work among the Mohawks, as soon as he was able. And in the end, they killed him. Horribly.

How are we to understand men like that? Giuliani had once wondered. How could a sane man have returned to such a life, knowing such a fate was likely? Was he psychotic, driven by voices? A masochist who sought degradation and pain? The questions were inescapable for a modern historian, even a Jesuit historian. Jogues was only one of many. Were men like Jogues mad? No, Giuliani had decided at last. Not madness but the mathematics of eternity drove them. To save souls from perpetual torment and estrangement from God, to bring souls to imperishable joy and nearness to God, no burden was too heavy, no price too steep. Jogues himself had written to his mother, “All the labors of a million persons, would they not be worthwhile if they gained a single soul for Jesus Christ?” Yes, he thought, Jesuits are well prepared for martyrdom. Survival, on the other hand, could be an intractable problem. Sometimes, Vincenzo Giuliani suspected, it is easier to die than to live.

“The faster we go, the closer we approach the speed of light,” George explained again patiently, “and the faster time will roll by on the Earth clock. At our peak velocity, halfway through the voyage, it will be our impression that one year is passing on Earth for every three days spent on the ship. Of course, on Earth, if anyone knew what we’re up to, it would seem that time on the ship slowed down so that each day takes four months to pass.

That’s relativity for you. It depends on your point of view.”

“I am not a complete jerk,” he informed the table formally, and having caught their attention with that, he assured them, “but I could be if I made an honest effort.”

“Derech agav,”

“yeish arba-esrei achshav.”

“Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.” She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, “They’ve all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt.

Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and—well, the rest is none of your business.” “But people change,” he said quietly. “Precisely. 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.”

“Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest’s vows by jeering at him when he can’t live up to them, always and forever.”

What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”

the clearest description of the Pearl of Great Price: a humaneness beyond sexuality, love beyond loneliness, sexual identity grounded in faithfulness, courage, generosity. And ultimately, a transcendent awareness of creation and Creator…

We are what we fear in others, Edward thought, and wondered how Voelker spent his time off.

“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.”

“Hijo de mi alma,”

“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.”

No less an observer of the human condition than Jesus once said, “Wide is the gate and broad is the path that leads to destruction, and many go that way.”

try to keep my mind stretched around both experiences of God: the transcendent, the intimate. And then,” he said, grinning briefly, “there are the days when I think that underneath it all, God has got to be a cosmic comedian.” Anne looked at him, brows up. “Anne, the Good Lord decided to make D.W. Yarbrough a Catholic, a liberal, ugly and gay and a fair poet, and then had him born in Waco, Texas. Now I ask you, is that the work of a serious Deity?”

If, instead of assuming that he was meditating on the glory of God or synthesizing some new and closely reasoned model of Ruanja grammar, anyone had asked him directly what he was thinking about, he would have said, without hesitation, “I was thinking that I could really use a beer.” A beer and a ball game on the radio to listen to with half an ear as he worked, that would have been perfection. But even lacking those two elements of bliss, he was and knew himself to be completely happy.

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 sense of being engulfed—saturated and entranced—had inevitably passed. No one exists like that for long. He was still staggered by the memory of it, could feel sometimes the tidal pull in some deep stratum of his soul. There had been times when he could not finish any prayer—could hardly begin, the words too much for him. But the days had passed and become more ordinary, and even that he felt to be a gift.

Scent: capricious and enduring, vanguard of taste, instrument of vigilance, essence of intimacy and recollection—scent was the spirit of the world, Hlavin Kitheri sang.

This was, he thought, the first time that celibacy would truly rob him of something. Before, he was aware of the clarity, the singleness of purpose, the concentration of energy, the gifts bestowed by the discipline.

A time to ratify or to repudiate a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and in full understanding. A time to weigh the extraordinary and spiritual and fathomless beauty that God had shown him against the ordinary and worldly and incalculable sweetness of human love and family.

As an anthropologist, she had loved the fossil Neandertals she studied with a ferocity that embarrassed her, considered them maligned and misunderstood because they were ugly. For her, their browridges and heavy bones receded into insignificance in comparison with their care for the infirm among them and their loving burial of the many children who died around the age of four. Anne had almost wept one day, in a Belgian museum, when it came to her that these children had probably died in springtime, replaced at the breast by younger siblings while still too small to withstand the rigors of the leanest season of the year without a mother’s milk. What were physical differences, when one knew that such children were buried with flowers on boughs of evergreen?

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,” Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. “ ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ” “But the sparrow still falls,” Felipe said.

“Aeschylus?” Wordlessly, Giuliani pointed out the passage, and Emilio studied it a while, slowly translating the Greek in his mind. Finally, he said, “ ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ ”

Old joke. Three Catholic priests are having dinner: a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit. Suddenly the lights go out. The Franciscan says, “Let us welcome Sister Darkness and wait patiently for Brother Sunlight to return.” The Dominican says, “God gives us the darkness of ignorance so that we might, by contrast, discern the light of truth.” The Jesuit finds a flashlight and goes downstairs to flip the breaker.

And there will always be fundamental existential questions for each generation of human beings to answer. What is a life worth living, and what is a life wasted, and why? What is worth dying for, what is worth living for, and why? What shall I teach my child to value, and what shall I urge that child to avoid, and why? What am I owed by others and what do I owe others, and why? Each human culture provides a different set of answers to those questions, but deity is nearly always embedded in the Why.

quarum sine auspico hic liber in lucem non esset editas

The central theme is an exploration of the risks and beauties of religious faith, If there isn’t a God, then Emilio Sandoz is all alone. And yet he’s terrified of the God he thinks he has discovered. But the story also revolves around the theme of family. One of the things I noticed after the story was finished was that all the main characters are childless, and yet they create a family for themselves, They relate to one another as son and daughter, brother and sister, uncle and aunt, grandparent and grandchild. It seems to me that this kind of spiritual kinship is tremendously important to all the people in this book. And the fact that they don’t have close genetic kin—they have no children to leave on Earth—gives them a kind of wistful freedom. Anne and George would have made terrific parents but they’re childless. Emilio, Jimmy, and Sofia become their surrogate kids. Those ties—that spiritual tension—was every bit as strong and resilient as genetic ties—perhaps even stronger.

Maybe it’s “Even if you do the best you can, you still get screwed.” We seem to believe that if we act in accordance with our understanding of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But in doing so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to. Emilio has kept his end of a bargain that he made with God, and he feels betrayed. He believes he has been seduced and raped by God, that he’s been used against his will for God’s own purpose. And I guess that’s partly what I’m doing with this book. I wanted to look at that aspect of theology. In our world, if people believe at all, they believe that God is love, God is hearts and flowers, and that God will send you theological candy all the time. But if you read Torah, you realize that God has a lot to answer for. God is a complex personality. I wanted to explore that complexity and that moral ambiguity. God gives us rules but those are rules for us, not for God.

What do you want readers to get out of this book? MDR: That you can’t know the answer to questions of faith but that the questions are worth asking and worth thinking about deeply.