Children of God (The Sparrow, #2)

by Mary Doria Russell

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? Giuliani asked himself that night. What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it’s not just me.

requiescant in pace.

“God made the world and He saw that it was good,” Sofia’s father had always told her when she complained of some injustice during her brief childhood. “Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect, Sofia. Good.”

“Jesus!” To which the Bishop of Rome replied, with unexpected humor, “No, only the Pope,”

Ha!

“There will be no more graves for you to dig,” the Pope said, and Vincenzo Giuliani heard the voice of prophesy: ambiguous, elusive, sure.

made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul, Your Holiness. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar,” Emilio said in the soft, musical Latin that a young Vince Giuliani had admired and envied when they were in formation together. “Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me.” Sandoz turned away, trembling. “God filled me, and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls, Your Holiness. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was in love with God, and all the children were mine.”

Beautiful

“He hath led me and brought me into darkness, and not into light. He hath set me in dark places as those who are dead forever. And when I cry and I entreat,” Gelasius III recited, eyes knowing and full of compassion, “He hath shut out my prayer! He hath filled me with bitterness. He hath fed me ashes. He hath caused me disgrace and contempt.”

he wanted to hide, to remove himself from whatever was happening in that room, to flee from the awful grace of God. “Let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die,” Giuliani thought,

“St. Ignatius advised that ‘we must never seek to establish a rule so rigid as to leave no room for exception.’

All her life, she had lived among people endowed with a predator species’ anatomy, reflexes, instincts: the grasping feet, the slicing claws, the powerful limbs; the patience to stalk, the cleverness to ambush, the quickness to kill. Selikat had seen what was done to freethinkers, and she did not wish that fate for Hlavin.

He believes Emilio Sandoz is beloved of God.” Danny pursed his lips judiciously. “Like Saint Teresa said: If that’s how God treats His friends, it’s no wonder He’s got so few of them.”

That was when all the children would learn if they’d gotten coal or gifts from La Befana—the Bitch, who had rudely driven the Wise Men away when they stopped in Italy on their way to see the Christ Child.

What now?

“Now there’s a novel approach to parenting! Have two kids, and concentrate on ruining one.”

when the headaches almost blinded him, when his hands hurt so much that he sat laughing in the dark, the pain comic in its intensity.

“Most people, now, they don’t like to go straight to the top, not really. They need to sidle up to a proposition, come at the thing a little off-center. They feel better with a chain of command,” D.W. said, an old Marine squadron commander whose years in the Jesuit order had done nothing to diminish his tendency to think in military terms. “Got a problem, you ask the sergeant. Sergeant might go to a captain he knows. Most folks would have a hell of a time getting up the nerve to bang on the general’s office door, even if he was the nicest fella in the world. Catholicism makes allowances for that in human beings.” He’d smiled then, teeth and eyes askew, the ugliest and most beautiful man she’d ever met. “But the children of Abraham? They look God straight in the face. Praise. Argue! Dicker, complain. Takes a lot of guts to deal with the Almighty like that.”

“Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’,” he said one night, after a few drinks. “Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Perfect Compassion and Perfect Justice.

“Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for,”

Hillel who taught, a century before Jesus, “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.”

“This is a magic box, you know,” Emilio confided then, face grave, eyes alight, as Celestina examined the tiny, perfect flowers that decorated its lid. “You can keep words in it.”

“Try it again,” he said, but he added, “This time, listen with your heart.” In the magical silence of a little girl’s bedroom, they all three heard his words: Ti amo, cara.

Isn’t that what they used to say about the Jesuits? They stood between the world and the Church, and got shot at by both sides.

Your own Pedro Arrupe said that injustice is atheism in action! No human society has ever wrested liberty from its oppressors without violence. Those in power rarely give up privilege voluntarily.

What was it you said at the hearings? ‘If the Runa were to rise against their Jana’ata masters, their only weapon would be their numbers.’ We can change that, Sandoz.”

“I am certainly prepared to provide such technical support,” said Carlo. “What is more important, I would not hesitate to suggest the ideology necessary to wrest liberty, equality and justice from their Jana’ata overlords.” “You wish to rule.” “As a transitional figure only. ‘For all things fade and quickly become legend, soon to be lost in utter forgetting,’ ” Carlo recited, quoting Aurelius grandly.

“There is, nevertheless, a certain appeal to the notion of being immortalized in Runa mythology—as their Moses, perhaps! With you as my Aaron, speaking to Pharaoh.” “So. Not just southern Italy,” Sandoz observed. “Not just Europe, an old whore, corrupted long ago, but a whole virgin planet. Your father will never know, Carlo. He’ll be dead before you return.”

You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.”

The crew of the Giordano Bruno shall not be marooned on the surface of Rakhat!”

Foreshadowing?

“Dutch Reformed agnostic—very different from a Catholic agnostic, mind you.”

Do you know what they call it when a bomb goes off too soon? Premature disassembly.”

As far as his father’s family had come from the squalor and debasement of the reservations, as much as he himself publicly rejected the stereotypes and romance of his Lakota heritage, Daniel Iron Horse had taken secret satisfaction in it. From childhood, he had known himself to be the scion of men who rode with Crazy Horse and Little Big Man of the Oglalas, with Black Shield and Lame Deer of the Miniconjous, with Spotted Eagle and Red Bear of the Sans Arcs, with Black Moccasin and Ice of the Cheyennes, and with Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas—heroes who led the finest light cavalry in history in defense of their families and their land, who had fought to preserve a way of life that valued, above all else, courage, fortitude, generosity and transcendent spiritual vision.

“Power corrupts,” he suggested one day, as they started up the slope to the ring path on one of their earliest walks. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Fear corrupts, not power,” she countered. “Powerlessness debases. Power can be used to good effect or ill, but no one is improved by weakness,” she told him.

“The powerful can more easily cultivate longsightedness. They can be patient—even generous—in the face of opposition, knowing that they will prevail eventually. They do not feel that their lives are futile, because they have reason to believe that their plans will become reality.”

“The sign of a good decision is the multiplicity of reasons for it. If more than one goal is served, then a decision is more likely to be wise—”

“My lady, it was once my belief that when a multiplicity of reasons is sought, the rightness of an act is suspect, that one is trying to justify the unjustifiable. Long ago, I made a decision for which I sought a multitude of reasons. That decision brought me here to you, but I will not know if it was right until I am judged by my God.”

“Look,” she commanded, her arm describing a graceful arc, sweeping from west to east. “And listen,” she said, for all the children, Runa and Jana’ata, were singing. “How can you doubt?”

there were far too many martyrs in Christian hagiography to suit Carlo.

“The noblest kind of retribution,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “is not to become like your enemy.”

“Did y’ever wonder then why Orthodox Jews count lineage through the mother’s ancestry?” Sean asked. “Strange, isn’t it? The entire Old Testament, filled with begats. Twelve tribes for the twelve sons of Jacob. But Jacob had a daughter, too. Remember? Dina. The one who was raped.” There was no reaction from Sandoz. “And yet, there’s no Tribe of Dina. Patrilineage, all through the Torah! Religion is conservative, as y’say. So why? When was it declared that a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother?” “I have always hated the Socratic method,” Sandoz said without heat, but he answered dutifully. “During the pogroms, to legitimize the Cossacks’ bastards.” “Yes, so none of the children would be stigmatized as half-Jew or no Jew a-tall. And good for the rabbis, I say.” Sean had spent a childhood being asked, “What are y’then?” Whatever he answered, the buggers’d laugh. “So. To legitimize the children of rape, when rape was so common the rabbis had to overturn twenty-five hundred years of tradition to cope with

Music entered Isaac’s heart directly and effortlessly. It slipped into his soul like a leaf settling into clear, still water, sinking silkily beneath the shining surface.

Emilio shrugged. “It still took me a while—Christ, what a dumb kid! Anyway, afterward, when they were putting the cast on my arm, I was thinking, How can a son be nothing to a father? Then it hit me, so to speak.” There was a brief bleak smile. “I thought, Well, he’s been telling me I was a bastard all along. I was just too stupid to realize he meant it.”

Emilio took a deep breath, and started again. “See, the thing about all this is, when I finally worked it out, I wasn’t angry, okay? I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t hurt. Well, I was hurt—I mean, the guy put me in the hospital, right? But I swear: my feelings weren’t hurt.” He watched John carefully. “I was relieved. Can you believe that? I was just so fucking relieved”

Emilio said quietly. “I can tolerate a great deal if I just understand why.…

as a parish priest, he had often observed that trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God’s love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

“Sofia, my dear mother,” she wrote, “we have left the garden.”

while his body cooled and she paid the awful debt of love.

“I see the face of a coward, who lives while warriors rot,” he shouted. “I smell the stink of one fit only to eat dung!” “Ah, but dead men have such small appetites, even for dung,” Shetri replied, not unkindly, but with no intention of being drawn into combat with an exhausted youth. He had seen this aggressive terror in so many boys: still reeling from the deaths of fathers, uncles, brothers, and ashamed to be alive. “I am afraid, sir, that I’d have proved a warrior of indifferent conviction and less skill. Instead, I have contrived to live at the expense of no person’s life,” he said, glancing at Taksayu and the other Runa before returning his eyes to the boy’s and adding, “not even my own. If my company displeases you after you’ve eaten and rested in my compound, you may relieve yourself of its inconvenience by leaving.” Befuddled by the soft response, the boy was speechless.

Great way to disarm

Looking at Suukmel’s drawn, gray face, he felt at long last compassion for the fools who expected fairness and sense—in this world, not the next.

“My father was the son of ancient priests, my mother the daughter of petty kings long gone,” he told Suukmel. “A thousand times, their people might have died out. A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.” “And yet they live?” she asked. “Last time I looked,” he said. “I can’t swear to more than that.” “And so might we,” Suukmel replied, with frail conviction.

Nauseated and cotton-mouthed, Sean spent the balance of the flight alternately invoking the Virgin’s intercession and chanting, “Fack, fack, fack,” like a litany, with his eyes closed and his palms stinking.

Ha!

Which is why the first man from the Giordano Bruno to set foot on Rakhat was not Daniel Iron Horse, who was the mission’s superior, or Joseba Urizarbarrena, an ecologist aching for his first glimpse of this new world; not Emilio Sandoz, who knew the place and would react most quickly to danger, or John Candotti, determined to be at his side, in case disaster struck again; nor was it the would-be conquistador Carlo Giuliani or his bodyguard Niccolo d’Angeli. It was Father Sean Fein, of the Society of Jesus, who pushed his way to the front of the queue and exited the lander the moment the hatch opened, stumbling forward a few steps and falling gracelessly to his knees, where he threw up for a good two minutes. They might have hoped for a more auspicious beginning to their stay. Sean at least managed to arrange for the first words spoken by a member of their mission to be a kind of prayer. “Dear God,” he gasped, when things slowed down, “that was a shameful waste of good liquor.”

Ha!