THE SPARROW
[This contains spoilers for The Sparrow]
I first read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell when I was in 9th grade. It quickly became my favorite book. I recommended it to everyone. Those who actually took my recommendation tended to respond by saying, “That’s your favorite book?!” These skeptics could not dim my love for it.
As I began to publicly discern a call to Holy Orders, I described The Sparrow as the book that made me want to become a priest. Seminary classmates and folks on discernment committees who’d read it tended to say, “That book made you want to become a priest?”
They responded that way because (spoiler alert) most of the priests die in this book. It’s not a big spoiler, though, because The Sparrow tells its tale in dual timeline. We first meet our protagonist, Fr. Emilio Sandoz, upon his return to Earth after a multi-decade journey to the planet Rakhat. The following chapter tells the story about how and why Fr. Sandoz and the rest of his party came to venture through the stars to Rakhat in the first place. This flashforward/flashback method of storytelling can be disconcerting at first, but it heightens the mystery. What happened to Emilio on that foreign planet? Why is he the only survivor?
Over the course of the story we meet a slew of refreshingly normal Jesuit priests. In 2019, we meet D.W. Yarborough, a one-eyed retired fighter pilot with a helluva Texas drawl and the ability to read people to their bones. Emilio Sandoz is a gifted linguist from the slums of San Juan who’s lived all over the world studying languages, but we meet him serving a parish in his hometown neighborhood, breaking up fights and recruiting doctor friends to come set up a free clinic. Enjoying a beer and some sofrito with the engineer who first hears the music that drifts Earthward from another world, Alan Pace is a bit of a snobby jerk. Then again, we’ve all met snobby jerks in our time. These guys make the priesthood look normal, accessible. Even in 2060, Russell gives us characters like John Candotti, who just wants to help the parish kids play basketball. Edward Behr is a gentle widower (and former stockbroker!) who doesn’t shy away from difficult caregiving. These priests play baseball, crack jokes, sing, tell the only Jewish member of the crew what they admire about her religion. They talk about sex and gardening with equal facility. They are clear-eyed about the injustices Russell’s imagined future Earth (she wrote in 1996) faces, and humble as they approach a foreign culture on another world.
And I wanted to be like them. I read the stories of these men (even in Russell’s imagined 2060, the Jesuits are all men) and I thought, “That’s what I want to be like when I grow up.” Intellectual, but down to earth. Well-traveled, but able to build strong relationships in a struggling community. They don’t take themselves too seriously. They are capable of asking the hard questions and facing their mistakes. They respect women. When Jimmy, the only lay single man in the crew traveling to Rakhat, confesses his infatuation with Sofia, the only single woman in the crew, to Emilio, Emilio doesn’t belittle Jimmy’s feelings or shame him. He also points out that Sofia is her own person, who wasn’t included in the crew for Jimmy’s convenience. The two men proceed to have a frank, honest conversation about clerical celibacy and ethical sexuality that continues to form the way I think through sexual ethics today.
I wanted to be like them even when the whole mission started to fall apart. Very quickly after the crew arrives on Rakhat, Alan Pace dies of an unknown cause. An autopsy reveals nothing, and the doctor who performed it wonders if God wanted him dead. Over the course of the rest of the story, the other humans die by violence, having unknowingly set in motion a revolution in Rakhat society. The dominant VaRakhati species captured Emilio, tortured and raped him, and displayed him as a zoo animal. The first thing he did upon being rescued by a second wave of explorers was to kill the VaRakhati child who led the human explorers to his prison. Frs. Candotti, Behr, and the rest of the Jesuits in 2060 do not abandon him. The rest of the world vilifies him, but his brothers in Christ stay with him. Vince Giuliani, Superior General of the Jesuits, leverages his connections to find a safe place for Emilio to heal and recover. Fr. Behr lovingly carries and feeds and cleans him. In the midst of suffering beyond my own imagining, these believers called God “poetry worth dying for,” and they faithfully walked alongside their brother as he turned away from that belief. They persisted with a God they continued to trust was good, despite a mountain of evidence suggesting that He was not safe, and that to be God’s best beloved was a more terrifying future than a transcendent one.
In an Author’s Note, Russell says that the idea for the book came from the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. She felt that his crew got a bad rap; that it was “unfair” to hold them to the standards of today. She wrote the novel to show just how difficult first contact with a truly foreign culture would be, and how easy it would be for even the best intentioned to make mistakes with horrific consequences. And indeed, Sandoz and his crewmates are well-intentioned. They love the VaRakhati, especially the villagers among whom they live. They want to share with them. And so they teach them agriculture, these gatherers, and disrupt VaRakhati society in an irreversible way. They meant no harm.
As a ‘90s teen, this explanation made sense to me. In 2024, it feels hopelessly unrealistic. Taino and other Indigenous scholars, not to mention postcolonial voices from around the world, have revealed document after document showing the unnecessary and intentional cruelty of Columbus’s crew and the Europeans that followed him. They were not well-intentioned men who unfortunately carried smallpox that accidentally halved a population with no natural immunity. They caused deliberate suffering, to the dismay of their contemporaries like St. Bartolomé de las Casas. Which is why, while the sequel Children of God, had less impact on my teenage faith, I’ve come to appreciate it more in adulthood. Father Daniel Iron Horse, a Lakota Jesuit, becomes the architect of a reverse reservation system that stops the violence on Rakhat, inadvertently caused by the first Jesuit visitors many decades before. Fr. Iron Horse’s genius is that it is the violent whose movements need to be constricted, not the victims. The predators, not the prey, are confined to reservation land in his system. What a thought experiment that would be, to imagine a North America in which First Nations remained sovereign, and European-heritage settlers lived on lands reserved for us, our slaughter contained and mitigated by a limited freedom of movement. Fr. Iron Horse imagines this future as a temporary measure, but in our own world we see that the challenges and difficulties arise again. What would happen upon the abolition of the reservations, and the integration of settlers into a mainstream Indigenous society? That’s a book I’d read.
But the genius of The Sparrow duology is not its rich world-building or its vision of music as the connecting force between species and planets in the universe. It is its willingness to take faith in a loving God seriously in the face of abject misery. Russell doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions. Maybe God wanted Alan dead. Maybe God did love Fr. Sandoz best of all, and that is why he suffered most. I haven’t even begun to reckon with the questions from Sofia, the lone Jewish character, left alone and pregnant under a pile of bodies at the end of book 1, and raising an autistic child in hiding on Rakhat before becoming a leader of the revolution in book 2. The faith described by The Sparrow is one that looks suffering directly in the face, that allows for questions and argument with God, and demonstrates that community is the greatest source of solidarity in suffering, and joy in contentment.
I am older now, and less likely to long for a faith like Emilio’s that led to his extensive suffering. But my faith remains in a God whose glory fills the universe, and is with us wherever we go. A God who is big enough to handle our toughest questions, and doesn’t look away in times of suffering. A God who sees every sparrow that falls, and who enfolds every victim within a community that recognizes their value. A God whose poetry speaks in the midst of the worst of our despair. That is the God I serve to this day.
