I have just read two books that comprise a complete story, The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. In The Sparrow, incontrovertible evidence of life on another planet is discovered, and in traditional missionary spirit, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) sends a ship to meet the aliens. This book has many of the qualities I look for in a science fiction novel: an interesting alien culture, complex characters with mixed motivations, a hazardous space journey, and at least one love story. As a bonus, this novel has at its center Father Emilio Sandoz, a priest who loves being a Jesuit because he values scholarship and enjoys service work. In the course of making first contact with the aliens, he also becomes, for the first time in his life, mystically aware of God's presence.
At that point, his life takes a turn for the worse: everyone on the expedition dies but him, he is maimed by the aliens and enslaved in a brothel, and in the course of his "rescue" by another party from Earth, he kills an alien child who had acted as his interpreter and to whom he had become attached.
The novel moves back and forth between two timelines: the mission itself, and the aftermath, when Father Sandoz is back on Earth and a group of his fellow priests are trying both to understand how the mission went so terribly wrong (a mission gone so terribly wrong is another marker of a good sci-fi novel, to my mind), and to help him heal.
The question at the center of the book, of course, is the age-old dilemma of the faithful: how can one continue to have faith in a God who allows such terrible things to happen?
Russell does a good job of exploring this old chestnut. Her characters seem to me to be realistic in their various faiths or lack thereof, and her priests are a diverse lot who are drawn to the priesthood for various reasons and bring to it various gifts. The novel ends at the moment when Father Sandoz first begins to believe in the possibility that he might heal from the trauma he has suffered, but his relationship to his faith is ambiguous and the future of his relationship with God unclear. It's a good ending, an ending that hints at hope without offering pat answers to unanswerable questions.
If only the sequel were as good (sequels that aren't as good are a science fiction staple, too). Russell says in a note at the end of the book that she wrote the sequel because she couldn't bear the place she had left Father Sandoz at the end of the first novel. So she wrote a sequel in which, faithless, he leaves the priesthood but falls in love with a woman and her young daughter. The Jesuits are meanwhile planning a return trip to the alien world, and the Father Superior of the Society, as well as the Pope, believe it is God's will for Sandoz to return there. Priests who were on the original mission reported that they came to believe Sandoz was a saint, and Russell does a good job of portraying a church hierarchy that thinks it might have a saint on its hands and therefore desperately needs that saint not to denounce God, leave the Church, and find happiness in marriage.
Unfortunately, at this point Russell has written herself into a corner: the priests keep saying, "Sandoz, you have to go back!" and Sandoz keeps saying, "There's no way I'd go back." I was on the edge of my seat waiting for Russell to come up with a twist that would make a man who was beginning to be happy again after suffering unspeakable losses turn his back on that happiness less than three weeks from his wedding date to return to a place that had only brought him suffering.
Alas, Russell solves this little plotting problem by having some other characters commit an act so out of character and so mean of spirit that I didn't get over it for a good 200 pages. "Father Guiliani," I kept saying to myself, "simply wouldn't do that." It nearly killed the book for me.
The book rallies for awhile, however, before taking a deadly nosedive into the tarmac in the final chapters, when something happens so wondrous that it could only be the hand of God, and it is therefore revealed that every horrible thing suffered by every good person for two books and a thousand pages was, in fact, all a part of God's plan leading them to this marvelous thing which could not have come about otherwise.
Blech.
And I say again, blech.
I guess the thumbscrews were getting pretty tight for Russell by the end of the second book: after giving Sandoz a taste of happiness and some hope for healing, she rips him away from the woman he loves, her daughter whom he loves perhaps even more, and the unborn child he does not even know he has fathered, and sends him back to a planet where he discovers--well, let's just say that Russell has a gift for getting her readers and characters thinking, "Well, at least things can't get worse," and then springing something so terrible and unforeseen that one is impressed even as one recoils and weeps.
So she wraps it all up as a gift from God with a big shiny ribbon. And it feels false in a way almost nothing else in her writing has seemed false. Unfortunately, this final false note resonates back through the entire text, making it all taste a bit off in retrospect.
Christians and Jews--Russell was one and is now the other--get all knotted up about this question of suffering and what it says about the nature of God. Reconciling our suffering with our faith in a loving God is challenging indeed. I believe it's an unresolvable paradox; every attempt I've ever seen to resolve it has either been sophistry or has diminished God in an unacceptable way. This is why I avoid, at all costs, making any pronouncements on the nature of God. I have an abhorrence of theology.
Russell could benefit from a mixing in a little taste of Buddhism with her Catholic past and her Jewish present. Some of the people in my Spiritual Formation group have become interested in Buddhism, and as a result I've read some books on it recently, including When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. I was interested in the topic because I had a very difficult winter and I could not make sense of it. We moved on very short notice; the baby hit a difficult stage; my partner injured his back and could help with neither the unpacking nor the baby. I thought I ought to be able to cope with this, that the combination of years in therapy and faith ought to allow me to face this challenge with equanimity and poise.
Instead, I was a screaming, stressed-out, weeping wreck.
Chodron helped. She says that everyone has a limit:
My aunt reaches her limit when I move a lamp in her living room. My friend completely loses it when she has to move to a new apartment. My neighbor is afraid of heights. It doesn't really matter what causes us to reach our limit. The point is that sooner or later it happens to all of us. (14)
She also said, and this is what most helped me, and would help Emilio Sandoz in his horrible cycle of loss and recovery, loss and recovery:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. The come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. (8)
Supposedly, people were always asking the Buddha to tell them about the nature of God. And he always refused. He said it was as if a person were bleeding to death, and the Buddha said, "I can heal you," and the person said, "OK, but first teach me all about what blood is and how it is made and how it circulates and how the healing process works...."
I don't want to imply that Buddhists have all the answers; Chodron in particular is contemptuous of people who believe in God. She says theism "means thinking there's always going to be a babysitter available with we need one" (39). (I guess we're the babies.) I would answer Chodron by pointing out that people like Russell are struggling faithfully with the dilemma that knowing God exists does not mean there's always a babysitter available when you need one, there's not always a hand to hold, that we are not always taken care of. It's just too bad that Russell's answer is ultimately both familiar and unsatisfactory.
Posted by Su Penn at April 19, 2003 11:14 AM | TrackBack