![]() ![]() 10 In these theologies, we see the difference between an ambiguous knowledge of God’s general action, which will be completed in the future and for which Sandoz now struggles in the present (celibacy), and a certainty that God is enacting Sandoz’s present specifically for some ambiguous future (providence). Both theologies assert God’s action in the world, “that God in the universe, making sense of things,” but they represent very different philosophies of what God does and how God does them. But even when he first announces prophetically, “Start planning the mission,” 9 Sandoz does not know what this will mean for the future if he is right nor does he entertain the notion that he could be wrong. And presently, the strongest reality of God in his life is an “awareness.” So, trusting in divine providence, Sandoz struggles to define his present reality as meaningful, as God’s unfolding plan. There are, then, two particular theologies of “meaning” or two ways in which Sandoz interprets reality theologically: first, divine providence-Deus vult-and, second, celibacy, in which Sandoz finds himself living in the present for the sake of some ambiguous meaningfulness that he hopes will be realized in the future. It is an active choice, not simply the absence of opportunity.” If Sandoz states a loose definition of what he thinks celibacy is, it is “that we hope to reach a point, spiritually, that makes the struggle meaningful.” 7 For Sandoz, celibacy brings to his life a “transcendent awareness of creation and Creator.” 8 5 It is also a struggle: “Celibacy is not the same as deprivation. The goal of the chaste life of a celibate priest like Sandoz is not the repression or suppression of sexual desire but, rather, a reorganization and subordination of that desire to his responsibilities as a priest it is aiming his life at a single goal. He becomes a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, a celibate, and as such, Sandoz takes a vow that prevents him from marrying and commits him to the virtue of chastity. ![]() 4 The search for greater certainty in this meaning becomes his life’s mission. 3 As a troubled adolescent, Sandoz collided with the Jesuits but eventually discovers a certain degree of meaning for his life because of their teachings. The protagonist, Father Emilio Sandoz, is by ordination a “priest in perpetuity” ( sacerdos in aeternum), and by nature, perhaps, a priest with rough edges. This conclusion locks the characters into an expectable trap: When things begin to go awry, the Deus of Deus vult becomes a monster, and by end of the novel, the characters’ disillusionment with this God is similar to that of Nada in the final part of Albert Camus’s play State of Siege when he says, “One day you’ll find out for yourselves that man is nothing and God’s face is hideous!” 2 1 They are dealing with divine providence, with God exercising God’s will in their present reality as it happens. Soon, the characters come to realize that like the “turtle on a fencepost,” they have been deposited in this story by some outside force, and thus, the Deus ex machina becomes Deus vult (God wills it). ![]() But this seeming predictability is what creates the book’s hook the characters themselves begin to address this absurd “falling into place”-is it explicable as divine providence or as a series of interconnected coincidences? And as these questions plague the characters, we readers are also not clued into what is really happening. The story begins with a literal case of Deus ex machina (God from the machine), as the plans for a secret Jesuit mission to the newly discovered planet Rakhat fall into place with all of the predictability of a bad children’s story. ![]() Like many interesting stories, then, The Sparrow allows readers of any faith-position to meditate on how meaning subsists-or doesn’t-in life, suffering, and death, forcing us to come to grips with the locus of meaning, be it objective (meaning as subsistent, that is, in God) or subjective (the thing in itself). But beyond this, it suggests interesting, and perhaps surprising, questions of theodicy, from the epistemological challenges to revelation to the insurmountable evil that swallows up all hope by the story’s end. The novel is a theological meditation on the classic question of evil. The Sparrow relates the discovery of and Christian mission to a distant planet that emanates a kind of singing, the melodies of which first attract the earthlings. A few years ago I read The Sparrow, an interesting, rather heady first novel by Mary Doria Russell. ![]()
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