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THE SPARROW: THINKING MAKES IT SO
Matthew 10:29
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them
will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.
The central concern of the book "The Sparrow," by Mary Russell Doria, is not so much the existence or non-existence of a maker, but the make-up of the maker as far as we can understand the planning and purpose (or lack thereof) involved. When the sparrow falls, what is its relationship to the overall scheme of things? Was the development of something else dependent on its demise or is destiny no more than bad luck, timing, or the simple running down of the finite molecular machine?
The Bible assures us that The Maker witnesses such population changes but I, for one, find no consolation in that spin. I don't mind a relaxed deity; what unsettles me is the possibility that there is no goal; no direction in which all sentient beings, finally illuminated, must point themselves. If indeed, there is no "mind" behind all this bustling activity, or worse, the "mind" doesn't have a plan or give a damn, then people like Emilio
Sandoz (the protagonist Jesuit Sparrow of this book), and me on certain days, have a problem.
Look, we all auto-hypnotize ourselves to get through life. We cling to beliefs and precepts as a way of soothing basic anxiety; trick is not to have the ideological ivy cling so desperately to the tree that when the tree falls, the ivy is bereft of options in terms of future supports. Padre Sandoz was shocked into despair by events that eventually transpired on the extraterrestrial terrain he and his crew and surrogate family had adopted as second home. What he found on the new planet was a social system brutally
similar to the one he had left behind. The aliens were no better or worse than earthlings. Theirs was a world wherein, just as on the planet Earth, shit happens and bad things happen to good people. Nothing new under the sun (or in the case of this particular planet, three suns).
He had, as people often do when in the grip of a strong idea or faith, interpreted circumstances and coincidences in the context of God's will. The mission into space was based on the conviction that they were among the special people selected by divine will to carry forth the human race to new realms. The trigger event, as construed by the architect of the Jesuit mission, was the celestial music so extraordinarily beautiful that it
must be a sign--a beckoning nudge from God to follow.
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