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The Sparrow
BBC news bulletins carried the story on 1st April: Scientists have created a ‘blueprint' of the genome of a songbird. It could have been an April Fool, but no, it's true, an international research team has compared the genes of a chicken and a Zebra Finch and thereby identified the genetic code for birdsong. A charming story, and a serious one, for it carries the hope of new approaches to speech disorders such as those associated with autism and Parkinson's Disease.
The capacity of song to charm us lies at the heart of one of most disturbing, harrowing and seriously theological books I have ever read. The Sparrow*, by Mary Doria Russell was first published in the UK in 1997 and the following year it won the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction. This isn't a genre with which I'm familiar but last November the book was strongly recommended by someone whose judgement I trust implicitly. As I discovered, a recommendation is all very well, but a health warning might also have been kind. Talking to another friend about my experience of reading The Sparrow, she shuddered to be reminded how the book had affected her and told me she had once given a copy to someone else. His response has stayed with her ever since: This book took me to a place I didn't want to go, he said, in such a way that I had no idea where I was going.
The Sparrow, like the recent Hollywood extravaganza Avatar, is about a mission to another planet. Drawn by the compelling beauty of song-like sounds picked up from Alpha Centauri, a small team of oddly-assorted men and women set out into space in a hollowed-out asteroid, in search of the songsters of Rakhat. The voyage is secretly funded by the Jesuits and Emilio Sandoz SJ is the central character.
In January this year The Times science correspondent Anjana Ahuja wrote a piece entitled What if the aliens decide they don't like us? in which she suggested that scientists might be making a colossal mistake if they decided to contact extraterrestrial life, rather than just listen out for signals of its existence. She quotes an evolutionary biologist who believes that any life 'out there' is likely, having followed a similar evolutionary trajectory to our own, to be as potentially nasty as humankind. She doesn't mention The Sparrow by name, but the terrors she points to are uncannily similar to those explored in the novel.
For all the visual appeal and technical excellence of Avatar, many thoughtful viewers and reviewers were dissatisfied with its simplistic depiction of good and evil. By contrast, the depiction of good and evil in The Sparrow is agonisingly, shockingly, complex. George Monbiot, writing about Avatar in The Guardian, said that the film offers a chilling metaphor for European butchery of the Americas, and the memory of precisely that historic butchery is an inescapable aspect of The Sparrow's challenge and complexity.
But at the heart of the book is an extraordinarily insightful depiction of what happens when a good man's faith, commitment and love are tested, tortured, to destruction. What is faith in the face of such evil? What is hope? Traditional theology has always struggled to answer those questions convincingly, and struggles today more than ever. But spirituality, too, will have to dig very deep to find a meaningful response. Perhaps Cynthia Bourgeault gives us a starting point in her little book Mystical Hope** in which she explores the nature of a hope not tied to outcome, and a hope with a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions. She finds this hope in the Christian scriptures. Hers is not a traditional reading of those scriptures, but it has the ring of deep truth. So too do Richard Holloway's words after visiting the place where six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, were murdered in El Salvador in 1989. He wrote:
We went to the corridor off which lay the Jesuits' cells, streaked with
caked blood. Then to the garden, to the wall against which they
blew their brains out on the little lawn. How could I tell these people,
especially the poor people I met, that they have re-evangelised me?
For I can once again feel the power and beauty and danger of the
Christian gospel.***
Go well
Eley
* The Sparrow published by Black Swan £8.99
** See Bookshelf in LSN Newsletter Spring 2010
*** Quoted in The Incarnation: More Than A Story an article by Joan Puls
