What to read when you're recovering from surgery

As I was headed to the doctor two weeks ago (with a hunch that she would put me in the hospital), I stopped at the mailbox at the end of the driveway. My package from amazon.com had arrived. It contained a set of DVDs of The Vicar of Dibley and a novel. I began reading the novel in the hospital. I started watching the DVDs after I got home and, sad to say, the Vicar of Dibley's jokes began to wear thin on me after about four episodes. Your mileage may vary.

But the book has proved to be quite the choice during my recovery. It is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, published in 1996 (New York: Fawcett Books, 408 pp.). Technically it's science fiction; as you see by my profile I am a science fiction fan -- Return of the Jedi is one of my favorite movies (not for the blaster battles, but for Luke's struggle to understand his father and to deal with his own dark side). But The Sparrow is about a lot more than science fiction.

In a way, it kind of takes the premise of Contact and runs in a whole different direction with it. Sometime around 2019, radio signals are received from somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. It turns out the signals are music. There is much excitement in the scientific community about this. And then a private group decides to launch a secret expedition to find the senders of the music.

And who is this private group? Think for a minute. Who were some of the great explorers of North America, around the seventeenth century, who are still around today? The Jesuits. Yes, the Jesuits decide to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri. My first reaction was, in this day and age, if any "Christian" organization decided to do such a thing, the only ones that would have that kind of money would be the televangelists. I can see Brother Billy Bob Whoosis on tv doing a big fund raising telethon to raise money to bring the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens of Alpha Centauri. But the book makes a quite logical case for the Jesuits doing this: their long history of intellectual inquiry and exploration. The author makes it all somehow make sense. In my hometown, the Jesuits operate an outstanding high school and a well-known university, so even though I am not a Catholic, I am well aware of their reputation.

So, a team of four Jesuit priests and four laypeople go to Alpha Centauri, and they do find intelligent life there. From the beginning of the novel (the book is arranged in flashbacks), we understand that only one priest survived the mission, and he has been badly injured and traumatized by what happened on the planet. The book is his story. But it's not just about a science fiction expedition to another planet. It's about one man's faith journey and how he comes to a deeper relationship with God -- and it's not all wonderful. He is a broken man. Somehow, starting to read the book as I began to heal from my surgery, I could identify with him.

So -- I commend this book to you. I haven't finished it yet, but it is powerful reading, and I don't think the ending will let me down.

Jesuits in outer space. Who woulda thunk it?

Pastor Kathy