“They went so that they might come to know and love God’s other children.”
This was a fascinating book that asks, “What if Jesuit missionaries were the first to travel to another world and encounter alien life?” The title is based on the passage from Matthew 10:29, “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.” So it’s more than a story about exploring the cosmos but about trying to find meaning and faith in the midst of suffering.
And what these Jesuits suffered…I’ll just say it’s Rated-R intense.
The central idea of not only this book but this series, of God having “other children” on other planets, is one I think a lot about. Thanks to space telescopes like Hubble, Kepler and now TESS, we know that nearly every star in our galaxy has at least two planets. Most have quite a bit more. Of course, we haven’t found one yet that has life, and who knows if any exoplanets have life, but it is faulty reasoning to conclude we never will.
(Side note: I happen to agree that a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that God only made life on Earth. It’s just shortsighted to state this as settled fact.)
We have to ask ourselves, what if God made other beings that made their own civilizations? What should the Church do? And what happens when you put well-meaning priests into the fray?
I haven’t yet seen Silence, about the Jesuit priests who face persecution in 17th century Japan. But from everything I gather, there is a lot of similar themes between that movie and this book.
“There is no form of death or violence that Jesuit missionaries have not met.”
Suffering, however, is not the end of the story for Emilio Sandoz, the book’s central character. Indeed, this book is not even the end of the story. I’m currently reading the second book in the series, Children of God. So I would definitely recommend reading the two novels back-to-back.
There’s a number of theological angles in this series I could highlight or pick on. But the main thing is that it got me thinking: how far am I willing to take the words of Christ? What am I willing to sacrifice and suffer through? And what are my own answers in the face of suffering?
“He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.”
Ultimately, everyone has to come up with their own answers to these questions. You end up “fearing” something. You’re afraid of what a godless universe dishes out at you, or afraid of what you become, or you’re afraid of impersonal forces like Fate. Or, if you believe the words of the Bible, you fear God, but in a wholly different way than you might be afraid of pain.