through the valley of the shadow of death: a conversation about mary doria russell's "the sparrow"

it begins, as these things often do, in the dark.

a kind of dark that is not night but suspension, the air tight and spent, the press of something mineral, something permanent, on your skin. the world outside — if it can be called that — continues. it hums along with the living. traffic moves. someone stirs sugar into coffee. but here, underground, time is less a passage and more a pause. not peace. not chaos. simply the middle distance between the two.

and then a voice. firm. masculine. unmistakable: “come forth.”

against all reason, you do. not out of desire. not out of faith. because the body moves before the soul consents. you inhale, a rusted gasp, and the air cuts. your hands, stiff and unaccustomed, rise to tear cloth from skin. you are breathing now, standing now, but the grave has not surrendered you. it only widened its reach. you are alive in name alone.

this is not resurrection. it is survival.

in the sparrow, mary doria russell gives us a man who survives. not a hero, not a martyr. a man. emilio sandoz returns to earth the way some people return to the scene of a fire. walking but marked, not entirely intact. he has witnessed something unnamable on the planet rakhat. he has lived through it. this is the problem.

the mission had been noble, or so they said. faith, reason, curiosity. all the words institutions use when they are trying to cover the cost of damage. and emilio, trained in language and god, had agreed. perhaps he even believed. what he returns to, years later, is a body broken and a silence louder than any sermon.

“not magdalene,” he says. “lazarus.”

there are two kinds of return. one is clean. one is not.

mary magdalene, in the story, is the clean return. she is the symbol of grace given and received, of sin washed and dried. a woman with a past — they always say it that way — who sees god and is seen by him in return. her demons gone. her face upturned. her name called and answered.

lazarus, on the other hand, comes back different. he is not offered a second chance. he is dragged into a second act. called not by invitation but by declaration. and when he emerges, he still smells of the tomb. he still wears the clothes of the dead. his miracle is not joy, but shock. he lives, and yet, you can feel the silence in the room when he walks in.

emilio sandoz identifies with lazarus because he, too, has been returned to life. not healed, not redeemed, not forgiven. simply put back into a world that no longer fits him. and the world, for its part, has no idea what to do with a man like him.

they look at him with the quiet horror reserved for survivors.

this is the discomfort of the unredeemed. not just to live with pain, but to live in a way that unsettles the myth of closure.

what the sparrow does, and what russell does so precisely, is dismantle the narrative of triumph. she shows us what survival really is: breath without conviction. a body moving forward because backward isn’t an option. the priest who can no longer pray. the man who cannot forget what the others will never understand.

and there is a moment — fleeting, brutal — when he says it aloud: “god is not merciful. god is not kind. god is not good. god is just.” the sentence lands like a door closing. final. airless. absolute.

to survive is not always to be saved.

what happens to lazarus after the miracle is never told. maybe he went back to his home, his sisters, the kitchen table. maybe he could still laugh. maybe not. the text doesn’t say. it doesn’t need to. the image is enough: a man, blinking in the sun, with dirt still under his nails.

this is where emilio lives now: in that silence after the miracle, in that breath that does not bring relief.

and that is what marks him. not just what happened on rakhat (although that, too) but what didn’t happen after. no absolution. no clear path. only endurance. the slow, unrewarded work of continuing.

magdalene was transformed. lazarus was dragged.

redemption, if it comes, does not arrive on time. it does not announce itself with light or clarity. it is slow. if it is coming for emilio, it has not arrived yet.

and so he exists in that in-between. not a sinner, not a saint. not dead, not entirely alive. like the space between heartbeat and echo. like a man who walks into a room and makes everyone remember what it means to suffer.

in the sparrow, survival is the wrong word. what we are left with is something closer to aftermath.

because to return is not the same as to belong. and some stories, the real ones, the quiet ones, the ones that don’t sell well in the church bulletin, are about what happens when you come back and everything has moved on and you haven’t.