Spiritual Sunday
I’m currently in the process of reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower–an early instance of dystopian climate fiction (or cli-fi, as Dan Bloom calls it)–and am attempting to sort out the protagonist’s theology. Daughter of a pastor, 15-year-old Lauren is developing her own version of God as she struggles for survival in 2024 California, where climate change has decimated society. Water and food are scarce, forcing people to live behind walls to protect themselves against gangs and thieves. Arson and murder are daily occurrences.
While the older generation laments the passing of the good old days, Lauren sees it as imperative that she creatively adapt to the conditions. She sets forth her theory of life/theology in jottings that she will one day assemble into a book called Earth Seed: The Books of the Living.
At one point, in an attempt to understand God, Lauren writes,
God is Power–
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable–
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay. God exists to be shaped.
God is change.
In her own version of Darwinian evolution, Lauren sees humans working in conjunction with God to survive and flourish in a desolate landscape. Doing so, however, takes effort on the part of the individual. If one is passive, one remains “God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey”:
A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
Become a partner of God,
A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything, God’s prey.
At another point, sounding a little like the non-scriptural “God helps those who help themselves,” she distinguishes between two different kinds of belief:
Belief
Initiates and guides action–
Or it does nothing.
Throughout the book, Lauren periodically attempts to spell out her relationship with God. If I understand her correctly, while she sees God as a potentially creative and generative force in the universe, to release that potential we must creatively and openly ourselves to God. This is what she means by shaping Him/Her/It.
Lauren rejects the idea that God will do good things for us if we pray. “Prayers only help the person doing the praying,” she says, “and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve.” And yet, if we use prayers to focus our resolve, then they indeed help us “to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us.”
Struggling with her articulation, Lauren sometimes veers into possible contradiction. On the one hand, she says, “God is power, and in the end, God prevails.” Yet she then adds,
But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.”
Lauren contrasts this vision with that found in Job, her favorite book in the Bible. As she puts it,
I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.”
Working with what might be seen as a Darwinian Christianity, Lauren differentiates between a blind evolution and one that humans can make happen. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, describes this as “the cognitive revolution,” which he says superseded biological evolution 70,000 years ago in that our cognitive capacities influenced evolution in a new way. As Lauren puts it,
We are Earthseed
The life that perceives itself
Changing
And elsewhere:
Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Working in conjunction with God—or with this impersonal force—brings about significant change:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only last truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Change, however, can be dangerous, meaning that we must approach God with openness and creativity. As Lauren warns,
A gift of God
May sear unready fingers.
It’s worthwhile at this point to remind ourselves of Jesus’s parable of the sower because it gives us further insight into Lauren’s vision:
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
And later:
Blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.
Lauren is determined to accept the earth seed as it falls upon her–which is to say, to hear what God has to say and to follow what God directs. As she puts it,
All successful life is
Adaptable,
Opportunistic,
Tenacious,
Interconnected, and
Fecund. Understand this. Use it.
Shape God.
Although I haven’t finished the novel yet, I’ll conclude with one last observation from Lauren’s book. It’s a declaration of what it means to be both conscious and sentient in God’s universe:
We are Earthseed. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny.
Lauren’s (and probably Butler’s) vision is striking a chord in me. I too have never seen God in personal terms. When my eldest son died, I didn’t blame God or hold God responsible, nor did I think that God felt sorry for me. Rather, as I saw it, I had to work in conjunction with God to make sure that Justin’s death would not become a curse that blighted my life and those lives around me. I looked to God as a potentially creative force that would help me find new wellsprings of love and care in a world that had just wounded me to the core.
Bitterness would have been my version of Lauren’s “destructive fanaticism.” Without God, life would have meant “nothing at all.” God was Change, a new way of being in the world, and it was up to me to shape and be shaped by Him/Her/It.