The Best Time I Basically Believed In A Fictional Religion
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Have you ever been reading a sci-fi book, and one of the characters creates a new religion, and it’s so close to what you think about life/the universe/our place in it that you are basically ready to sign up for this fictional religion by the time you’re done reading the book?
No? Just me?
It is an odd sensation, to see your worldview precisely spelled out in the pages of a novel about a dystopian near-future, but that’s exactly what happened to me when I read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. (I can't get enough of her — read my thoughts on Kindred here.)
In the Parable books, our protagonist is Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl who has seen some major shit and creates a new religion called Earthseed in response ... though she would say she discovered rather than created it.
Earthseed’s major tenet is this: Change is the most powerful force in the universe, and we are both subjects of and participants in it.
All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthIs Change.God Is Change.
In the Earthseed worldview, God is not a person or a person-type entity who cares about your thoughts or whether your favorite football team is winning this season. God is nothing but Change itself, inevitable and impersonal and beautiful and devastating.
It’s a clear-eyed and some might say cold perspective, but to me, it’s perfect, because first off, it seems more accurate than believing there is an entity in the sky listening to my thoughts and/or caring about my football team.
Secondly, it underscores the fact that we do not need and in fact must not rely upon divine intervention to make a better world for ourselves and for each other.
God is not our supernatural mother or father. God is Change, and its job isn’t to take care of us. That task falls squarely on our own shoulders. We need to take care of each other.
God is Change,
And in the end,
God prevails.
But meanwhile…
Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles
That positive obsession she mentions is the destiny of Earthseed as she sees it — to spread itself throughout the universe, to take root among the stars. This mission, this large and audacious project is meant to give humanity a goal, yes, but it's also designed to get humans to organize our thoughts about each other at a higher level. To see each other not as rivals, but as family. To be Earthseed, before we are men or women or rich or poor or American or Korean or South African or anything else.
The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.
It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.
It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.
It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.
It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.
To my delight, Butler goes all the way with this — Olamina writes her verses and shares them with others running from the fires of the future. With her verses and with her own personal strength, she gathers a community around her to practice Earthseed. They welcome newcomers, focus on education, and make carefully considered but bold moves to shape chaos to their benefit. They become a formidable and capable group of people, practiced in the art of adapting to new situations quickly, learning as much as possible, and putting themselves in the strongest position they can.
In one particularly painful part of the second book, we get a chance to see how Earthseed functions when the shit hits the fan and the community falls on the hardest times imaginable. Even when everything falls apart, their beliefs galvanize them. They remain focused on surviving, on learning, on keeping their eyes open for opportunities to influence what happens, instead of just being the ones it happens to.
Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.
Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.
God is infinitely malleable.
God is Change.
The ending of the book is extremely satisfying to me, but I know from reading interviews with Butler that there were meant to be lots of Parable books. We were meant to follow Earthseed as it spread around the universe, as it shaped and was shaped by many other worlds, but Butler died before she cracked the nut of how to tell the rest of those stories. Such a shame … maybe someone will pick it up and run with it in the future.
When I say I’m ready to sign up for Earthseed, I guess my tongue is in my cheek a little … probably because I’m the only one who would be signed up, and I’m not like Olamina. I'm not ready to devote my life to spreading the ideas of Earthseed.
But to me? Everything Butler/Olamina came up with is fucking sound. And I get a deep charge when I think about change in this way — inevitable, unstoppable, but malleable, too. It makes me remember that to dig my heels in against change is a fruitless effort. It reminds me that I can work with it instead, I can shape it, I can play an active part in creating what happens around me. As Olamina puts it,
We do not worship God.
We perceive and attend God.
We learn from God.
With forethought and work,
We shape God.
In the end, we yield to God.
We adapt and endure,
For we are Earthseed
And God is Change.
To me, this seems just about right, even if we don’t get the G-word involved in it. Change is happening all the time, all around us, and even when we feel like we are its victims, in truth we are always, always participants as well. Best to recognize that and run with it.
photo by Gianluca Mastrascusa // cc
