The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued
with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the
Sower, a science fiction novel written in 1993.
The setting for the novel begins in 2014 when the main
character, Lauren Olemina is only 15 years old. She and her family live in a
walled community surrounded by horrors going on right outside of her
neighborhood that eventually spill in.
Although Lauren’s
dad is a Baptist minister, Lauren creates a religion called Earthseed that
becomes her guiding principal. She wrote a Bible called Earthseed: The Books of
the Living.
All
that you touch
You
Change
All
that you Change
Changes
you.
The
Only Lasting Truth
is
Change.
God
Is
Change.
When forced to travel by foot from Southern California to
Northern California, Lauren becomes a leader of a small group traveling with
her. She also suffers a condition called “hyperempathy” which makes her feel
the physical pain of others. All of us in our discussion agreed that we could
benefit from a leader who had just a little empathy.
On June 27th, seven of us met on a Zoom meeting
to discuss this great book. Octavia Butler wrote the book in 1993 and won the
MacArthur Genius Prize in 1995.
We talked about prophecy and how the author tried to warn
us to step back from the precipice we were (and still) standing on. Stacy said
Butler’s book “warns us not to go there.”
When asked why we thought Lauren’s father talked her out of
spreading talk of preparation to leave their neighborhood ahead of time,
Shelara answered, “He didn’t discourage her so much as instructing her to share
information in increments.
Lauren’s dad taught her to put away seeds to grab
for planting in a new place. He also taught her how to clean and use guns.
These examples show that Lauren’s father, like her, knew that that their
neighborhood peace wouldn’t last. There was, however, as Judy pointed out,
tension between leaving or staying to fight.
Judy said the book was grim but still left so much open to
hope. Laura said she “loved the term ‘God Shaping’”. I want to love the term as well, even though I believe in the absolute authority of God. Shelara pointed out that the fact that we’ve decided to break out into Methodists,
Catholics, Buddhists, etc. shows that we’ve been shaping God in our own ways
all along. That being said, it was somewhat uncomfortable for some of us who’ve
been taught to revere, honor, worship and depend on God to read the following:
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.
Judy pointed out that in the world drawn in this book no
one dies in a natural way. Shelara mentioned how calling the cops, who the
citizens had to pay, made every situation worse. Stacy commented on the dogs
that began to run in packs and became hunters of humans.
Once the group began to apply the lessons from Parable of the Sower to today’s
pandemic, Judy told us that the culprit is capitalism. Shelara added to this,
saying, “We’re seeing the callousness of capitalism. People couldn’t last two
weeks once they lost their jobs. Poorer people never had a big enough part in
this system to survive even for a short while.”
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