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Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (Virtual Book Discussion)








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.
  
 Barbara said, “I’ve been thinking about class issues in the book. When they met the doctor who owns property, it really underscored who has access to water, to food, to money. He’s 57 years old and by this time Lauren is 18. The saddlebag he’s carrying is of good quality.

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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