The Parable of the Sower

 

by Nancy Corson Carter

 

One of the great gifts of PEC’s conference for me was the discovery of Octavia E. Butler’s novel, The Parable of the Sower. I learned of it through Dr. Faith Harris’s presentation, “A Womanist and Interfaith Response to Climate Change: Reimagining Our Collective Futures.”

 

Dr. Harris quoted Katie Geneva Cannon to introduce herself: “My assignment as a womanist liberation ethicist is to debunk, unmask, and disentangle the historically conditioned value judgements and power relations that undergird the particularities of race, sex, class, and oppression.” (She defines “womanist” as a liberation theology restoring dignity and hope to women of color without being adversarial.)

 

In asking “What should people of faith and good conscience do?” Dr. Harris argued that our faith tradition can change the narrative: “We can make the moral argument to invest in people, in Earth.” So it seemed natural, now that I have read The Parable, that she would celebrate this book.

 

Written in 1993 by a gifted prize-winning writer who’d grown up poor, fighting the notion that “black women don’t write,” the story begins in 2024. This dystopian work of science fiction presents a world in chaos that we can recognize as already becoming true—it is both prescient and prophetic.

 

The young woman protagonist, Lauren (the sower in hopes of seeding good soil), is thrown into a deeply disturbing journey by violence. I found that the nightmarish world she traverses (ostensibly the Pacific coast in the future) is not unlike the Darién Gap, the dangerous link between Colombia and Panama being risked now by hundreds of thousands of migrants set on finding a better life in the North. Yet Earthseed: The Books of the Living threads through the book in brief poetic-journal form at the beginning of each chapter as her testimonial that there is a God who is our partner in this Earth through change, “forever uniting, growing, dissolving.” She believes that this God leads us, if we persist, toward loving, Earth-honoring community. The book’s final words quote the parable of the sower from Luke 8: 5-8 in the King James Version of the Bible.

 

 A main theme Dr. Harris argued is that, “Our challenge is to interrupt the fossil fuel death spiral” and to face our problem of a “theo-ethical premise” that individuals can own land and push others out (stealing, killing, or enslaving them as in the Doctrine of Discovery). She urged that the moral remedy is to bring God back to Earth: “God is not outside us but within us and all Earth,” and our hope is to create community wherever we are. She celebrates Parable of the Sower as a work that gives her hope because “we are going to have to figure this out, to do it together.” That we will do this is my hope as well.

 

Nancy Corson Carter, professor emerita of humanities at Eckerd College, has published two poetry books, Dragon Poems and The Sourdough Dream Kit, and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems, drawings, and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and Jesus: Weaving Action and Contemplation in Daily Life and in her memoir, The Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories.