We shape God

I initiated the "Religion and Anthropo- cene" students in a new religion today, or in religion in a new way. Our reading was Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, an account, among other things, of the founding of a religion called Earthseed. Each chapter begins with lines from something called Earthseed: The Books of the Living, and over the course of the narrative we learn how a young woman named Lauren Olamina start writing it, eventually collating it and teaching it to others. As part of our class I invited students to transcribe these epigraphs in a shared google.doc (above), each choosing a different chapter. Seeing a google.doc on which many are working at the same grow is always fun; this time it felt a little like seeing a scripture come into the world.

Earthseed's oft-cited central ideas are announced in the epigraph of the first chapter:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

We spent some time teasing out how these ideas are like and unlike those of other religions. 

But Earthseed isn't just a spirituality or philosophy. It's a community which does things together. I drew the class's attention to the epigraph to chapter 18.

Once or twice

each week

A Gathering of Earthseed

is a good and necessary thing.

It vents emotion, then

quiets the mind.

It focuses attention,

strengthens purpose, and

unifies people.

These gatherings are structured by the words we'd transcribed but sound like the weekly gatherings of American religious communities of all kinds. And tucked inside was a definition of religion: it vents emotion, quiets the mind, focuses attention, strengthens purpose, unifies people. Functional definitions have their problems but in some small way this definition cut through our students' generational suspicions of "organized religion" and even the doubts the Anthropocene question raises about whether all religion is now obsolete. 

Time was running out but I asked students what other characters in the novel found hardest to take seriously about Earthseed. Because Parable is a sort of science fiction novel they hadn't paid it particular heed:

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

Folks in the novel are perplexed by it, too - what does it mean, and why should it matter? We managed to have a little bit of discussion about why the apostle of Earthseed insisted on it. A sort of afterlife? Some future beyond this damaged world? A unifying shared project? A sense of connection with our descendants? A purpose for our existence? All of the above! (We decided that Earthseed might also satisfyingly take root on this planet, inhabited in a revitalized and sustainable way by a transformed humanity.) But this, too, is religious, nu?

All these students have signed up for a class called "Religion and the Anthropocene" but their essays so far have made little to no reference to religion, in general or to particular traditions. Perhaps letting this "made up" tradition define religion for us will get the juices flowing. 

(Class began on a more somber note, by the way. Because of the Jewish new year we didn't meet last Friday, so we'd last been together two long weeks ago. I named some of what had happened during those two weeks, each a sign of ongoing anguish and heartbreak: Two Hundred Thousand. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Breonna Taylor.)