Sower troubled

It's been a week for the parable of the sower! Thanks to someone's not being able to use their tickets, I managed to see Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon's "community opera" of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower at Lincoln Center on Thursday - a thumping revival-like gathering weaving every kind of African American traditional music into the story of Butler's prescient novel, 30 years old this year and never more relevant.

And in church today, the lectionary gave us the parable which gave Butler her title, in Matthew's version - with a significant omission.

The parable appears in all the synoptic gospels, and in the Gospel of Thomas, so it was clearly thought important by the early church. As our rector explained, that's perhaps because this is a "meta" parable - a parable about parables, a teaching about teachings. The same message can be shared with all, but only a few will get it or keep it. 

In one sense, the parable is straightforward and surely true, as anyone who's ever tried to communicate anything knows. But it seems at odds with the messages of at least some of Jesus' other parables, like the one about the good shepherd who loses no sheep from his flock. Shouldn't the sower know the ground and work, till and weed it to make all of it receptive, instead of wasting his seed and blaming the earth? 

Meta-parables from another tradition - from the Buddhist Lotus Sutra - go where this doesn't, with one telling of a Dharma rain which falls everywhere and allows all plants to grow, each in its own way, and with others claiming that a wise teacher, engaging upaya, will successfully tailor the teachings to students' varying receptivity even to the point of illusion. The parables may seem at odds but can be reconciled if the Dharma rain is thought to be the unchanging intention to save, which drives the virtuosity of upaya, the "all" of "may all sentient beings be saved." 

The Jesus of the Parable of the Sower seems, by contrast, reconciled to not saving all. And it gets even harder when you read the section from the middle which the lectionary omitted, here its first lines: 

Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ (13:10-13, NRSV)

They're not supposed to get it! It sounds like the hardening of Pharoah's heart. You can see why the editors of the lectionary left this out! Where the Buddha's parables and meta-parables in the Lotus Sutra are crafted so that all may perceive and understand, the very use of parables described in the meta-parable of the sower seems designed to exclude. Not the meta-parable we want! Without that middle section one could at least take the message to be that we should cultivate our own gardens, work to make ourselves receptive; perhaps the careless sower will be back again next year. (Really, we need - and get - more parables, but it's not clear how to trust the parable-teller after this.)

Why Octavia Butler chose "Parable of the Sower" as the title for her book has never been entirely clear to me. The book tells the terrible story of a world collapsing, and the escape of a group of refugees into a utopian alternative community they call Acorn, inspired by the emerging teaching of "Earthseed" channeled by their leader, the "hyperempathic" teenager Lauren Olamina. Not everyone she meets is receptive to her teaching, or receptive right away; some follow despite the teaching. But many never have a chance. Acorn's ritual life is built on mourning.

"Earthseed," which you've read about before in this blog, is a compelling alternative religion, too. Its most famous line is "God is change"; the context in which it appears makes clear that it's offering another approach to the problem of the clueless sower.

Why is the universe?
To shape God. 

Why is God?
To shape the universe. 

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change. 

(72-73)

There's another Christian parable in the book, one which Lauren Olamina uses before she leaves Christianity behind. (It features in the opera, too.) It's that of the importunate widow who pesters a lazy and immoral judge until he gives in, getting the justice she deserves - and making him the just judge he ought to be. 

Life is too precious and too hard for us to count only on the sower's wisdom. But when the seed is able to take root, it bears fruit a hundred times. Among its fruits might be a more enlightened sower. Certainly included are those who learn that we work, till, weed the ground around us, together. 

The Reagons' opera doesn't really tell the story of Butler's book; if I hadn't read it before I would have been completely lost, and certainly wouldn't have known to sing along with Don't let your baby go, don't let your baby go to O-li-var. Instead it highlights key moments of feeling along the way. More than an opera, I realized, it's like what the emerging liturgy of Acorn must have been like, reminder and recommitment to a story everyone knows but needs to hear again and again. There's grief at so much loss, and there's joy at the world we can yet make with and for each other, if we keep faith.