Sowing A Dream
Riffing on Cathleen Falsani
Have you read
this morning? Her “Sunday Musings” features who dives deep into Octavia Butler’s writing on the popular Christian parable. My little missive is a riff on her’s.Here’s the biblical text from Luke’s gospel (Chapter 8, read it all some day.).
4 When a large crowd was gathering, as people were coming to him from town after town, he said in a parable: 5 “A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed some fell on a path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered for lack of moisture. 7 Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. 8 Some fell into good soil, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!”
Butler spins it in all manner of dytopian ways that ring true today. But, for me, this is the core of her teaching. God is Change. Butler wrote:
“Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”
Which reminded me of this image.
If the universe is God’s self-portrait, then we are Christ’s self-portrait. This kind of truth falls on uneasy ears. We don’t want to be that close to the Godhead. We don’t dare be a part of it, but this is the essence of Jesus’ preaching. We are part and parcel of God’s creation. We aren’t outside of it looking in. We are within it. Through Christ, so too is God. We are with God and within God. Again, this kind of truth falls on uneasy ears. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us.
Falsani puts it this way:
It’s impossible to ensure with total certainty what the results of a literal planted seed will be, no matter how carefully it is tended and cultivated. Likewise, no one can predict the ultimate result of a seed planted in someone’s imagination.
I’m pretty sure Jesus knew this. Perhaps that was his point.
There is mystery, yes. And people have agency. We have the power and ability to choose what to do with what we have received, whether it’s information and talents, peak experiences or traumas.
Following Jesus is difficult. Why? Because his truth is hard to swallow. For everyone. So often we read the stories in the biblical canon as if we were the heroes, the enlightened, the saved. What if we started from a different perspective. What if, instead of God’s certainty about us, we began from the idea that we are God’s dream?
It’s not an original idea, but it’s a good one.
We are God’s dream. And the various soils of the plowed field are found in each of us. Our task is to begin to take ourselves seriously as God’s own children, as God creation, as God’s self-portrait.
Each of my prison associates (staff and prisoners) has a different way of looking at the entire spectrum of who/and what name our Creator is actually named and therefore differing ways of honoring him/her/they. But if we look more closely at the under lying beliefs, we see that LOVE is essential.