“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. God is change.” —Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
Los Angeles is on fire. For the past week wild fires have ravaged our county in the north, south, east and west, with the most destructive being the Palisades Fire, which has torn through the communities along the coast of the Pacific Ocean; and the Eaton Fire, which has leveled the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena. Dozens of people have died—so many of them elderly and young disabled Black people—with more yet unaccounted for. And the fires are still burning.
Many are just now learning that 30% of our firefighters are incarcerated men who get paid $10 A DAY to risk their lives fighting these fires, sometimes working 14 hour days with no break or food. Yes, this is slavery.
While Angelenos praise the firefighters doing the work to contain these fires, it’s not far from my mind that in November 2024, this state voted against ending slavery, opting instead to continue forcing incarcerated workers to labor as a punishment for alleged crimes. As fire victims try to find new housing to rent, landlords have been illegally price gouging so they can profit off of people’s pain and desperation. I can’t help but to think that in the same election, Californians voted against rent control by 62%.
To say there’s been extra chaos and confusion here in the wake of the fires is a bit of an understatement. While in the red-flag zone and glued to the citizen-run Watch Duty app (which provides minute-by-minute updates on the status of fires and evacuation orders), I got an Emergency Systems alert from the government telling me that evacuation orders were in place for my area. I’d had my car packed just in case, so when the alert screamed at me from my phone, I was out the door and down the highway in seconds. Twenty minutes later, a new alert said, essentially, whoops—didn’t mean to send that evacuation order to the whole city! This happened at least one other time.
But the peace in the storm has been the county’s incredible activists and organizers. The covid mutual aid organization Maskbloc LA has continued to distribute free n95 masks to anyone in need—not just for covid and respiratory illness prevention, but now also to prevent inhalation of toxic particles in the wildfire air. In fact, because they’ve been doing this work despite an environment that is hostile to covid safety, they were able to distribute four times as many masks to residents than the actual city government. PLEASE, L.A., learn from the aftermath of 9/11 and wear an N95, P100 or higher quality mask in this toxic air!
The non-profit community center and social movement WalkGood has also compiled a list of resources to donate, volunteer, or receive support if you’ve been impacted by the fires. These orgs and the hundreds of volunteers who have flooded impacted areas and had to be turned away because the organizers were over capacity got me thinking about God.
More specifically, it’s got me thinking about iconic sci-fi writer Octavia Butler’s writings about God and climate change. In 1993, she wrote the prophetic climate novel, The Parable of the Sower, which begins thirty-one years into a future she would not live to see: the year 2024. On November 6, her Parable protagonist Lauren writes in her journal that the U.S. has just elected a despotic president to rule over a country marred by climate change, extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Sound familiar? By February 2025, a fire breaks out in Lauren’s LA suburb. By 2027, Lauren’s entire community has burned to the ground. Because climate change has made California and the entire country drier than ever (in the book), water, food and safety have become precious commodities that people literally kill for.
“People have changed the climate of the world,” Lauren says in the book. “Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”
But 15-year-old Lauren—who’s never known the good old days in her life—still knows that the good old days are not coming back. And if they mean to survive, as she does, they have to start facing reality and making a plan.
“[The Parable of the Sower is a book about] what happens because we don’t trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now,” Butler warned in a 2005 interview with Democracy Now, just a year before her untimely death. “Global warming is one of those problems,” she said.
It’s not that Butler was a soothsayer, or as Black people call them, a “seer,” necessarily—though, why rule it out?—it’s just that she was well-read and paying attention to patterns, science and history.
“I was aware of it back in the ‘80s; I was reading books about [global warming]. And a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow,” Butler said. “What I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort.”
This is where God comes in.
The daughter of a Christian preacher, Lauren starts to journal her doubts about her community’s religion—or at least the way it’s being interpreted. I can relate.
As Los Angeles’ city mayor Karen Bass, L.A. city council, L.A. County executives and California governor Gavin Newsom shirked responsibility for their lack of preparedness by blaming acts of God/nature for the 100-MPH winds and the 8-month lack of rain which turned the Palisades and Pasadena/Altadena into a tinder box, I couldn’t help but recall what California used to be.
The Tongva people indigenous to the area colonized as Los Angeles County would regularly enact controlled burns to nourish the land, feed native plants that need fire to germinate (pyrophitic plants) and prevent the levels of devastating wildfire that we’re still experiencing. The excuse that our political leaders “can’t control the wind,” or the rain, for that matter, falls apart when we understand that climate change is indeed a billionaire-funded, politician-approved phenomenon made up of thousands and decades—centuries, even!—of human choices.
The Resnicks, a billionaire couple in town and friends of Newsom, use more water than every L.A. resident combined. This is not to mention billionaire family the Kardashians, actor Kevin Hart, Sylvester Stallone, Dwyane Wade—all of whom have been fined for using well over their allotted water supply at their mega-mansions. As the saying goes, when the penalty for a crime is a fine, it’s only a crime for poor people. While Los Angeles residents have been encouraged to save water and recycle to reduce our “carbon footprint,” the Taylor Swifts of the world take private jets to fly down the street and cause more carbon emissions than some countries do in a year. Sure, we can all play a role in fighting climate change, but the water shortages, the drought, the construction of homes in known fire zones, the planting of invasive species that destabalize the ecosystem, the government’s inability to not only properly warn residents but to help them evacuate beforehand—these are only “acts of God” if billionaires and the politicians they own are the God they think they are.
Now, here’s where it gets tricky.
In Sower, Lauren tells her best friend what she’s been thinking about, what she writes in her journal every night. Her best friend is terrified by Lauren’s thoughts that their gated community can’t keep out what’s coming. That desperate people would one day break through the gates and the community wouldn’t be ready. That the community would have to learn how to live “outside”—what plants to grow, what food to eat, how to find water—if they meant to survive. Her best friend tattles on her and Lauren gets in trouble, learning an early lesson from that Biblical parable of the sower, about using discernment to determine with whom you are safe to share information.
I’m going to bet that our newsletter community here is fertile ground, or at least the kind of folks who are curious about how prophetic Octavia Butler’s novel writing turned out to be, so here are some of Lauren’s musings in Sower:
“There’s a big, early-season storm blowing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s bounced around the Gulf, killing people from Florida to Texas and down into Mexico. There are over 700 known dead so far. One hurricane. And how many people has it hurt? How many are going to starve later because of destroyed crops? That’s nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don’t hear the warnings until it’s too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where’s safety for them, anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? We’re almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we’ll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have. How will God—my father’s God—behave toward us when we’re poor? Is there a God? If there is, does he (she? it?) care about us?”
Whew. What a question.
As someone who owns a car, had gas money, had things to pack and a loving, beautiful family in the north to evacuate to, I’ve heard from so many loved ones who thanked God on my behalf that I was safe. It felt bad, though I know it wasn’t intended to. Am I, as we church folk like to say, “blessed and highly favored by God,” because I’m not physically disabled or elderly, and I have means and community enough to escape moderate-to-imminent danger?
While the wealthy who lost a home or two will have the resources and political support to rebuild—and live to pay a water over-usage fine again—some Black families’ entire generational wealth was wrapped up in the Altadena homes that they had previously been passing down for two, three, four generations. There’s no telling if they’ll be able to rebuild. Vulturistic land developers have already descended on desperate folks in Altadena, looking to take what’s left of their properties off their hands. Despite the yelling some on social media are doing to tell Black folks not to sell, some will simply have no choice. This is not to mention the unhoused people who lived in both communities destroyed by the fire, who never had enough to build, let alone rebuild, and may still be beneath the rubble.
When I see such inequality in the world, it’s hard to hear churchisms like, Favor aint fair to explain why some prosper and others are absolutely destroyed.
Yet, this has been the crux of Prosperity Gospel for generations—i.e., being specifically financially prosperous is a sign that God is pleased with you. It’s God’s will when leaders are installed into power. It’s God’s will when people die. It’s God’s will when people live. It’s mere coincidence that every president we’ve ever had is a war criminal, and that 7 of the last 10 presidents have been credibly accused of sexual assault. It’s mere coincidence that the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, Jeff Besos, Mark Zuckerberg, have caused more harm to humanity and the planet in the last decade than all the criminals behind bars could in their combined lifetimes. But Prosperity Gospel is how we get the United States of America—it is Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, and justification for slavery and genocide of Indigenous people the world over, all rolled into one unimpeachable so-called Will of God.
“But what if all that is wrong?” Lauren wonders. “What if God is something else altogether?”
“God is change and in the end God prevails, but there’s hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous but infinitely malleable. There’s comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There’s power in knowing that God can be focused diverted and shaped by anyone and all but there’s no power in having strength and brains and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that. God will shape us all every day of our lives. Best to understand that and return the effort. Shape God.
“God is power, and in the end, God prevails. But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent. A victim of God may, through learning adaption, become a partner of God. A victim of God may, through forethought and planning, become a shaper of God.”
When I think of the Shape of God in these L.A. fires, yes, I see the theft of water, the exacerbation of drought, a city mayor who tried to appease her Zionist donors by proposing a mask ban in a pandemic and criminalizing the very same mask-wearing protestors and activists whom she’s now relied on to help get N95 masks to the city. I see a millionaire governor who went down to an unhoused encampment in L.A. and personally tore it apart with his own hands and threw people’s homes and belongings in the trash. This is how they have chosen to shape God.
And I’ve also seen the organizers who have been working with the unhoused for decades spring into action to help the newly unhoused (a reminder that it could be any of us at any time, with one simple Act of God). I’ve seen volunteers be turned away because organizers have more help than they could dream of. I’ve seen GoFundMes paid out to families in need in record time through small donations from many people across the country. This, too, is the shape of God.
I love Butler’s interpretation of God here because so much of what I have previously learned of God makes humans seem far more passive than I’ve witnessed with my own eyes. The African Holocaust and slavery weren’t “God’s will,” or the fulfillment of some ridiculous curse on the descendants of Ham, as white supremacists have historically used as religious justification. White imperialist enslavers made those choices and shaped God in their own, twisted image.
We can pray for an end to the genocide in Gaza, or we can see that human beings are pushing the buttons, dropping the bombs, sniping children in the head, and hold those humans to account. Arrest the war criminals when they vacation in your countries. Shut down the factories that make the bombs. Shut down the ships that send them to Israel. Shut down the politicians who made genocide their lasting legacy. This is how we become partners with God instead of its passive victims.
“Nothing is going to save us,” Lauren says. “If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead.”
Lauren is also called a prophet by her fellow survivors when the things she warns of come to pass. Like Butler later would, Lauren rejects the label.
“‘No.” I shook my head, remembering. ‘No one could have been ready for that. But. . . . I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside,” she says.
But seeing the signs are only the first step.
“I think we should make emergency packs—grab and run packs—in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Money, food, clothing, matches, a blanket. . . . I think we should fix places outside where we can meet in case we get separated,” Lauren shares with her friend before ultimately having to do just that when the fires break out and the survivors are few. She’s studied botany books. She learns how to skin rabbits for food. And she spends the rest of the book building a new community with those who agree: we only thrive together.
“It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse,” Lauren says. “If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak—too poor, too hungry, too sick—to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out. There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!” She says.
In the wake of the second inauguration of a rapist who has made his intentions to shape God in the most horrible ways possible very clear, Butler left us these solutions because it was obvious that we would need them. Let’s take what she has left us and go find our ‘something,’ y’all; let’s build and rely on community, and shape another possible world.
As Lauren’s last words in The Parable of the Sower say: “Weʼve got work to do.”
Donate to wildfire victims here; sign up to volunteer here.
Stay watchin,’
Brooke
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