Close to the end of The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Octavia Butler’s incredible 1994 novel The Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina explains why she founded Earthseed, the religious creed she believes will save humanity from its downward spiral toward destruction. She says,
“I wanted to give us [humans] a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been… There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren’t, the cycles wouldn’t keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can choose to do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up.”
Lauren’s speech goes on from there, and the whole book is worth reading, but I remain struck by the phrase “We can grow up.” It resonates with a phrase I read a few years ago in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, where the author, Yosi Klein Halevi, describes the purpose of the Jewish people in history. He writes, “The role of the Jews is to be a spiritual avant-garde, attesting to God’s presence—not least through their impossible survival—and helping prepare humanity for its breakthrough to transcendence.” In other words, God selected an ordinary people to prepare humanity to grow up.
To become more like God is our destiny; it is the purpose that enables us to rise above the pettiness that so often threatens to overtake us.
Both Butler (through her character Lauren Olamina) and Halevi share a belief that humanity is meant to become something more than we are. This belief is also found within Christianity. Our Orthodox Christian siblings refer to this as theosis, a word that refers to the process by which humans, through grace, can participate in God’s divine life and become increasingly more like God. To become more like God is our destiny; it is the purpose that enables us to rise above the pettiness that so often threatens to overtake us. It is the trajectory that gives lift and meaning to our lives.
Named explicitly in The Parable of the Talents and implied in Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is the danger that emerges when human beings forget our destiny or attempt to grasp it on our terms. When humans forget that we were made for more, our creativity, genius, and power turn inward and become cruel and malicious. War, poverty, and inequality are the direct result of a humanity that has lost a universal vision of itself. In lieu of this vision, nationalism, racial and ethnic chauvinism, and the acquisition of wealth at all costs serve as cheap substitutes. We forget that we were made to love God and, through our love of God, to love others and share God’s stewardship of the rich beauty of creation. Instead, rather than growing up, we, like children, fight one another for what we believe belongs to us and people most like us, or we elect/appoint leaders who will do the dirty work for us, treating our fellow humans as disposable in order to lay claim to some misshappen and distorted version of our true destiny.
These days, this immaturity isn’t all that theoretical. It’s in plain sight. One of the places we see it most obviously is on social media. Just last week, Senator Mike Lee from Utah responded to the politically motivated assassination of Minnesota’s Speaker of the House and her husband with two jokes. This is perhaps the most egregious example of late of the way the algorithms that determine what we see and when, in order to extract as much profit for social media companies as possible, seem to prioritize inhumane exchanges with one another. Our inhumanity and immaturity are encouraged because that’s what sells. Even our politics seems to prioritize immaturity and inhumanity, with elected officials racing to the bottom with cruelty only to be re-elected to the same positions over and over again.
To follow Jesus is to strive to grow to fit the inconcievably large life that he has given us by grace.
God calls us to grow up, and this process of maturation is at the heart of the Christian faith. The Christian life begins in the chaos that emerges from human immaturity, by our collective unwillingness to fulfill our true destiny—to love God and neighbor and steward creation as God’s partners. In Being Christian, Rowan Williams writes, “Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.” Baptism, the act of grace by which we are made Christian disciples, is a sacrament of recovery. “To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended,” Williams writes. “What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God’s sons and daughters. Human.” Jesus is the only person to have ever been truly human. When we take on his life in baptism, we take on his humanity and then spend the remainder of our lives becoming more fully human. As Howard Thurman writes describing Jesus when he restores the shattered dignity of the woman accused of adultery, “He [Jesus] placed a crown over her head which for the rest of her life she would keep trying to grow tall enough to wear.” To follow Jesus is to strive to grow to fit the inconceivably large life that he has given us by grace.
I’m a millennial, so I speak in memes and GIFs. One of my favorite GIFs comes from Issa Rae’s Insecure. In an episode where the main character, Issa Dee, describes a change in behavior, Kelli, played by Natasha Rothwell, says, “You know what that is? Growth.” In the face of so much immaturity and inhumanity, maybe we should spend some time reflecting on where the life of God is growing in us. Growth in God’s life can be measured by the degree to which we can love not just ourselves and those most like us, but those most different from us. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells the crowds who have gathered to hear his teaching, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous… Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:43-45, 48).” Perfect love is a high bar, but make no mistake, this is the standard toward which we should strive. This sort of love is of the kind demonstrated by God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Every day, in every moment of decision, the call of the Christian is to ask, “how can I respond to the image of God that is right in front of me with love?” How would I want to be treated if I were them?
This love is the fulfillment of our destiny. This is a call to become peacemakers, working to reconcile broken human relationships wherever we find them by asserting our shared human dignity even, and perhaps especially, in the face of those who’ve lost sight of their own. Such a life is not easy. Later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus would tell the crowd, “For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it (Matthew 7:14).” Perhaps one of the ways we need to grow up is in the way that we have come to believe that the purpose of our Christian faith is to make us comfortable. Although the road is difficult, we do not walk it alone. If we ask for what we need to walk this road faithfully, God will give it to us. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7-8).”
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” We’ve been down this road enough times. We know where it leads. It’s time to grow up, to become more than we are, to become what we were made to be, to become human.