Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable—
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.
This is the literal truth.
God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to.
Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. 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.
That’s what I know. That’s some of it anyway. I’m not like Mrs. Sims. I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.
Maybe I’ll be more like Alicia Leal, the astronaut.
Like her, I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need. I don’t have all of it yet. I don’t even know how to pass on what I do have. I’ve got to learn to do that. It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?
Is any of this real?
Dangerous question. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. I doubt myself. I doubt what I think I know. I try to forget about it. After all, if it’s real, why doesn’t anyone else know about it. Everyone knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season… . “), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.
We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people— super-parents, super-kings and queens, super-cops— to be our gods and to look after us— to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba— or like a cancer.
Chaos.
Even so, why can’t I do what others have done-ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.
But this thing (This idea? Philosophy? New religion?) won’t let me alone, won’t let me forget it, won’t let me go. Maybe… . Maybe it’s like my sharing: One more weirdness; one more crazy, deep-rooted delusion that I’m stuck with. I am stuck with it. And in time, I’ll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I’ll have to do something about it.
That reality scares me to death.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2024
President William Turner Smith lost yesterday’s election. Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner is our new President— President-elect. So what are we in for? Donner has already said that as soon as possible after his inauguration next year, he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless, unnecessary”
moon and Mars programs. Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized— sold off.
Also, Donner has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend “overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board.
What’s adequate, I wonder: A house or apartment?
A room? A bed in a shared room? A barracks bed?
Space on a floor? Space on the ground? And what about people with big families? Won’t they be seen as bad investments? Won’t it make much more sense for companies to hire single people, childless couples, or, at most, people with only one or two kids? I wonder.
And what about those suspended laws? Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people— as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die?
Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.
2025
Intelligence is ongoing, individualadaptability. Adaptations that anintelligent species may make in asinge generation, other speciesmake over many generations ofselective breeding and selectivedying. Yet intelligence isdemanding. If it is misdirected byaccident or by intent, it can fosterits own orgies of breeding anddying.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
by Lauren Oya Olamina
A victim of God may,
Through learning adaption,
