What's Love got to do with It?

No, I'm not humming a Tina Turner favorite.
And the quick response is certainly "Love has everything to do with it."

What am I writing about?
Well, last weekend a reading group gathered to discuss a short story entitled "The Book of Martha" by speculative (science) fiction writer Octavia Butler. If you know Butler at all, you know she wrote some fairly wild yet engaging fiction that involved everything from time travel back to a southern plantation during slavery, and vampire-like human-sort-of people who have populated the earth, to novels on how religion in America can lead to disturbing and distorted rather than Utopian possibilities.

And then there's "The Book of Martha"--
It seems a West Coast writer, who loves her craft, has died-- she thinks; though she wonders if she's gone nuts or is somehow aware of her dead self on a slab in the morgue, since everything around her is gray and amorphous.
So she's dead, because next thing that appears against the gray is God-- or someone she thinks must be God (that bearded, enthroned king image is what she is seeing... at that particular moment).
If that's God, then she must be in heaven? she queries.
She queries because if it is heaven, it's all just gray and God and her. "Where's everyone else?" she wonders out loud. "Why?" God asks, in a sort of set up that then plays out throughout the story. "What do you see?" God more or less asks; and Martha says "only you." God then implies that is Martha's vision situation (and that plays out throughout the story too because God goes from being a bearded old man to eventually being a middle-aged African American woman who says yes to a tuna fish sandwich, who Martha thinks could be her own twin and about which God is not so much amused as God is suggesting that Martha (and the reader) should spend some time thinking about how and why we imagine God as we do/need to.

You really need to read this short story to both enjoy Butler's way about certain issues (like What do we know and How do we know it and communicate/process/interpret it?) and then to ponder the issues.

These are important questions both for people of faith and for people who are wondering about faith (and if you are wondering about faith, then you are likely, also, wondering about doubt, too). For that matter, Butler, like the prophets of The Old Testament, might be trying to both comfort the oppressed (those oppressed by doubts) and challenge the comfortable (those too snug in their faith assumptions). For when you do take a sober look at all the violence and enslavement that continue in our world, one then does begin to ask, "What's Love got to do with It?" What does it mean to say we believe in a God who is Love in a world which is so full of un-love? That's not a new question. People ask that question a lot, and have through the ages.

However, what Butler does is pose the question in her narrative (without ever asking it) in such a way as to be able to speak to both the believer and non-believer at the same time. That's the big project at the heart of all Octavia Butler's writing: traversing the divide, not taking Us/Them as a given and, instead, trying to speak to both-- to uncover how we construct reality so as to assure and secure ourselves, and that such constructions often have blueprints that keep the other out.

In "The Book of Martha" Butler teases the reader about Heaven, God and Self (freedom, responsibility, control, power) so that when Martha gets sent back to earth, the reader is brought to an earthly contemplation of what we might mean by "God."

It is a very interesting read; a good way to apply a lens on our own faith texts--the beliefs we carry around inside ourselves and even within our community. Butler is not discounting faith, just challenging faith assumptions so that we do not have too ready an answer to the question "What's Love got to do with It?" She even embeds a Christ-figure in the narrative so as to suggest a response to the question. Can you spot it?

By the way, if you are wondering why "It" is capitalized, that's just me suggesting that not only do we need to consider what we think love is/means, we also need to ask ourselves what is the "It" to which we want God's love applied (e.g., What's love got to do with salvation, my trusting God, God's being good to/with/for me, health, happiness; as well as pain, suffering, things not turning out good etc)

Any thoughts? Leave a comment.
Need a copy of "The Book of Martha"?
Let me know and I can email it to you.