Letter from Patrick
This week’s Letter to the Future comes from Auburn’s Dean. In the aftermath of last week, we offer a reflection and invitation to dream with us…
For our young people:
July 20, 2024, is this upcoming Saturday and, the first entry of a fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. She writes:
I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle—when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter.
She continues…
I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson.
After the events on July 13, 2024 and all that led to it, we are living in a world not far from Lauren’s fictional world. But I write to the future because Butler’s Lauren casts a life-giving, humanizing, and world-building vision that fuels my imagination.
She builds a spiritual community grounded in a faith that centers life.
Butler’s work resonates through the generations and across cultures because her vision was inclusive in a world that sought to destroy her. While I am an ordained Chicano writer whose visions of the future rest in the Indigenous practices of my ancestors and the multifaith family I belong to, I know that a vision that centers life—without ignoring our current world—is what I am committed to with every bone in my body.
Auburn is building a spiritual community centered on intergenerational and cross-cultural healing and love. I am writing this letter not just to my children—Ash and Carmelita—who belong to their Indigenous, Jewish, neurodivergent, gender expansive, and broader disability communities – but to all children.
My vision is a future where all children—from the descendants of those who thought or think my children, I, or my ancestors did not and should not exist to the descendants of those who have always sought inclusive and loving communities—are living in a world guided by our unwavering commitment to building a spiritual community seeking to heal and love every member of its body.
Auburn is committed to this future, and we ask that our descendants hold us accountable for our ability to love in days like these.
Returning to Butler, Lauren’s daughter, Asha Vere in the following book, Parable of the Talents, wrestles with this commitment to a spiritual community. She writes in her last entry:
Religions are no more perfect than any other human institutions. But Earthseed will fulfill its essential purpose. It will force us to become more than we might ever become without it….I wish I could be one of those who go out to go take root among the stars…
Butler left the third book unwritten—notes and potential titles are all that remain. And I wonder what would have been written in a third book when what we are living is so close to the time and experience of the first novel and I have a vision and love for our children that mirrors the second?
That is the beauty of these Letters to the Future. There is work left undone. We are learning to fly, so that we may take root among the stars.
I want to give you a gift: a prayer from my people to yours.
A Prayer for the Future
Beloved
You have the right to be loved
To loveYou have the right to
LoveIn the past
In the present
And, in the FutureMay the Hummingbird
Who embodies the seven directions
Remind you of the love you have
As it flies in each directionTo give thanks to the ground below you
Extend gratitude for the divine above you
To the ancestors guiding in front of you
And the descendants following close behindMay love extend to the family to your left
Your friends to the right
And finally, that the Hummingbird,
As it centers itself in the air, as if by magic,
Reminds you of the spirit that dwells within you.
You are a beloved child of God.May you all find love this day and all your days to come.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.