Emergency Backpack 

By Cat Odenkirk

I recently went to a book club where we discussed Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It charts a young Black woman’s growth and survival in a dystopian hellscape. Lauren grows up in a walled-in small tight-knit community, which manages to get by. Outside the walls, there is extreme violence and drug-fuelled chaos driven by the absolute desperation of people who have nothing, in a society collapsed.

She believes that it is only a matter of time before the walls are broken down and they will have to be able to survive the brutality outside. She also wants to escape across to the other side of the country in hopes that there could be a better world, with fresh water and jobs, based only on rumours and speculation. Her chances, like most in this world are vanishingly small and she faces a long and deeply dangerous journey that most wouldn’t dare to undertake. 

With this in mind, she starts building an emergency backpack to run and survive when those walls inevitably come down. She puts in only the bare essentials – water, food, a knife. And her journal. Not just any journal. Lauren has been building a new faith that she calls ‘Earthseed’ built around various ideas such as the belief that ‘God is change’. The book is punctuated with her spiritual passages, which she writes down in her journal and places in her backpack. In a desperate world with little resources, she considers this vital. 

In our book club discussion, I marvelled at how spirituality could be seen as an essential tool of survival. The reaction to this emphasised a clear split already present in how members saw the book – some as an ultimately hopeful tale, and others as one that just cemented how hopeless everything is. Among those who found it hopeless, issue was taken with the spiritual element of the book. The idea that these words could come to her out of nowhere, rather than from books, was seen as suspect and absurd, and there were accusations of it being cult-like or meaningless. Worthless at best, suspicious at worst.  
 
I didn’t know how to say that when I pray, the words come from ‘nothing’. To me, like Lauren, it is God. It could also be characterised as coming from love, the universe, the heart and soul – many words that both represent and overlap with one another.  
 
I’m a Quaker, and when we worship we are encouraged to listen deeply, in stillness. In this prayerful space, words can come to me  that guide, nurture, challenge and ground me. I even write them down sometimes in a little journal.  
 
As chaotic as the world seems right now, it is not desperate enough that I am packing an emergency backpack just yet. But if I did, I think I would like Lauren, make room for that little journal. There have been times in my life when I have felt desperate, and felt I may crumble to the point where I can no longer carry on. And in those times it has been God who has carried me through. It has been vital. It has been survival.  
 
Lauren’s own journey ends hopelessly or hopefully depending on how you look at it. She gets to the other side of the country, but the resources are much more limited than they had hoped, the future uncertain.  
 
But she does survive, and her trek brings her to a place where that hope is more realistic, more possible, with a little more opportunity than before. Along the way she builds community, through mutual witnessing of vulnerabilities and responding with acts of kindness, despite the darkness of the world they inhabit. This binds them together. Later, despite some scepticism, her spiritual ideas seem to take some root in the community, where they share ideas and debating their truth or true meanings. It reminds me of how carrying on past that dark time enabled me to find my own spiritual community, and of the growth, hope and opportunity that has afforded me. 
 
I am left with the questions – could she have gotten that far without God in her backpack? Would she have had the hope to continue? Would she have found her community?   
 
I am so grateful I can put God in my emergency backpack. I have so much hope. 

Cat Odenkirk (she/they) is a London-based
writer, Quaker and activist.