Love in the Waiting: An Advent Word with Octavia Butler
Photo by Gleb Shvartser on Unsplash
Advent arrives each year with its own quiet paradox: it is a season about beginnings that starts in the dark. It is a season about love that first asks us to wait. And for many of us who move through a world increasingly shaped by anxiety and fragmentation, even despair and uncertainty, the invitation to wait—let alone to love—can feel like a bit much. Advent is supposed to be gentle, but it is not soft. It is tender, but it is not sentimental. It is a season that asks courage of us.
And perhaps this is why Octavia Butler, the great prophetic writer that wrote beyond and out of time, feels like an unexpected but necessary companion for this Advent moment.
I return often to Butler’s worlds. I love her short story collections, but it’s the Patternist series, the Xenogenesis trilogy, and the Parable novels—alongside stand-alone works like Kindred (1979) and her final publication, Fledgling (2005)—that stay with me most. These worlds are rarely comfortable. They are marked by climate catastrophe, social upheaval, fleeing families, fragile communities, and the tenuous question of whether the human will to survive can coexist with the human capacity for cruelty. Yet within these worlds—strange, disorienting, yet strangely familiar—she insists on a radical, embodied vision of love. Not sentimental comfort. Not romance. Not even affection. But love as a demanding, generative, communal ethic that emerges precisely in the midst of disruption. Love as a survival practice.
This is, after all, the heart of Advent: love coming into a world that does not want it, does not deserve it, and is not prepared for it.
Learning to Love in a World on Fire
One of Butler’s most poignant explorations of love runs through her Parable series, especially Parable of the Sower. Lauren Olamina, the teenage protagonist, lives in a collapsing America that feels eerily close to our own: economic stratification, fragile security, ecological crisis, violent nationalism, and communities struggling to protect themselves from forces far beyond their control. It is an apocalyptic landscape, but not one of explosions and special effects. It is apocalypse in the literal biblical sense: an unveiling, a revealing of what has been true all along.
In this unraveling world, Lauren forms Earthseed, a spiritual community centered on the idea that “God is Change.” But Earthseed is not merely a belief system—it is a relational practice. In a place where violence is normalized and trust is scarce, Lauren insists that survival is not possible without communities who choose to be bound to one another. Again and again, she gathers people others might overlook: the wounded, the traumatized, the suspicious, the outcast. She protects them, but she also asks them to protect one another.
This is Butler’s subversive vision of love: not a feeling, but a practice of attention and a posture of commitment.
This is not naïve optimism. It is a costly, strategic practice of love.
Love, in Butler’s imagination, is what happens when people decide—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes fearfully—to move toward one another when everything around them insists they should turn inward. It is the refusal of apathy in a world addicted to self-preservation. It is the decision to bind one’s fate to that of another in the middle of uncertainty.
And in this way, Butler, perhaps inadvertently, teaches us what Christians have forgotten: love is not sentimental, but fiercely Advent.
Mary as a Parable Woman
Mary, too, lives in a disrupted world. Her region is occupied by an empire that extracts wealth, suppresses dissent, and disciplines the bodies of colonized people. Her future is uncertain, and her pregnancy places her at the edges of both imperial suspicion and community expectations. Yet when the angel tells her what God intends to do, she responds not with fear or resignation, but with an audacious willingness: “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
Mary chooses to participate in the impossible. She chooses to carry love into a world that may not receive it. She chooses to bind her future to God’s future for the world.
In this sense, she is not unlike Lauren Olamina—not because she is a messiah figure, but because she embodies the same radical truth Butler explores: love is a risky response to an unpredictable world.
Butler and Mary both show us that love in the midst of chaos is not naïve; it is revolutionary. It is courageous. It is, quite literally, a world-making force.
The Strange Tenderness of Love in the Dark
Advent is when the church gathers to proclaim that Love is coming—not as an abstract idea but as a vulnerable child, a body, a life intertwined with other lives. And yet this proclamation begins in darkness. Advent invites us not to escape the world’s unraveling but to enter it more honestly, with open eyes and tender hearts.
And here again Butler’s work speaks profoundly to the Christian imagination. In Parable of the Sower, as Lauren travels north, she encounters people who have been brutalized by lawlessness, poverty, corporate greed, and militarized control of labor. It would be easy—and expected—for her to pass by, protect herself, and keep moving. But repeatedly she stops. She tends to the wounded. She shares food and information. She invites them into her fledgling community. She risks slowing down, even though danger is always closing in.
This is not naïve optimism. It is a costly, strategic practice of love.
Lauren understands that no one survives alone. And so she chooses connection over isolation, compassion over self-protection, solidarity over suspicion. She embodies a kind of Advent discipline: forming, bit by bit, the community she hopes will outlast the world’s violence.
If this sounds familiar, it is because the Incarnation itself is the ultimate refusal of isolation. God does not remain distant, untouched by human suffering. God joins us, inhabits our vulnerability, and takes on the limitations of a body that can hunger, weep, bleed, and break. God chooses interdependence.
Love, in the Christian story, is never self-preserving. It is always self-giving.
What Love Asks of Us Now
We often assume that love is the easiest commandment. But Advent teaches us that love is the hardest work we do. It asks us to see clearly without giving in to despair. It asks us to hope fiercely without turning away from reality. It asks us to imagine what is possible even when the world insists that nothing can change.
Butler gives us language and texture for this kind of love. Her characters show us that communities are forged through practices of mutual care, shared vulnerability, and fierce commitment. Love in her stories is not the reward for safety—it is the precondition for survival.
And perhaps this is what the Christ-child brings into the world: not safety, but a new way of being human. A way that binds us to one another. A way that resists the isolating logic of empire and fear. A way that insists, even in the dark, that love is stronger than the forces that unravel us.
The Work of Love Begins Here
In Advent, we light candles not because the night has ended, but because the light we carry together is enough to help us take the next step. Lauren Olamina walks north with only the smallest sources of illumination—campfires, shared stories, the fragile connections of strangers becoming companions. Mary walks toward Elizabeth with a song in her throat and a child in her womb. We walk into Advent with our own small lights: our communities, our tender hopes, our practices of love that remake the world in tiny, persistent ways.
Butler helps us see what Scripture has been saying all along: love is not a comfort we receive; it is a labor we undertake. It is slow work. Communal work. Hard work. And it is the only work that makes a future possible.
This Advent, may we learn again to love in the dark—fiercely, creatively, courageously—trusting that the God who comes to us in vulnerability is already shaping a world where love is the law of life.
