Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [30]

AT LEAST THREE YEARS ago, my fathers God stopped being my God. His church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because I’m a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn’t mine any more. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 30

Note

The chapter’s hinge: a private apostasy stated in flat, reiterative negation (‘stopped being my God… stopped being my church’), then undercut by the self-indictment ‘because I’m a coward.’ The joke is in the theology — ‘all three names of that God’ performs the Trinity while refusing it. Butler makes the narrator’s honesty and her self-contempt the same act.