9.01.2003
Speaker for the Dead is the second in a series of books written by Orson Scott Card, an award-winning science fiction author. Card is a Mormon and much of what he writes is infused with this background, experience and theology. This does not detract from the fact that he has some good insights and asks powerful questions. The book centers on a colony of humans on the planet Lusitania who are living with an indigenous sentient life form they nicknamed the “piggies” because of their facial resemblance to swine. The following is a conversation between Ender Wiggin, The Speaker for the Dead, and the colony’s governor.
“This is a quarantined world, Speaker. The amaranth (a food crop) is so well-suited to this environment that it would soon choke out the native grasses. The idea is not to terraform Lusitania. The idea is to have as little impact on this world as possible.”
“That must be hard on the people.”
“Within our enclave, Speaker, we are free and our lives are full. And outside the fence – no one wants to go there, anyway.”
The tone of her voice was heavy with concealed emotion. Ender knew, then, that the fear of the piggies ran deep.
“Speaker, I know you’re thinking that we’re afraid of the piggies. And perhaps some of us are. But the feeling most of us have most of the time, isn’t fear at all. It’s hatred. Loathing.”
“You’ve never seen them.”
While Card may have seen this from his Mormon background of a group of solitary Believers heading west to find sanctuary and build a Mormon state, the applications go much broader than that. There are a couple of thoughts that I find in the above passage that relate to my fundy background.
The first is the idea of living in an enclave, a “Christian ghetto” as we call it now. We have the seeds within us to impact the wider world at large with a life-transforming gospel but for some reason we find it necessary to stay within our enclaves and protect it. The idea is not to Christianize the world but to have as little impact on the world as possible. Like the Amish. Like many sections of the denomination that retreat behind a fence.
The second idea is the concept that living inside the fence provides freedom. By minimizing our contact with the wider world, we achieve a measure of safety but it comes at a cost. That cost is the restrictions we place on ourselves. To cover for that, we content ourselves with living inside the fence, the enclave, the ghetto, and tell ourselves that we are free. The truth is, we are constricted by the boundaries we place around ourselves and miss out on God’s greater blessings because we fear those “outside.”
Third is the last sentence. We know all about people “living in the world” or “living in sin” but we are only fooling ourselves. Most of us have never seen them. Oh, we catch a glimpse of them, we have a mental picture of them, we identify our stereotypes and our caricatures, but we have never seen THEM. They are individuals; they are people. We, like the disciples, lose the message of the gospel in seeking to call down fire on them, when Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. If we would SEE them, then we would love them and leave our fence to take the gospel to them.
“This is a quarantined world, Speaker. The amaranth (a food crop) is so well-suited to this environment that it would soon choke out the native grasses. The idea is not to terraform Lusitania. The idea is to have as little impact on this world as possible.”
“That must be hard on the people.”
“Within our enclave, Speaker, we are free and our lives are full. And outside the fence – no one wants to go there, anyway.”
The tone of her voice was heavy with concealed emotion. Ender knew, then, that the fear of the piggies ran deep.
“Speaker, I know you’re thinking that we’re afraid of the piggies. And perhaps some of us are. But the feeling most of us have most of the time, isn’t fear at all. It’s hatred. Loathing.”
“You’ve never seen them.”
While Card may have seen this from his Mormon background of a group of solitary Believers heading west to find sanctuary and build a Mormon state, the applications go much broader than that. There are a couple of thoughts that I find in the above passage that relate to my fundy background.
The first is the idea of living in an enclave, a “Christian ghetto” as we call it now. We have the seeds within us to impact the wider world at large with a life-transforming gospel but for some reason we find it necessary to stay within our enclaves and protect it. The idea is not to Christianize the world but to have as little impact on the world as possible. Like the Amish. Like many sections of the denomination that retreat behind a fence.
The second idea is the concept that living inside the fence provides freedom. By minimizing our contact with the wider world, we achieve a measure of safety but it comes at a cost. That cost is the restrictions we place on ourselves. To cover for that, we content ourselves with living inside the fence, the enclave, the ghetto, and tell ourselves that we are free. The truth is, we are constricted by the boundaries we place around ourselves and miss out on God’s greater blessings because we fear those “outside.”
Third is the last sentence. We know all about people “living in the world” or “living in sin” but we are only fooling ourselves. Most of us have never seen them. Oh, we catch a glimpse of them, we have a mental picture of them, we identify our stereotypes and our caricatures, but we have never seen THEM. They are individuals; they are people. We, like the disciples, lose the message of the gospel in seeking to call down fire on them, when Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. If we would SEE them, then we would love them and leave our fence to take the gospel to them.
