The Soulful Eye

As someone who holds a position underneath the radar of most conservative Christian thought, I find myself often struggling with the seeming futility of the things I care about.  Why would I hope for a time when we will gaze out into the world and see animals as fellow creatures of God when we can barely look at other people and see fellow children of God.  More days than not I wish I could just forget about what I know, what I’ve seen, what I continue to see about what we are in relation to the creatures at our mercy.  If it were possible to say this literally I’d say that it literally makes my soul throw up.

One of this week’s readings in a little book called “A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People“ is from a book called Living Simply, and it’s about how living differently in relation to the world around us can be properly meaningful.  People ask me why I don’t eat meat and there are so many reasons that sometimes it’s hard to give the short quippy sound-bite answer most people are looking for.  I’d like to use the points from this week’s devotional to break it down.  I get the feeling that most people think I’m constantly struggling to fight back my meat cravings, that I’m involved in some sort of ascetic battle against my own mind and body.  That’s just so not true.  I saw the truth, it didn’t line up with my values, I changed my behavior.  Period.  In other words, I’ve reoriented …

As an act of faith performed for the sake of personal integrity …

I simply don’t look at animals as things.  My dog is not a watch.  Neither is a pig or a chicken or a cow or a turkey.  I’m personally not someone who is comfortable harming an innocent creature if I’m aware that I’m doing it and it’s within my power to avoid it.  If I wouldn’t look and animal in the eye and be willing to kill it myself I don’t think that it’s ok for me to hire out that killing.  I would never consider the conditions factory farmed animals are raised in to be reasonable or right or just so I do everything I can to avoid supporting that industry, directly or indirectly.  Neither eating the flesh nor wearing the skin of an animal is something that can be separated from everything that led up to that point, so I orient towards not participating in either the process or the product of that harm.

As an act of self-defense against the mind-an-body-polluting effects of over-consumption …

Eating meat is a habit for me.   I did it because I was taught to do it.  I live in one of the wealthiest times and places in the history of the world … I have 2 huge grocery stores within 3 minutes of my house (not to mention access to farmers markets and a garden in my own yard)  and the produce section alone is so bountiful that it would bring much of the worlds population to tears simply to see it.  Produce, beans, grains.  It’s all we need.  It turns out that under most conditions meat is a lie.

As an act of sharing with others what has been given to us, or of returning what was usurped by us through unjust social and economic structures …

In most of the developed world, meat is a greedy choice.

As an act of celebration of the riches found in creativity, spirituality, and community with others, rather than in mindless materialism …

Ditto.

As an act of provocation (ostentatious underconsumption) to arouse curiosity leading to dialog with others about affluence, alienation, poverty, and social injustice …

Ditto.

As an act of anticipation of the era when the self-confidence and assertiveness of the underprivileged forces new power relationships and new patterns of resource allocation upon us …

Ditto.

As an act of advocacy of legislated changes in present patters of production and consumption …

Ditto.

As an exercise of purchasing power to redirect production away from the satisfaction of artificially created wants, toward the supplying of goods and services that meet genuine social needs …

Ditto.  Our whole food system is essentially a world of artificially created wants.  See here and here and here.