Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [75]
The influential “ecotheologian” Thomas Berry reaches the same conclusion. “Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being, and spiritual integrity.” In perhaps his most famous teaching, Berry speaks against the idea that the world is a mere “collection of objects” and insists we look at creation as a “communion of subjects.” By leaving animal products out of our diet we welcome into our lives new, more beautiful, and more inspiring ways of being a part of the natural world.
Linzey, Dear, and Berry are speaking for many other Christians past and present who also have found a link between the spiritual life and a life of compassion for animals. The Christian teaching of compassion for animals was especially emphasized by Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis not only spoke eloquently about compassion for animals but also (like Linzey, Dear, and Berry) taught that kindness to animals is good spiritually and promotes peace among humans. “Not to hurt our humble brethren, the animals, is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have people who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity you will have people who will deal likewise with other people.”
It feels like this is what was meant when God said we have “dominion” over animals. Rather than exploiting them and using them for our every whim, perhaps we are to take care of them, or at least not to hurt them. In other words, kindness to animals whether expressed in diet or other ways is an essential part of one’s spiritual life. This has become my experience in very concrete ways.
For example, after learning the truth about how animals suffer on today’s industrialized “farms,” I faced a kind of spiritual choice. I could press the facts from my mind and pretend that the violence I was supporting by eating animal products was someone else’s responsibility. Had I made that choice it would have shaped the person I am today and my spiritual life in important (and unfortunate) ways. Instead, I listened to my better instincts, and I’ve found that when you learn to do that with the foods you choose, you learn to do it in many other parts of your life as well. One good deed leads to another.
My friend the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who was inspired to commit to vegetarianism by the birth of his first child and wrote a wonderful book about it called Eating Animals, put it this way: “Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty… change[s] us.” Aligning my diet with my beliefs has helped me become more like the person I want to be.
It’s not surprising, really, that when the world’s single most influential spiritual leader, Pope Benedict XVI, was asked to comment on the factory farming of animals, he began by saying, “That is a very serious question.” If the rest of his answer weren’t so insightful, I would be tempted to stop there. It’s such an important point: what we choose to eat is “a very serious question.” Yet, many of us never ask it. The pope continues, “Animals, too, are God’s creatures…. Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” Yes, such practices are indeed degrading to living creatures, but they also degrade our own humanity. Who are we if we not only allow this to happen, but if we purchase the end