“It would seem that the Spanish bought Christ to America in order to crucify the Indian.”
—Bishop Vasco de Quiroga
When Easter passed, my lovely friend Tim suggested I made a faux-pas by posting, on the Easter weekend, a blog on veganism and not mentioning Easter.
He has a point. It is the most important Christian celebration in a largely Christian country (even though it appears its placement is sitting over the pagan celebration of the vernal equinox—actually a week after it, and something about the full moon, or so said the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD). Incidentally, cable television, reincarnation and gnostics were also banned at that Council, except on weekends.
Easter corresponds with the Jewish Passover. The Last Supper is often thought to be a Passover meal, and Jesus was a practicing Jew, after all. The fact is he never actually became a Christian until long after his death. Actually, I don’t know if he ever converted at all, although his followers definitely did. Either way, his teachings remain, at their essence, eternal and challenging: “No longer love thy neighbour, love thy enemy.”
That would be a good one for today, with discernment, of course.
Christians have different names for different days over the Easter weekend: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday (in the winter, 8:30 in Newfoundland) and Resurrection Day or Easter Sunday on, well, Sunday. And somewhere in there some parents also fit in a chocolate Easter egg hunt and families gather to break bread and give thanks.
Easter is the time of Jesus’ crucifixion and the miracle of Christ’s resurrection, of the possibility of eternal life, and triumph over the cross of the body, and the difficulty of being human on this crazy planet. The idea is wondrous, and interestingly placed over the vernal equinox—as the earth itself at that time, in so many ways, begins to come back to life, reborn, replenished, maybe even re-believing.
THE VEGETABLE GARDEN OF EDEN
Anyway, I was thinking about Jesus and veganism and if there is any connection? I do know this, before the Fall, the Garden of Eden was pure vegetarian. Seriously. You couldn’t find a shrimp salad anywhere, let alone something as revolting as a Big Mac.
That’s one nice thing, and perhaps to those who are subtle, a hint.
CHOOSING MERCY
Also, the idea of veganism and vegetarianism is often rooted in the belief that just as it would be undeniably wrong to give your dog Rex a brutal and miserable life of cruelty and confinement, and then cut him up for cutlets, so it is wrong, it seems to me, to do the same to those never-loved, never-seen animals we see saran-wrapped up all pretty and clean in the deli in Safeway. And Factory Farming and ultimately slaughterhouses do just that, en masse, 24 hours a day. Billions and billions of animals.
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
So how does this tie in with what Jesus would do, or want, where the tiger lies down with the lamb? Along with “Not only love the neighbour, but love thy enemy as thyself,” one of my favourite lines from Jesus—of many—is this:
“Whatever you do unto one of the least of mine, you do unto me.”
That’s a stunning statement. And I could be wrong, but I happen to believe that the animals in our dominion, that we brutalize for months or years in factory farms and slaughterhouses, qualify as “one of the least of mine.”
CHOOSING JUSTICE
As for loving people, I recently read some beautiful quotes from Christians who have fought also for the rights of the poor and persecuted, and to them I feel profound admiration and gratitude.
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, often thought of as the founder of Liberation Theology and the preferential option for the poor, wrote:
“If I define my neighbour as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines—then my world changes. This is what is happening with the “option for the poor,” for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence.”
The “option for the poor” is one of the main ideas of Liberation Theology, known as “the preferential option for the poor.”
Leonardo Boff wrote:
“…the Church’s option is a preferential option for the poor, against their poverty.”
Boff goes onto say that the poor are:
“…those who suffer injustice. Their poverty is produced by mechanisms of impoverishment and exploitation. Their poverty is therefore an evil and an injustice.”
This mechanism is what is often called “structural violence”. Paul Farmer talks about structural violence at length in his Pathologies of Power, and it is from that book that I found these quotes.
Structural violence results from mechanisms that by their exploitative nature—their imposition or their limitation—lead to violence against people who are choiceless but to live and survive within these structures.
Samuel Ruiz, much beloved Bishop in Chiapas (but not with the government), and recently retired, said this:
“I came to San Cristobal to convert the poor, but they ended up converting me.”
Easter is many things, and crucially important to Christians. It tells of and symbolizes the resurrection, rebirth, something that transcends violence and injustice. And when we are kinder, when we reach out to those who are hungry, naked, thirsty, in that moment, maybe we are all reborn.
And then we start again.
Though perhaps not perfect, Tim, I hope this is an improvement over the Vegan/Easter-forgetting Blog.
Here’s to the beauty and miracle of Easter, and the lush earthly hope of the vernal Equinox, of rebirth and regrowth, to reaching out to the littlest of us all, and to the creatures who suffer to fulfill our human greed and ignorance.
Lots of love to you, with gratitude and surrender,
Pete xox
