Prisons and Plowshares

It used to be that farms in this country were owned by farmers whose well-being depended on the well-being of the animals they raised for food, and farming wasn’t so much a business as a way of life. Cows, pigs, and chickens were still raised for their meat (or eggs, or both), of course, but their lives were spent in relative ease prior to that fateful day. And yes, those lives were often spent in coops and barns, but at least the animals had room to move and knew the cycles of the seasons and when day would turn to night. Farms weren’t merely places where animals died, in other words. They were also places where animals lived.

Today’s factory farms are nothing of the sort. Animals are kept alive in these modern behemoths of production (and pollution), but it really can’t be said that these animals truly live any more than one can say that prisons are where people truly live. The only real difference between prisons and factory farms, it seems, is that the inhabitants of one have room at least to move around and stretch their limbs and are given balanced meals, while the inhabitants of the other are fed chemically altered slop and kept in cages so small they can never turn around their entire lives. Oh, yes, the other difference is that the former group of inhabitants are people who presumably did something wrong to get themselves in their predicament, while the other inhabitants are animals who… well, their only “crime” was that they were born with hooves and tails or beaks and feathers.

How we arrived at the place where animals face a fate worse than criminals for the sake of efficiencies of production and to satisfy our insatiable taste for meat is a long and sordid tale, and one that will be examined in future posts on this blog. Suffice it to say that we’ve unwittingly become a culture that prizes efficiency over ethics and mass production over morality. If it saves money, who really cares if it came from the sweat of impoverished third world labor or the blood of abused animals? When convenience trumps compassion, a culture has lost its soul.

The Psalmist says, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”

If we, who were created in his image, do not likewise show compassion over all that God has made, are we then not marring God’s image in us? When we have fashioned the plowshares of our farms back into the swords of factories, and our pruning forks back into spears, have we not reversed the very call we’ve been given to be ambassadors of peace and compassion? Have we not, at that point, dispensed with our inheritance and, thus, forfeited our own souls?

Shhhh...

"The Secret" hit the shelves with a vengeance a few years ago and flew off the shelves just as fast. The basic premise (for those of you who have been stuck in an alternate universe for the past year) is that the good things that happen to you are the result of your ability to envision them happening. If you keep a positive attitude, good things will come your way: positive energy creates positive outcomes.

There have been countless iterations of this idea for millennia, the most historically recent being Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking." (The Health and Wealth Gospel movement has been a more recent offshoot.) Of course, for any student of culture or religion, The Secret wasn't much of a secret at all. Indeed, a variation on this theme exists in the Christian tradition in Paul's letter to the Philippians:

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you." (4:8-9)

The Christian version of The Secret (more accurately, the various iterations of "The Secret" are really just misguided versions of the Philippians passage) promises, not that good things will come to you if you envision them, but that God's peace will be upon you if you continue to focus on the good and noble. And what is a better thing than God's peace?

In the work of animal welfare, it is far too easy to get overwhelmed by the sickening reality of animal abuse and the horrific conditions of factory farms and the plight of millions of animals who are euthanized each year in this country in the name of population control. We must nevertheless hold up, in the midst of the reality of this desperate situation, a vision for what things can--and with God's help, will--be. God has rarely made a practice of swooping in to stop suffering. Many of us wish otherwise, but that's not how it works (freedom invariably begets suffering, which is the price we pay in a broken world). That will all change, of course, when "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven," but until that day, WE are God's hands and eyes and feet and heart, and WE are the ones whom God entrusts to carry out his will that all suffering might end, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our freedom to do so.

Think of a world where animal shelters are empty, factory farms gather cobwebs, dog and horse racing tracks are turned into pastures and parks, where medical laboratories are turned into classrooms, where children dissect sentences instead of animals. Meditate on these things... then get to work to bring it about.