JUNE 1 2020
THE PATH OF LIFE ETERNAL
See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).
Life is making choices: wrong path, right path; wrong food, right food; wrong partner, right partner. Today all of life conspires to push us in the wrong direction, with life-threatening consequences. Not Jesus: he came to teach us ‘how to live correctly’, how to live as human beings in God’s earth; that’s why he came with a dual purpose, not only to save us but primarily to restore creation to her pristine state.
Fortunately, there is an awakening out there: we are experiencing a sudden jolt that might just work as a catalyst for change. And change we must, not easy because we are creatures of habit: we have our routines: wake up, grab a cup of coffee, have a bite of something, and back to the grindstone, because: “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”
Well, for millions that routine has suddenly stopped. We still owe, but for many the ‘work’ part has been deleted. We suddenly have time on our hands, time to reflect, or time to riot?
Time to change?
Ecclesiasticus 3 points to change:
To everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to break down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to search and a time to count as lost,
a time to keep and a time to discard,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
I believe that NOW is a time to mend, a time to kill the old order, a time to uproot what has become a destructive regime, benefitting the rich and killing the poor and fatally wounding creation.
We are seeing the World Health Organization as irrelevant, we are seeing the United Nations as non-effective, we are seeing the European Union as fragile, unwilling to help Italy and Spain to fight to VIRUS. Instead borders are sealed off, while power has reverted back to national and local authorities.
And then there is the USA. Thanks to meat shortages President Trump has decided to open slaughterhouses, endangering the workers there: money trumps lives. My question: how essential is meat in our lives.
Fast Food Nation
This past week I have been reading, Fast Food Nation, and the astonishing rise of McDonald’s and other fast food outlets in the last 50 years. Their closure has led to a surge in ‘home-cooking’ and ‘home-baking’ and ‘home-gardening’, while farmers are forced to stop the factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens.
Eating meat is embedded in our culture, even though animal agriculture is a leading cause of global warming. Will the Covid-19 open the door to more healthy eating and greater awareness of Climate Change?
Yes, the path of Life Eternal is intimately connected to our eating habits. We now know that we cannot protect our environment – creation – while continuing to eat meat regularly. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world after China and the USA.
For too long, especially in “Western civilization,” we have nurtured an opposition between “mind” and “body”. Even worse, we have held the body hostage to the mind. What the mind wanted, came first; what the body needed, came maybe second. This radical dismemberment of our very being has been at the root of so many of our contemporary illnesses. Even the treatment of illness follows this same duality: medications may be prescribed, but without psychological therapy. It is now more important than ever to let people’s minds become re-assimilated to their bodies, to restore balance. The church is no help there: it separates Nature from Grace, Heaven from Earth. The same split is evident in Human and Animal. The current pandemic is the result of our anthropo-human-centric life: we are seen as more important than the animals God created from the same soil, even though the abuse of animals is at the very centre of the pandemic.
Jesus taught us to be the servants in chief in creation, a service that includes animals.
Eating a plant-based diet is the most important contribution an individual can make in reversing global Warming: Following ‘the wrong path leads us away from the path of Life Eternal’. Life Eternal is exactly what it says: it means the earth being permanently capable of sustaining LIFE, because right here on terra firma we will spend eternity.
C. S. Lewis was right when he wrote, ““Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”
Oops, that hurts. Our farming system is a road to hell, permeated with misery. Today’s chickens have been so genetically modified that their very bodies have become prisons of pain even if we give them their freedom. Turkeys are bred to be so obese that they are incapable of reproducing without artificial insemination. Mother cows have their calves ripped from them before weaning, resulting in such acute distress that we can hear this in their wails, while cattle are imprisoned neck-to-neck in feedlots and brutally slaughtered.
The road we are on leads to PANDEMICS: if some part of creation hurts, we all become victims, with the USA being the leader in animal cruelty and with Brazil openly encouraging rain forest clearing. Both are now Coronavirus champions: two countries led by presidents who call themselves Christians.
Go vegetarian.
A 2015 study found that a vegetarian diet is $750 a year cheaper than a meat-based diet. It’s also healthier: less fat, less heart disease, less antibiotics in our diets, as its overuse is leading to reducing its healing powers.
There is a lesson here for eternity. The Bible tells us so. See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).
What is ‘the path of Life Eternal?”
And here I open up another animal aspect: a can of worms. The Path of Life Eternal leads through vegetarianism. We cannot do God’s will by abetting animal cruelty. Today we eat the ‘Devil’s Brew’, born and slaughtered in pain and cruelty, saturated with growth hormones, with no regard for the animal’s wellbeing. In the very last text of the book of Jonah, God expresses concern for the welfare of the domesticated animals in Nineveh. God cares about them, and so should we.
Sorry to repeat my mantra about heaven: we won’t go there, ever. Our eternity will be lived – to the full, I should add – here, right here, on God’s precious earth. Life Eternal will be enjoyed, perfectly – in full loving care and symbiosis with ALL ANIMALS and ALL OF NATURE.
For our sake, our eternal welfare, now that we are on the threshold of a new phase in human history, now that we are at a historic moment in the tortuous tale of humanity, God calls us to reconsider how life should be lived. The path of Eternal Life leads through animal welfare and effective love for creation.
In a world threatened with famine, especially in Africa and South-East Asia, it is unconscionable to eat a product that requires close to 10 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, not counting the untold calories in refrigerated trucking to bring it to the table.
I may add that my wife and I have been vegetarian ever since we read 45 years ago Francis Lappé’ s book, Diet for a Small Planet.