Chalk Messages
A few weeks ago, the Katy trail in Dallas had messages chalked on its concrete. There were many variations, all colorful and well-lettered, and with some wit. The first one I saw said (this from memory) “You can be strong without eating animals.” There were a number of other messages, all of them encouraging a rethinking of eating flesh or dairy. I was not offended. I like witty vegans, and I appreciated this stealth overnight campaign which itself did no harm.
The next day the messages were clean gone; there had been rain and, one supposed, they were just washed away. As I was meditating on all this, I saw a reddish cardinal on the side of the trail. It was pecking at an insect that was trying to get away, but the cardinal prevailed.
Score: Vegans 1, Bug-Eaters 1.
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I was having a salad one evening for supper, and a dinner companion looked at my plate. “Oh,” he said, “that’s what food eats.”
Bonus point for the carnivores?
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This is a true story; I have a book of his published letters. Sydney Smith was a witty Church of England clergyman of the 19th century and a real socialite. Sent to the country for his health, he wrote about the pains of his exile to a city friend. I’m stuck out here, he said, where all sorts of “birds fly around, uncooked.”
I think that makes it a four-way tie between vegans, bug-eaters, carnivores, and clergy.
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The original plan, it seems, had all living beings eating only fruits and vegetables and seeds and grass. Animals, birds, fish, and humans did not eat each other, nor did any living thing “that creepeth upon the earth.” There is also a suggestion that the purpose for which animals and birds came into existence was to become friends of the original, solitary human. Yet in short order that was seen not to work, and so the human’s friend was extracted from within himself, the woman whose sameness-in-difference brought delighted recognition from the man. The fall, however, brought into the world the need for rule and judgment. An early sign of this is right after the flood (Genesis 9:2-6), where the execution of punishment for murder is put into human hands.
What is a very deep mystery is that, at the very same time as human beings were made political, they were given permission to eat animals. The binding together of human beings seems to require the strong differentiation of humans from the other living beings. I do not know why this is the case. I sense that the Bible has a deep and difficult truth here.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the Bible is ambivalent at best about meat-eating. The permission to do so seems to be a concession. As Jesus said about divorce: the law permits it because you have hard hearts. But at the beginning it was not so.
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Out & About. The date for the fall theology lecture is Sunday, October 28, at 6 p.m. at Incarnation, Dallas. The topic is about rules and exceptions, and I will use assisted suicide as a way of getting at the problem. Suicide is wrong, and the Christian tradition holds rather strongly that we should not assist someone else who wishes to bring about her or his own death. But we can also imagine rather difficult cases, and so we wonder about breaking the rules—that maybe, sometimes, it would be okay. The reception that follows will illustrate the same rule-and-exception quandary, for while it is unlikely to feature meat or even fried grasshoppers, we do expect cheese.