By Jayda Kechour

I have chosen to share what I have learned from three of our readings through CreatureKind. The first reading is a book by Randy Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Woodley’s book stirs within me a call to pursue a life of shalom. His book reminds me that if one part of creation is suffering then we are not living in complete harmony and wholeness. Woodley calls readers to be a part of the healing and reconciliation process on earth with all creatures by looking at the ministry of Jesus which is congruent with the Harmony Way through Indigenous perspectives. The second reading is a book by Sunaura Taylor named Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. Taylor clearly reveals how all living beings, those disabled and those not, suffer from systems created by humans that are disabling and oppressing through ableism. Taylor has helped shape my disability theology and has convinced me that disability and animal liberation must go hand in hand. Lastly, the third reading is a book by Melanie L. Harris titled Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. Harris teaches the importance of environmental justice perspectives by women of color particularly women of African descent. I have learned how necessary ecowomanist perspectives are in understanding earth justice and liberation for all creatures. These three readings have deepened my faith and have inspired me to reshape my role with creation care and justice as a follower of Jesus.

Ministrocentric

We are one part of creation. In Randy Woodley’s book Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, Woodley shares that Indigenous views reveal that life is both biocentric and anthropogenic. Indigenous views show that humans uniquely relate to the rest of creation. This view is described as ministrocentric which means that life is centered on serving creation, maintaining harmony, assuring reciprocity, conducting ceremonies of mediation, and more, to maintain harmony and restore harmony whenever it is broken. A ministrocentric life is one of restoring harmony through gratitude, reciprocity and ceremony between our Creator, humans, and all other members of creation.¹ This view is sacred and meaningful. How can Christians live out the role of maintaining and restoring harmony? I learned through Woodley that living a shalom life means we must be intentional about bringing balance and harmony to creation. I extend Woodley’s offer and invite us to imitate Jesus’s ministry of shalom. Woodley explains the heart of shalom:

A society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them. God has a special concern for the poor and needy, because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just. Jeremiah 22:16 (NLT) equates the social task of caring to revealing a genuine relationship with God: '[King Josiah] gave justice and help to the poor and needy, and everything went well for him. ‘Isn’t that what it means to know me?’ says the LORD.²

First, “a society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them.” Are we caring for those most marginalized? I ask, “how do I benefit unknowingly or knowingly from an unjust system while others experience harm?” Caring for justice and sharing compassion to others is to know God better.

Nonhuman Creature Justice

During high school I began to realize how my food choices were being made at the expense of the captivity, torment, and suffering of nonhuman creatures. Sunaura Taylor elaborates in her book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation that the disability farmed animals experience is inseparable from the environment humans create.

The mother pig is made utterly immobile not by physical difference or disease but by the metal bars of her gestation crate. The hen suffers from pain, but whether that pain is due to a broken leg, overcrowding, complete darkness, or the death of her cagemate is impossible to know. The dairy cow is euthanized not because she cannot walk but because she has become a symbol of contamination.³

It was easy for me to go to the grocery store and buy packages of cheap meat without knowing details about the lives behind these containers. I learned that cows, pigs, and chickens are part of our most marginalized neighbors in creation. I had been benefiting from a shattering system, one contrary to peace and harmony. God created nonhuman creatures to flourish, roam, and have an abundance of clean air, fresh water, and nutritious food from the earth. The more I learned about the pain and death that nonhuman creatures experience on a massive scale every single day, the more I wanted to be vegan. As a beloved child of Abba, ⁴ I want to live a life that supports creation like our Creator does. I have yet to experience a church setting that addresses environmental sin or how God’s plants and nonhuman creatures are not being loved well by humans. If we pursue a life of shalom as followers of Jesus, we must soften our ears and listen to the marginalized. Taylor writes, “We choose to ignore cries from nonhuman creatures.”⁵ Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy poignantly writes, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”⁶

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.⁷ Human imaginations are powerful gifts from the Creator. They allow us to consider realities that commonly provide for human consumption, yet would not be witnessed by most humans on a daily basis, such as the cries of nonhuman creatures in horrifying food production settings. They speak to us every day when they cry out in pain or try to move away from our prods, electrodes, knives, and stun guns. Animals tell us constantly that they want out of their cages, and that they want to be reunited with their families, or that they don’t want to walk down the kill chute. Animals express themselves all the time, and many of us know it. If we didn’t, factory farms and slaughterhouses would not be designed to constrain any choices an animal might have.⁸

Disability Justice

Through her book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, Sunaura Taylor has helped me understand that all bodies are subjected to the oppression of ableism.

All animals–both those we human beings would call disabled and those we would not–are devalued and abused for many of the same basic reasons disabled people are. They are understood as incapable, as lacking in the various abilities and capacities that have long been held to make human lives uniquely valuable and meaningful. They are, in other words oppressed by ableism. ⁹

Taylor discusses ableism and animals and she highlights an important argument. Taylor argues that beings with neurotypical human capacities must not be inherently more valuable than those without.¹⁰ Cathryn Bailey, a feminist scholar furthers the conversation and says, “the problem is not reason itself but rather the ways in which reason has been held up as separate from and more valuable than emotion, feeling, and other ways of knowing and being.”¹¹ As a human, and a follower of Jesus, how can I care and love living beings just for their being? I argue we need to expand our imaginations about who we are as humans in creation and how mysterious and wonderful our neighbors are. “We are just beginning to comprehend the vast array of abilities found on this planet, and human abilities are but a small fraction of them.”¹² Our imaginations must be tied to shalom. In other words, shalom is to view everything as sacred because our Creator cares for all. Each day creation invites us to humbly appreciate the intricacies of every living being and teaches us that everything connects us to our Creator. How can we view and treat nonhuman farmed creatures and humans with and without disabilities as sacred? How can our food systems be environments of flourishing rather than disabling for humans and nonhumans? Are we willing to stop supporting factory farms where countless lives of nonhuman creatures are massacred and disabled? Are we willing to follow Jesus and allow these creatures to be in a thriving environment? I hope so.

Ecowomanism

Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths by Melanie L. Harris is

critical reflection, contemplation, and praxis-oriented study of environmental justice from the perspectives of women of color and particularly women of African descent. It links a social justice agenda with ecojustice, recognizing the parallel oppressions that women of color have often survived when confronting racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and similar oppressions that the earth is facing through environmental degradation.¹³

I am thankful for Harris’s wisdom because I feel that I and communities of faith where I belong/frequent/participate in would benefit from her reflection on climate justice.

At the same time that conceptualizing the unique connections women have with the planet as mother, or the feminization of the planet, can serve as a connecting point to the lives of women, there is also an eerie familiarity to the structural nature of violence that the earth has faced (ecoviolence) and the structural forms of violence that black women have faced historically. ¹⁴

Structural violence that Black women have endured are interwoven to the violence of mother earth. Reading the voices of African and African American women in Harris’ book resonates within me the necessity to include ecowomanist methodologies so we can not only learn their histories and traditions but also follow their leadership which is transformative and centers earth justice. Christians are called to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God,” therefore, ecowomanism can lead us with deeper connection with justice issues that impact our planet and people on its margins. From them we can become more aware of environmental changes and implement climate smart practices for our collective future. I argue that one of the urgent needs of the Western American churches is to understand justice issues such as environmental justice, climate justice, and food and land sovereignty as connected to animal liberation, disability inclusion, and Black and Indigenous lives, to name a few. Christians can take part in the incarnational hope of Jesus and ecowomanist lessons are pivotal to this ministry.

Revelations

As I reflect on how I have grown through CreatureKind, I recognize new perspectives, dreams, ideas, and voices within me that have been strengthened. The books we read are achingly compelling. I feel a forceful tug from our readings, which constantly pushes me to reshape and rebuild my role in creation. I am beginning to unpeel layers of systems that exploit and disable living beings. I feel like I am holding the cheeks of stories interwoven on pages that are shattering-liberating-and yet, I feel as if I am only gazing at the ripples of chilling waters into which I have not yet had to plunge. I am learning more that I am easily disheartened and overwhelmed by the world and environmental perils, the state of mother earth and where we are heading. Yet, there is hope. Earth is active, breathing; she is well-alive. As Chris Doran illuminates in his book, Hope in the Age of Climate Change, expectational hope for all of creation to be reconciled with God one day means that we are to actively bring hope alive on earth now.¹⁵What an invitation and a daring honor. How can Christians help create a life for nonhuman creatures, such as farmed animals, to live in a way that is even a pale reflection of the hope still to come? We must dig deeper in church settings and address despairing structural systems so that we can support or create new ones that are more justiceoriented. Our imagination for creation needs to grow deeper. Through CreatureKind, I have learned words such as ministrocentric, ableism, and ecowomanism, as well as perspectives from authors who are Indigenous, Black female, and disabled. I anticipate learning more rich insight about climate and ocean justice in our following readings. Specifically, I feel more connected to my Godgiven dream through CreatureKind than I ever have before. The more I learn from CreatureKind’s mission to care for animal welfare in faith communities, I learn about my authentic design in Christ. I am created to love my neighbors well and help bring hope and reconciliation on earth for all creation to flourish. My dream is this:

Route to Roots / Jayda’s Farm

The soil is rich with microorganisms. Rescued cows, pigs, and chickens find shelter and roam freely on the land. The hungry people are enjoying a rich vegan meal outside in the grass on wooden tables with colorful cushions. The dishes are cooked by the community with ingredients straight from the growing garden as an act of sovereignty and resistance. There is praise and dancing. Nonhuman creatures are thriving eating alongside human creatures, as we all abundantly feast from the bounty of the earth. Peoples, once displaced from the land are safe from environmental harm and other violence, feasting as one. We are thankful. We pray and thank our Creator for the gift of earth’s precious food. This land is home for all to return to the route of our roots. We are all soil creatures, loved by our Creator.

How are your Godlysized dreams serving the whole community of creation?

^{1. Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Prophetic Christianity Series (PC)), 2012. 61↩}
^{2. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, 25.]↩}
^{3. Taylor Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, New York: (The New Press, 2016), 38.↩}
^{4. God as Father↩}
^{5. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 62.↩}
^{6. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 62.↩}
^{7. Romans 8:19-23, NIV.↩}
^{8. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 63.↩}
^{9. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 21.↩}
^{10. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 70.↩}
^{11. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 71↩}
^{12. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 79.↩}
^{13. Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, New York: (Orbis Books, 2017), (Kindle Location 2619). Kindle Edition. ↩}
^{14. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, 2630↩}
^{15. Chris Doran, Hope in the Age of Climate Change: Creation Care This Side of the Resurrection, Oregon: (Cascade Books, 2017).↩}