A Holy Kind of Proximity

BY JORDAN HUMPHREY

Pigs

When I was a child, growing up in the suburbs of North Carolina, my mother got the wild idea that she would surprise my uncle with a Christmas gift of two potbellied pigs. My uncle was the type of man you might call eclectic. He lived at the end of a long gravel road, in a cabin he’d built with his own two hands; he had a menagerie of animals that roamed about his property: a flock of guinea hens, a litter of cats, and a small pack of mutts.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, my siblings and I looked after the young pigs, chasing them around our basement and taking them on leashed walks around our neighborhood. They were about the size of cats, all cute and cuddly, and we could not believe they would one day grow to weigh as much as 200 lbs (or 90 kgs).

As Christmas drew closer, my siblings and I had a difficult time preparing to say goodbye to our new friends. We had grown to love how their little hooves slid across the floor and how their drooping tummies jiggled back and forth. We held our breath when, on Christmas morning, my uncle sat on a bar stool, blindfolded, while my mother brought in the pigs, one in each arm, eyes wide and tails wagging.

To my mother’s surprise, my uncle declined the pigs and we happily brought them back home. Soon after, during a thunderstorm, a neighborhood dog attacked and killed both of them. As an eight-year-old kid, I was devastated. At church when I asked the pastor if animals went to heaven, I wasn’t taken seriously. At home when I stopped eating meat, my parents didn’t know what to do. I was in the second grade and knew nothing of vegetarianism. I knew only that I could not eat something as loving, as curious, and as cute as Moonlight and Shadow. 

Any animal lover will tell you this—there is something about getting to know another living being that inextricably links us to their well-being. And this link allows us to see the animal not as a nameless thing but as a unique being, created by God, capable of both joy and suffering.

Before welcoming pigs into our home, I did not know this truth. I knew the taste of bacon. I knew pigs lived on farms, but I knew them only from a distance. Then, sharing a home with Moonlight and Shadow changed me, and I could no longer see pigs as mere things.

If this is true, then perhaps it is distance that allows the atrocities of industrial agriculture and factory farming. Perhaps it is only through concealed slaughterhouses and plastic-wrapped meats, through the renaming and repackaging of animal bodies, that industries can farm other species with little to no concern for their quality of life. And perhaps these injustices result less from a lack of concern for animal welfare and more from the emotional protection offered by distance.

The opposite of distance is proximity. While distance distorts reality, proximity confronts it. While distance pretends suffering does not exist, proximity accepts the truth of the sufferer. Moreover, as Christians, we might find comfort in a God, who is not distant but is intimately connected to Creation. A God who has counted the hairs on our heads, who cares for every sparrow that falls. A God who showed up, right smack-dab in the middle of a manger, who put on creaturely flesh and came to live among us creatures. Not a God out there, but a God who is here — a God who’s with us.

To live a flourishing life, to be transformed by our proximate God, we must become proximate to Creation. All of it — the pain and the pleasure, the suffering and the joy. Jeanette Armstrong, an Environmental Ethics scholar and a keeper of traditional knowledge of the Okanagan Nation, said recently that “society changes when transformative experiences are made available.”1 Not through guilt-tripping, not through arguing, not through scientific data – but through transformative experiences, which can only happen in proximity.

Sanctuary

For me, one of these transformative experiences happened at a farmed animal sanctuary. I had hoped to take my partner to see goats (her favorite animal) at a farm outside of New York City for a birthday surprise. But instead of a simple meet-and-greet with goats, we were taken along on a tour of the sanctuary. While we spent time with the residents, scratching pig bellies and letting cows lick our hands, we learned about the industries that exploit their bodies. We learned about chickens bred to gain so much weight their legs cripple underneath them and about calves taken from their mother on their first day of life. We were asked to hold, simultaneously, the delight of interacting with the animals alongside the knowledge of suffering our food system causes. And through becoming proximate to the animals’ joy as well as their suffering, our hearts were transformed.

In 1986, Farm Sanctuary began in upstate New York as the first farmed animal sanctuary. Today, there are more than a hundred throughout the US and many more scattered throughout the world. The concept is simple: farmed animals are rescued from the abuses of factory farming and provided a safe place to live out the rest of their lives. They are not used for human consumption nor valued for what they supply humans with, but are instead recognized as equals, as kin, as beings worthy of a flourishing life. 

But why a sanctuary? Why not free the animals on a big plot of land and turn away, letting them live without the constant gaze, chatter, and touch of humans? I have found two reasons. First, most farmed animals would not survive in the wild due to breeding patterns that have increased their bulk and docility, causing more and more harm to their bodies. Secondly, by living in a safe and stable environment, the residents become ambassadors for their species, allowing visitors to encounter them not as consumable commodities but as fellow creatures. 

After my partner and I visited the farm animal sanctuary, our vegetarian diets quickly became vegan. We learned how to make baked goods without eggs (substituting applesauce, or mashed banana), and how to add creaminess to foods without dairy (using coconut milk, or avocados). We volunteered at farms and animal sanctuaries, hoping to connect our practices to our preaching, our ethics to our lives. Last summer, we took care of a farmed animal sanctuary in Georgia while the owners went away. There were cows, donkeys, goats, and chickens. The chickens, especially, seemed to live a good life, with space to roam, bushes to shelter under, berries to pick, and dust to bathe in. On hot days we would feed them frozen fruits, and at night each small flock got an electric fan to keep them cool.

Our focused care for the animals promoted their well-being as equal to our own, and yet there was something about our work at the sanctuary that felt isolating. We had come to the farm from New York City at the height of the George Floyd protests and the 7:00 pm cheer for essential workers battling COVID-19. At the farm, we couldn’t help but feel disconnected from the pain and reckoning our communities were going through.

Solidarity

Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland writes that “through the praxis of solidarity, we not only apprehend and are moved by the suffering of the other, we confront and address its oppressive cause and shoulder the other’s suffering.”2 At the farm in Georgia, I struggled with the question of whose suffering to shoulder. I realized that proximity to one type of suffering may result in distance from another. I continue to struggle with how to respond. 

As much as I want to pretend that animal welfare is merely a matter of dietary choices and showing kindness to animals, I am learning that oppressive systems are often much too complex to be changed by any single-sized solution. The food system trapping animals in horrible living conditions is the same system trapping our neighbors in oppressive conditions. I think about migrant workers in slaughterhouses forced to tolerate hazardous environments for meager pay; I think about the lack of nutritious, affordable food in low-income neighborhoods; I think about the social and economic barriers that have shaped the eating habits of marginalized communities.

I guess what I’m wrestling with here is: to what communities am I allowing myself to become proximate? By shouldering the suffering of one community, am I ignoring the suffering of others? Or is it possible that, by standing in solidarity with a chicken in a sanctuary in Georgia, I am playing a small yet honest role in confronting these complex and oppressive systems?

I do not have answers to these questions. I do not know what transformative experiences may be necessary to guide us towards the liberation of all beings. I do not know, currently, what standing in solidarity looks like outside the walls of an animal sanctuary. But I do know that the one whom we call the Good Samaritan was not the person who turned away or continued walking down the path. No, the one we know as the Good Samaritan was the one who Christ said left the path, the one who saw the stranger and climbed down in the ditch, the one who was moved by a holy kind of proximity.3

1Indigenous Economics. YouTube. IntlForum, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib9BVGDW6sw.
2 Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010.
3 Luke 10.29-37.