Fasting from Injustice, Feasting in Freedom

by Alyssa Moore

I identify as Catholic, but until I began to study theology at a Jesuit university, I knew few other Catholics or practicing Christians my age. Among those vaguely familiar with Catholicism, a few common factoids floated around: we make a huge deal about “the holy wafer thing” at church (we do); women and queer people are restricted from taking on leadership roles (alas, usually true); we tend to have big families (at least historically); and—this was the most frequent one—we don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. 

For me, already an herbivore from the time I was old enough to begin fasting, this last one didn’t seem like a big deal. (It did provoke a few theological debates about whether or not Gardein chickenless chick’n nuggets, being made of plants, were acceptable Friday fare.) But I became increasingly aware that, to both Catholic and non-Catholic/Christian acquaintances alike, abstaining from meat was something unusual, something that set our tradition apart. 

I’ve been interested to discover that when you ask Catholics what this practice is all about, few are able to articulate a reason right away. Among those who attempt to, you get a wide variety of answers, some of them slightly unsettling. “It’s an act of self-discipline.” “It’s a way to remember your total dependence on God to provide for your needs.” “It’s a reminder that the mind and soul are more important than the body.” “It’s a way of respecting Christ’s ‘flesh sacrifice’ by not partaking in other ‘flesh sacrifices.’” “It’s a means of practicing obedience to the Church!” “I’m not sure, I’m not even really Catholic anymore, but my Irish grandmother would be horrified if I didn’t do it.”  

Strangely, no one thinks to suggest that we are fasting from an everyday act of violence and indifference: towards animals, towards creation, towards our neighbors. If they did, we might begin to ponder why we only do this for a few days out of the year. 

As an animal lover by nature, and an environmental scientist by training, I have always been frustrated by my church’s lack of engagement with animal protection and environmental justice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church goes so far as to argue that “we can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point,” suggesting that each individual animal being and species, constantly upheld by the love, care, and affection of their Creator, is a unique manifestation of God’s presence and characteristics. (1) It repeatedly describes animals and other forms of nonhuman creation as living revelation, imploring Catholics to remember that animals have their own purpose, value, and trinitarian destiny entirely apart from their “usefulness” to human beings. It emphasizes on multiple occasions that it is “contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly,” and preaches that animals should be treated with kindness, mercy, and restraint—both for their own sake, and because of their relationship with the Creator. (2) And, as we know—as governing bodies like the UN and IPCC are all but begging us to realize—our exploitation of animals on an industrial scale has devastating consequences for our health and the health of our planet. (3)

What does fasting mean if after we celebrate Christ’s resurrection we return to the daily sacrificing and killing of animal bodies—an endless Good Friday for God’s revelatory, beloved nonhuman creation?  

A parable of sorts: I worked for a while as an administrative assistant at my Jesuit Catholic university, doing general office work and helping prep for catered business events. While almost all of the school’s student gatherings were vegan or vegetarian events, apparently our sustainability scruples got set aside for faculty, donor, and board meetings, which always involved at least one kind of meat or fish: steak, ham, or various kinds of poultry. I was always bothered by this inconsistency, but conscious of the fact that I was an easily replaceable student worker, not in a good position to contest the higher-ups’ menu choices.

Less than forty-eight hours before once such dinner was to take place, I was cc’d on an email saying that the catering order needed to be redone: since it was Ash Wednesday, the faculty could not eat meat, so would it be possible to replace the chicken with salmon, please? 

I would like to think that twenty-odd portions of chicken did not go to waste that night, that these creatures were not slaughtered and butchered just to end up in a dumpster, unused, in a city in which almost twenty percent of residents are food insecure—all in the name of a more “appropriate” fish dinner. (4)

I would like to think that. Unfortunately, I don’t think that was the case. 

And it’s not just animal creation that suffers because of our shortsightedness around food.  

On March 2, 1980, less than a month before he was murdered while saying Mass, the Salvadoran martyr and saint Monseñor Óscar Romero proclaimed from the pulpit: “Lenten fasting is not the same thing in those lands where people eat well as is a Lent among our third-world peoples, undernourished as they are, living in a perpetual Lent, always fasting.” (5) In the global north, we have normalized the fact that our food consumption (of animal products and otherwise) comes at the cost of oppression and injustice elsewhere. In San Romero’s native Central America, for example, the United States helped plan and execute a 1954 coup overthrowing Guatemala’s democratically elected president, sparking a civil war in which 200,000 Guatemalan people, primarily indigenous citizens, were killed. Why? The US desire for cheap tropical fruit. The Guatemalan president had proposed land reforms which would have threatened the global fruit conglomerate United Fruit Co., now known as Chiquita Brands International. (6) In South America, cattle ranching, largely driven by the US demand for cheap beef, is currently the leading cause of deforestation in every single Amazon country. This demand accounts for 80% of deforestation rates as of 2015 with devastating consequences for indigenous communities whose land is polluted, burned, deforested, and even seized outright for ranchland. (7)

Many of us live a “perpetual Lent” in wealthy countries as well, forced into frequent fasting by income inequality, increasing cost of living, and lack of access to nutritious food. A few blocks to the south of our graduate theological campus lies the University of California, Berkeley, arguably one of the most well-regarded universities in the nation. Even pre-pandemic, 44% of undergraduate students and 26% of graduate students in the UC system described themselves as food insecure, meaning they had to eat less, or experienced periods of disrupted eating, due to a lack of resources. (8) In Alameda County more broadly, at least one in five people source food from food banks in order to make ends meet. Two thirds of food bank clients are children and seniors, and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by hunger and food insecurity. Nationwide, households of color, especially Black and Latinx households, are approximately twice as likely to experience hunger as white households. (9)

What does fasting mean, when our everyday meals come at the cost of colonialism, imperialism, oppression, starvation? 

What does fasting mean, in the midst of so much hunger and injustice? 

Pondering all of this, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that we must radically reimagine what we think of as “fasting,” seeking to rediscover the spirit of the act rather than just conforming to established practice. The Bible and its many prophets and visionaries model this for us. On the first Friday of Lent, we hear the words of Isaiah 58: 

Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits,

    and drive all your laborers.

Yes, your fast ends in quarreling and fighting,

    striking with wicked claw.

Would that today you might fast

    so as to make your voice heard on high!

Is this the manner of fasting I wish,

    of keeping a day of penance:

That a man bow his head like a reed

    and lie in sackcloth and ashes?

Do you call this a fast,

    a day acceptable to the LORD?

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:

    releasing those bound unjustly,

    untying the thongs of the yoke;

Setting free the oppressed,

    breaking every yoke;

Sharing your bread with the hungry,

    sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;

Clothing the naked when you see them,

    and not turning your back on your own.

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

    and your wound shall quickly be healed;

Your vindication shall go before you,

    and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,

    you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!

What strikes me is that the prophet changes the paradigm from restriction to liberation—from an individual experience of mourning and penance to a communal project of change, healing, and solidarity. Our Lenten requirement is not sackcloth, ashes, and self-denial, but the explicit challenge not to deny or ignore our neighbors, human and nonhuman—“not turning our back on our own.” 

Father Greg Boyle, SJ, writes: 

Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, says, ‘How narrow is the gate that leads to life.’ Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way […] Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. (10)

What could fasting mean, if undertaken as part of an expansive community of creation? A community of solidarity directed towards a shared vision of justice? A community dedicated not just to “restricting” ourselves or abstaining from evil things for a few Fridays each year, but instead dedicated to breaking down structures of sin and replacing them with new patterns of love, equity, and justice? 

Speaking for myself, I am coming to see the act of fasting not so much as a temporary “opt-out” of the daily luxuries to which we’ve become accustomed, but as a daily “opt-in” to new choices, new ways of being, which build and strengthen bonds of connection and mutual love. Lent, then, becomes a privileged season to put into practice our responsibility to our fellow worshippers of the Creator, human and nonhuman alike, so that we may daily live the resurrection for which we’re preparing. Fasting from injustice helps us to prepare a glorious feast of liberation, justice, and love, to be shared and celebrated with all of creation. 

As individuals, and as a Church, we have a lot of work to do. We will need radical change in our power structures, our praxis, our ways of relating to one another. We will need an ethics of solidarity and inclusion, casting aside discriminatory practices, making reparation to those we have harmed. It will not be an easy task. But it is undoubtedly a worthy one, and can even be a joyful one, through which we might become a people that can be known and know themselves, in the words of Tertullian, by how they love one another. 

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Alyssa Moore (she/her/hers) is a CreatureKind Fellow. Since a young age, Alyssa’s love of animals and her vibrant experience of parish life have been her greatest joys, as well as tremendous sources of mission and motivation. She is a Catholic from Berkeley, CA, currently studying for a Master of Divinity degree at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology (JST).

 

"For what must the church repent and how?" 

A Lent Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2021
by Rev. Aline Silva

“God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.’” (Gen 9.12-13, NRSV)

Leader: The Word of the Lord for all CreatureKind. 

All: Thanks be to God

And we are told that God so loved that earth, this earth, that God took on human flesh, with all its joys, sorrows, exhilarations, and pains. 

I invite you to breathe in with me. And in breathing out, name the pains and sins we have witnessed this year. 

  • Racially-motivated, state-sanctioned violence against our Black, brown, and Indigenous kin. 

  • An attempted coup, following years of voter suppression and dismantling of basic democratic protections. 

  • Acts of hate perpetrated against our Asian siblings, blamed wholesale for a virus caused by capital demand. 

  • Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples who contracted and died from COVID at high rates, and yet receive vaccinations at low ones. 

Touch your hearts and breathe in with me.

And in breathing out—in this season of reminding ourselves why God so loved this very earth—in that breathing out, name the mourning and the loss of lives caused by our industrialized, colonized food systems. 

  • Slaughterhouse, food-plant, farm, and food-service workers around the world were forced to work in unsafe conditions during a global pandemic and sentenced to die because of it. 

  • Indigenous peoples murdered, the land they steward stolen to make way for the production of animal flesh to be exported and consumed by the wealthy in other countries. 

  • Long lines at food banks. Empty bellies for some while a select and privileged few reap unfathomable financial rewards. Money earned on the backs of the sick, suffering, and often times disabled. 

  • Animals—fellow worshippers of the enfleshed God—pushed to extinction by human activity or bred, confined, raped and mutilated on factory farms. 

  • Small farmers taking their lives in record numbers after being pushed out of a system dominated by a few powerful corporations. 

Beloved, we seem to have broken that Genesis covenant with our Creator, a covenant to care for one another, the earth, and non-human creatures. And so we must ask, where and with whom does God’s covenant need to be restored this Lent? This is work that we must do individually and collectively, to examine our personal and our communal complicity with broken systems and ways of being that cause so many in God’s beloved community to suffer rather than flourish. 

We seem to have allowed ourselves as humans to take an unrightful place in the cosmos, considering ourselves a little less than angels. Conquering and Colonizing the world, extracting and maximizing its “resources” to the great disservice of all creation. What must we change to ensure God’s covenant, salvation, and liberation is accessible to the whole world, the chickens and the stars?

Beloveds, breathe in with me. Breathe in the covenant, salvation, and liberation that the God who loves the world has for us all. 

Now breathe out fear and shame. For the enfleshed God is also our protector, liberator, and co-Creator of this beloved world. 

“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1:12-13, NRSV)

How might we follow God—Liberator, Protector, Creator—into the wilderness? Can we humble ourselves enough to learn not only from the earth but the animals themselves, like Adam in the garden or Jesus in the wilderness? 

For too many of us, entering the wilderness, encountering, and learning from animals is a physical impossibility. Centuries of Colonization and conquering has caused deforestation, displacement of First Peoples, and the desecration of this earth. The EuroAmerican appetite for cheap food and cheap meat, produced in huge quantities at very little cost has created a crisis of climate refugees, food apartheid, and health disparities around the globe. 

So, to follow God into the wilderness, we must repent from industrial farming and its death-dealing ways. 

Together, we confess:

  • We have perpetuated 500 years of food apartheid.

  • We have forced enslaved peoples to displace natives to grow food for the wealthy few. 

  • We have caused global pandemics and untold death, beginning with the first pandemic of a colonial diet and the model of consumerism and capitalist demand. 

  • We have subsidized multi-billion dollar agribusinesses while small, ethical farmers suffer. We have contributed to their depression and suicide. 

  • We have systematically denied access to land for BIPOC farmers. 

  • We have failed to protect or walk with animals. We breed and slaughter them by the billions, forgetting that each life is precious to God. 

  • We put factory farms and slaughterhouses in BIPOC communities, polluting their air and water, and creating generations of health crises. 

  • Our industrial fishing practices have stripped the ocean of life. 

We confess, and we repent with our actions. 

We repent by joining Jesus in the wilderness of the unknown, and letting the wilderness herself guide us and we commit to listening and learning from First Peoples, whose relationship with the earth and non-humans has been instrumental in preserving their integrity and diversity. 

We repent by being willing and open to learning from other-than-human animals. We commit to remembering that humans are not the pinnacle of creation and that our interconnectedness is the key to our very existence, survival, and flourishing. 

We repent by being careful consumers of the earth’s abundance. We commit to getting to know our food growers and handlers; to choosing to eat plants instead of animals as often as we can; to remembering that every created being is beloved by God, and to treating those beings accordingly; to advocating for policies and practices that foster flourishing, equity, and liberation for all. 

Fam, this Lent, might we return to the dirt, this very earth, and join Jesus in considering this covenant and life abundant? 

May it be so. 

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Rev. Aline (Ah-lee-nee) Silva (she/her/hers) serves as the co-Director of CreatureKind, an international non-profit leading Christians in new ways of thinking about the Christian Faith and Farmed Animal Welfare.  Prior to coming to CreatureKind, Aline served for over a decade as a local parish pastor of rural and farming populations in Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado. Aline shares herself as a queer, Black & Indigenous immigrant of Brasil to the US. Aline chooses not to eat non-human animals, her fellow-worshippers of God. Aline is a pastor, an excellent preacher, and a life coach. You can most often find her laughing out loud, twerking, and sharing her life with her emotional support pup and main squeeze, Paçoca (pah-saw-kah). You can learn about Aline and her work by following CreatureKind on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. She writes today from the unceded lands of the Tequesta, Taino, and Seminole peoples, namedly South Florida, USA.

Resources for Lent 2020

by Sarah Withrow King

The season of Lent was not a strong part of my Christian formation. To me it was, at most, a time to stop eating some food I liked, to be “spiritual.” In high school, following the lead of a cute camp counsellor, I gave up meat for Lent…a commitment I abandoned after approximately two days when I ordered a turkey sandwich because I forgot that I had become a vegetarian.

It wasn’t until I became a parent, and I started looking for ways to help expand my son’s sense of Christian community, that I started paying closer attention to the rhythms of the Church calendar, and to Lent.

Whether you are a Lenten new-comer, like me, or have been marking this period for as long as you can remember, we hope these resources connecting Christian faith with animals will be a welcome addition to your Lent practice.

 

Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing

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“Attention to the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent. The season means to rouse us from our self-absorption. Absorbed instead in the beauty of other creatures, we see how they value their lives, lives woven together across species in beautifully complex webs. The nine-ounce red knot flies from the southern tip of the world to meet the horseshoe crab at precisely the week she crawls from the waters of Delaware Bay to lay her eggs. Once alive to the exquisite web holding all creatures, we also see the holes slashed through it. By us. We’re enraptured by the animals’ beauty, and we’re horrified by the suffering we inflict on that beauty. With Saint Paul we can hear all creation groaning, including ourselves.” Gayle Boss, from the introduction to Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing.

With a reading for each day of Lent, and Easter Sunday, Wild Hope connects our human stories with the stories of individual animals in creation. A simultaneously beautiful, heart breaking, and hope-filled work. Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. Text Copyright © 2020 Gayle Boss. Illustrations Copyright © 2020 David G. Klein. Available from Paraclete Press.

 

CreatureKind Small Group Study

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 “I was really glad to be able to consider a lot of areas of scripture that I hadn't thought about before. I found learning about the environmental cost and the way animals are treated on these farms to be very persuasive, in combination of a better understanding of how Christians should think about caring for other creatures and the earth,” said one participant. Post-course surveys show that in addition to thinking differently about animals, participants commit to changing their daily dietary choices, as well.

You can lead a church or community discussion using CreatureKind's free course! Our six-week small group study:

  • helps Christian communities think about what their faith means for animals, 

  • is designed especially for small groups to use over a six-week period (like Lent), 

  • provides a gentle introduction to animal welfare and the church,

  • and guides communities to explore how to care for animals more faithfully. 

Through videos, short readings, and lots of dialogue, the CreatureKind Course for Churches encourages Christians to consider what we believe about God’s creatures and how we might move toward living out those beliefs as members of the body of Christ. We provide all the course materials, and a guide for leaders. You don't need to have any specialist knowledge, just the motivation to help people think and discuss together. Download the course today! 

 

Honorable Mention: We Are The Weather

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“The chief threat to human life—the overlapping emergencies of ever-stronger superstorms and rising seas, more severe droughts and declining water supplies, increasingly large ocean dead zones, massive noxious-insect outbreaks, and the daily disappearance of forests and species—is, for most people, not a good story. When the planetary crisis matters to us at all, it has the quality of a war being fought over there. We are aware of the existential stakes and the urgency, but even when we know that a war for our survival is raging, we don’t feel immersed in it. That distance between awareness and feeling can make it very difficult for even thoughtful and politically engaged people—people who want to act—to act.” Jonathan Safran Foer. We Are the Weather

Safran Foer applies the art and science of storytelling to help deeply connect readers to the realities of the climate crisis. While the book doesn’t connect Christian faith with animals, Safran Foer explores spiritual themes familiar to Christians. This may be a good resource to use for a group open to spiritual seekers, as well as Christians. Written in five parts, the book can be studied on your own or in a group. We Are the Weather. Text Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lenten Reflection: Transforming Scarcity into Excess

by Lucas Patterson

During the Lenten season of reflection, it’s appropriate to meditate on the “other” – quiet partners deeply woven into the fabric of our daily existence and sustenance. There are immense spiritual and practical applications to be considered, and giving up meat for Lent is a uniquely tangible way we can consider the intersections between human and non-human creations of the same Creator God.

That relationship between Creator and creation received above average attention in the weeks leading up to Lent as one environmentally-minded group launched Million Dollar Vegan, a challenge asking the Pope to give up meat for Lent in exchange for a $1 million gift to the nonprofit of his choice. He quietly declined the offer, but public awareness of connections between Lent and reduced meat consumption grew nonetheless.

The practice of giving up meat for Lent is anything but new and reasons for this dietary sacrifice pre-date some of the more popular modern motivators such as concerns regarding climate change and animal welfare. Instead, it goes back to the first century and is based, in part, on meat playing a historically significant role in celebrations and feasts. Meat was considered special because it came at great financial cost, which limited its use. And on Fridays during Lent as Christians meditate on the crucifixion, the mood is anything but festive. Our thoughts are somber and streamlined, focusing on matters of eternal consequence.

Stories in the Bible highlight Jesus’ penchant for transforming scarcity into excess—multiplying seven loaves and fishes into sufficient food to feed thousands, for example. Carol J. Adams, in a SARX article about her 2018 book, Burger, presents a striking contrast to Jesus’ miraculous resource stewardship by describing how food producers (and consumers driving demand) have turned a blind eye to the ethical dilemmas created by staggeringly poor agricultural efficiencies:

“For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we get back one pound of meat. We have become the people who reverse the miracle, diverting and reducing rather than multiplying resources.”

Nearly 2,000 years after the crucifixion and resurrection, abstaining from meat remains a staple of contemplative Christians during Lent because meat continues to come at great cost. Especially to the animals. Although this year’s 40 days of Lent ends on April 18, a critical question to keep in mind beyond the Easter season is how our Christian worldview influences food policy decisions on a personal and corporate level. Will we be workers pushing for miraculous change, or those who would maintain the status quo and “reverse the miracle” through the inertia of inaction?

Lucas Patterson works in grant writing and other philanthropy communications for Southern Adventist University in southeast Tennessee. He enjoys contributing to the important food policy mission of CreatureKind as both a monthly donor and through occasional website and editorial assistance.