LAMB OF GOD

I wanted to be a vegetarian many timed but I decided not. This is why:

In Lesotho Southern Africa my family and I lived in a small village for a few months to learn the language. Meat supply was a leg of mutton delivered by bus once a week. Otherwise we bought chickens with their wings still flapping from neighbors in the village. We asked the young man who looked after our vegetable garden to do the killing. One day chicken was delivered during the weekend and our man was not available. So I butchered it. I could not eat that bird.

All of us live because other lives die for us. Even vegetarians kill some kind of life-forms as food. Our world is an interdependent world. All life forms, including us, live because other lives die. Lobsters and crabs are boiled alive. Japanese eat live fish as delicacy. It is the reality of nature, cruel as it maybe. Every time I see the pictures of animals, chickens, cows, fishes, pigs, or rabbits on the way to our dinner table, I want to be vegetarians. Their eyes look at me pleading, “Don’t kill me!” The first time this city grown man killed a chicken, he could not eat it. Pathetic? I agree. City dwellers buy meat wrapped in plastic. My cousins who lived in countryside knew how meats came to the table. So did my friends and neighbours in Africa. In Lesotho, church dinners often began a day before by killing live cows in the church yard while congregants watched.

The notion of “Lamb of God” tells us a lot about our interdependent world. We live because others give up their lives for us. When we die we become food for bacteria and flies that lay eggs on our bodies. The maggots feed on us. In extreme situations, humans ate dead persons. The first Christians began to call Jesus “Lamb of God” remembering the lambs enslaved Jews in Egypt slaughtered to save their first born sons when they were preparing their escape from slavery. The Roman authorities accused Christians of practicing cannibalism when they heart the Christian priest pronouncing “Body of Christ” as he was distributing bread at the Communion table in remembrance of the Last Supper of Christ.

All lives are sacred, including the ones we eat at the table. They are sacrificed so we live. In some cultures, the traditional way to prepare the live animals for food included some kind of ritual to express gratitude. In Japan, at the table they put the hands together, bow, and say “Itadaki-mas” thanking all who gave us food, including the once lived animals, fish, and vegetables. I saw a film at “Head Smashed-in Buffalo Jump” Museum in Southern Alberta that showed a scene where a man was butchering a buffalo. He picked up the dead animal’s heart, raise it into the sky in thanksgiving. What a difference that is from the industrial slaughterhouses scene where hundreds of animals are funneled into the tunnel to be electrocuted mechanically like machine parts. They had life and is the Lamb of God. A friend of mine who is an avid hunter told me that his way to provide meat to his table was much more environmentally less harmful because he killed only what they ate. There is no waste.

I am not a vegetarian. I could have been. But I accept the laws of God’s world. We live in an interdependent world.