Beyond the Shrink Wrap

Presented by

Sandra Wilson, Intern Minister

October 2, 2005

In the Michigan family in which I grew up; hunting was a much-loved sport. Deer of course - it was before our present time when deer are found in many of our backyards, and one had to go into the woods and actually hunt for them - ducks, pheasants, geese, partridge, and small game. In my family it was a ritual of sorts. Every year when the various hunting seasons came around the brothers and fathers and sons and friends made ready, polishing and packing their gear, and they took off into the woods, the fields, or out onto the waters of the Great Lakes.

I was an unusually lucky girl for growing up in the 40s and 50s, because my father didn’t treat me like a girl, and for that I will be forever grateful to him. Because of this I sometimes was taken on hunting trips with the men and boys. I loved being in the woods and on the waters. I loved being trusted to help in the endeavor, but I did not love killing the animals. Once and only once did I do it. From the silently approaching “sneak boat” paddling in, I shot a duck on the wing as it flushed from the midst of a set of duck decoys floating in the marshy edge of Lake Erie. Everyone cheered me. I think I was 10 years old and it felt very good indeed to be congratulated and boasted about, and to have been trusted not just to hold and look at my father’s beautiful shotgun with the fancy wooden stock, but to use it for what it was meant to be used - killing birds as they fly away.

But, confusing that elated feeling was the huge surge of regret that came over me because I had killed that absolutely lovely Mallard, and I knew that I myself was not capable of ever doing it again.

But still, I ate of the meat of that beautiful duck and its taste was good.

My father’s business was related to the meat packing industry in Detroit. Here too, when I was old enough, my father thought it valuable that I see what his business was about, so on average of about every two years, I went with him to one or another of the many slaughterhouses that were part of the vibrant meatpacking industry that went on in Detroit at that time.

Details about or judgments of the commercial slaughtering of meat are not my intention here. You can conjure the details for yourself at whatever level you are comfortable and you can come to your own judgments. My intention here is merely to tell you that my dad, in his gentle way, made sure that I saw everything that went on in the process that brought meat to the plate on our table.

In each slaughterhouse, he showed me everything from the poker games in the lunch room that carried on between arriving truck loads of cattle to the operations on the “kill floor”. I saw the whole process - from the steers ambling down the ramp of the unloading truck into the holding pens where the last few minutes of their lives were passed until they were prodded into the chute, to each animal ending up 20 minutes later as two very big slabs of meat hanging in a huge cooler with hundreds of other sides of beef, each graded and stamped and evaluated for its current value on the meat market.

Sometimes I saw the Jewish shochet (sho-ket) at work as he wielded his long sharper-than-a-razor knife to turn a living cow or steer into kosher beef. As a watching and listening child of twelve years, the prayers he repeated over and over with each animal whose life he caused to ebb away along with its blood made no sense to me. Why would it matter how an animal came to be meat for people to eat, as long as it happened in a painless and humane way? Why would God care whether the precise and minute rules for slaughtering and processing meats were followed? What difference is there if prayers are said for each individual animal or for a whole truckload at once or even forgotten altogether? All that seemed important to me then, in any method that produced the animal protein in our diet, which my sixth grade teacher taught was essential to our health and well-being, was that the animals were healthy and that I could believe that they felt no pain or terror at the time of their dying - and my dad assured me that they did not.

When I was young I did not understand fully just what it was that I was to learn from those visits to the slaughterhouses. For a long time I thought only in terms of what seemed to be an hypocrisy - the hypocrisy of buying our meat all sanitarily wrapped in the heat-sealed shrink wrap of the supermarket meat department without ever soiling our fingers or our sensibilities with the touch of the juices of the animal from which that meat came.

As time went on and I grew older and hopefully wiser, I came to understand much more.

I came to realize the importance of those prayers the shochet (sho-ket) intoned as he killed each animal. He was acknowledging the sanctity of that animal - that bit of God’s creation. He was thanking God for each animal from whom he was taking life in order that his people might eat of that life.

I came to understand the wisdom and critical importance of Native Americans thanking the Great Spirit for the animals who give their lives to the hunter as all participate in the great web of life on earth.

I came to understand eventually that each individual creature, no matter what creaturely form it takes, has an intrinsic value - not as a commodity of any kind, but value for no other reason than that it exists in the world.

And just a few days ago, a Jewish friend of this church explained to me that the shochet (sho-ket), with his prayers and ritual, was not only recognizing the dietary laws by which God commanded the Jews to eat, nor was he simply thanking God, but that he was carrying out a set of rules intentionally made difficult by God so that the sacrifice of the animals who give up their lives cannot be taken lightly by humanity, cannot be taken for granted, so those animals will not lose the sacredness that is theirs as a part of creation.

Albert Schweitzer, medical doctor, philosopher, musician, theologian, and scholar, named this way of being, “Reverence for Life”. He taught that a person is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him or her, - the life of plants and animals as well as that of fellow humans, and when he or she devotes him or her self helpfully to all life that is in need of help. He taught never to destroy life, unless it is unavoidable.

He is quoted as saying, “By going out of our way to help any living creature in distress we are helping to discharge a debt - a debt of honor - which we owe to the rest of creation for its vicarious sacrifice to our needs. It is after all the only sane and reasonable course we can adopt.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, the great contemporary Buddhist monk, peace activist, poet, and scholar, speaks also of reverence for life, but in a different way. He says, “The next time you have a tangerine to eat, put it in the palm of your hand and look at it. You do not need a lot of time to do it. Looking at it, you can see a beautiful blossom with sunshine and rain, and you can see a tiny fruit forming. You can see the continuation of the sunshine and the rain, and the transformation of the baby fruit into the fully developed tangerine in your hand. You can see the color change from green to orange and you can see the tangerine sweetening. You will see that everything in the cosmos is in it - sunshine, rain, clouds, trees, leaves, everything. Peeling the tangerine, smelling it, and tasting it, you can be very happy.”

III

And what does all this mean as we sit here, this very morning, holding our beloved and faithful pets close by, preparing to deposit our donations for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals into the collection box downstairs that the children of the Religious Education classes have so kindly prepared?

Well, first of all, as Thich Nhat Hahn looked into the tangerine and saw the cosmos, it means that we can look beyond the clear plastic shrink wrapping on those packages that lie neatly stacked in the refrigerated shelves of every super market and see not a pay-by-the-pound commodity, but a whole animal that gave us that piece of its own living flesh so that we may then eat. It means that we can be mindful of the cosmos in that piece of meat - to feel the sunshine, the rain, the clouds, the trees, the leaves, everything - because they surely are there, just as they are there in Thich Nhat Hahn’s tangerine.

It means that, as Dr. Schweitzer said, we are repaying a debt that we owe to the rest of creation when we are kind and caring and simply helpful to animals and plants - to all life. It means that no life exists for us to use wantonly or carelessly, that all life is to be held in reverence and respect.

It means that when we look into the eyes of our pet, we are engaging in a relationship that is like no other - for the bond between a person and his or her pet is communication between fellow creatures at its most basic and intimate level.

Father Floyd, a Franciscan Friar in San Francisco, says as he blesses the animals in his church, “The way you respect creation, our mother earth, the way you treat animals reflects the way you treat others. When you care for the earth and the animals, it makes you a better person, a kinder person......every creature is important. The love we give to a pet, and receive from a pet, can draw us more deeply into the larger circle of life, into the wonder of our common relationship to (Creation).”
And I couldn’t agree more with Father Floyd.

Blessed be -