(Un)Mute Yourself, Day 15
Isaiah 61:3 — They shall be called oaks of righteousness, a people who mask up and stay safe (we are learning to take our time in a new COVID reality, and being safe takes preparation)
Today’s featured contributor is Rev. Aline (Ah-lee-nee) Silva. Aline 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 as a local parish pastor in rural and farming populations in Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado for over a decade. 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 unseeded lands of the Tequesta, Taino, and Seminole peoples, namedly South Florida.
What if sharing Good News to the Captives began at our tables with the foods we eat?
Some of you are listening to the voices of empire figuring out how to fix this. Folks do not see every slaughterhouse worker, farm worker, and food factory worker as a beloved child of God, created in the Imago Dei as a part of our Body, our family. Folks with no consideration for our animal kin. Folks like Bezos, Gates, Musk, and Biden who value profit over all, even maybe themselves. Folks who are hiding themselves behind the Progressive Green Deal while creating more climate refugees, funding more factory farms, still binding up and breaking hearts, all the while making you lust after what they’ve got. Like, Amazon warehouse workers are wearing diapers so that you can have your packages. Happy Advent, you Brood of Vipers!
We have desecrated the land by displacing native peoples and deforestation as so to grow more beef. Much of the forest and endangered wild species are being burned and razed so American beef can graze. Eating beef contributes to this demand.
We have sacrificed our siblings by demanding they remain essential workers in factory farms and slaughterhouses leading to their Covid outbreaks:
“Slaughterhouse workers around the globe are often members of underserved or marginalized communities. U.S. data indicates that, early in the pandemic, 87% of COVID-19 cases in slaughterhouse workers occurred among racial and ethnic minorities. In Germany, the majority of workers infected in an early outbreak were from Romania and Bulgaria. And after a cluster of cases was traced to one meatpacking plant in Australia, a worker told the Guardian Australia that they felt unable to question management policies or practices because of a language barrier. “I don’t speak English well,” said the employee. “I just stay silent and work…We just come to the factory and go home. Everything they tell us to do, we don’t say no.”
We have welcomed organic produce into our homes that was harvested by slave labor, during a pandemic, amidst wildfires. A local organic peach picked by slave labor isn’t “Sharing the Good News” even if you pray the sins off of it, or whatever. And more, we have asked them to bring us food (so that you can go to whole foods in your gentrified neighborhood or have a BIPOC person deliver food to you safely while you sit at home during this pandemic). No. I am not saying, “Go vegan.” That’s cute. But no. How can your eating practices better reflect the Good News to the Captives?
Take root. Go deep within yourselves. Look around. How are your neighbors really? Whose land have you settled? Take root, beloved. God is planting us in darkness that we might Rise and be crowned with flowers. Take root. We have been chained and have chained and caged the earth and animals and ourselves that we forgot how to take root. We think the weight of rooting down and growing up might be the same as the yoke of the oppressor and the empire. But that is not so.
And so beloved, on the 2020th year of our Lord Jesus we must choose now if we’ll be spreaders of this Good News or oppressors, captors, binders, and heartbreakers; namely superspreaders of more hate and this zoonotic disease.
The people of God are indeed defined, shaped, and transformed by this Good News — we exist for the sake of the oppressed, for the brokenhearted, the imprisoned, and mournful. Not the other way around. We share a call to liberate the whole earth, to eagerly proclaim the Shalom of God, and to love our neighbors well. But this pandemic is a shocking and painful reminder that we havelots of work to do before we can peacefully coexist in a world where all can live abundantly as creatures of God.
In what ways has your life — ministry and personal — aided or diminished the work of liberation for God’s incarcerated peoples, animals, and land?
Are we leading toward a life of abundant flourishing where all bodies have agency? Bodies of flesh and bodies of water and ice and stone and sand? Can we dare to welcome the abundance of life even to these? Are we feeding into the empire who continuously benefits from our sacrifice?
Beauty and sacred darkness are not a bad thing, seeds and Black people are rising. Will we center their leadership?
The vast majority of field workers are people of color living in rural, low-income communities. Approximately 75% of field workers were born south of the US border and have either attained a visa or remain undocumented. These siblings of mine are responsible for feeding people in North America and all over the world. They work in harsh conditions and are unable to demand safety because of their vulnerable status.
In my own native land of the Guarani Peoples in Sao Paulo, Brasil, COVID-19 cases can be traced to the meatpacking industry, which is mostly staffed by indigenous persons, also disproportionately affected by this virus and other disparities. Additionally, we know that as the largest producer of livestock in the Americas and the second largest producer in the world, Brasil is responsible for the deforestation of the Amazon, the displacement of millions of indigenous peoples, and the endangerment of many protected wild animals species.
Women are the foundation of the developing world agricultural economy, even though we receive only a fraction of the land, training, and economic support as men. Women comprise 43% of agricultural labor world-wide (75% in Africa) and produce more than 80% of the food needs in food insecure households and regions. Additionally, female farmed animals are the ones continuously raped for their milk while at the same time having their kids kidnapped; female animals are being continuously measured and groped for larger breasts, thicker thighs, and efficient reproductive organs, while their male counterparts are either discarded or raised in total isolation. Please note that the measuring and standards of good meats, including breasts, are set by rich white men and the industries they fund. The good dudes named above ;)
And now the largest farm worker protest known to us is happening in India and it is all connected to how you get your favorite grain at that Gentrified whole foods. These already vulnerable farmers are rising against new laws, which further open the farm sector to private players, essentially tradable to the free market. The government says the reforms will not hurt farmers. But how can we trust those who value profit over all?
Mary, and Jesus too, each in their own ways spoke about the partiality of God’s heart and lived lives accordingly. They rose up in protest to the way things were. And more, they extended compassionate care to the broken, chained, and the marginal. By living in this way, they pointed to the arrival of God’s Reign and its partiality not for the 1% but for the poorest of these.
In a time of so much despair, pandemic, and injustice for so many- How are you showing God’s partiality beyond wealth and political power?
Our faith tells us that we are to love God, and to love our neighbor. In Isaiah, we read that we must take action to protect and care for workers.
And when they are ready to stop spewing their hate from in front or from behind their masks, will we welcome them back into community? Will we welcome them into the fold of God? Or will we stand healthily, at the center, saying, I told you so? Or worst, continue to depend on the works and labors and contributions of BIPOC — welcome them to your tables- with our leadership unchanged, as if we have arrived?
There’s room for them too, if they are willing to change. Otherwise, mask up. Get ready. We’re about to erupt/explode into some Good News while we leave them in the dirt, so they too can be redeemed.
Love and Peace —
AS
For more on Covid and Slaughterhouses and how your might help.
How Farmed Animal Welfare Connects To Race, Gender, And More: https://www.becreaturekind.org/blog-posts/2019/7/9/resource-list-how-farmed-animal-welfare-connects-to-race-gender-and-more
Facts about Indian farmers.
Ending Racism in the Food Justice System: Soul Fire Farm
