The Eucharist as a Real Vegetarian Meal

Lately, I’ve felt the presence of a slightly different Christ, a transfigured Christ. It’s not something that happens all the time, so I am aware of a kind of conversion in process, and that’s exciting and disorienting. I don’t feel ready to say a lot about it, but I want to say something.

For various reasons I’ve been thinking and reading, like a lot of people, on ecological disaster, about the damage caused by greedy consumption, objectification of the earth and its creatures. I’ve come to appreciate the validity of critiques of consumer culture. I’ve agreed with those who diagnose a certain Gnosticism or spiritual escapism at work in the churches and beyond – at work to undermine care of the earth and its creatures.

What’s different lately (slightly/significantly), is a perception of the Eucharist as a vegetarian meal. I don’t mean this in as naïve or individualistic a way as it may sound. But the implications are far-reaching.

The Eucharist, the real presence of Christ in bread and wine (early celebrations included bread, wine, water, vegetables and fish – but not meat), questions/undermines the imperial and religious (ancient and modern) treatment of animals as little more than meat machines in Temple slaughterhouses or industrial sheds.

Christians have, throughout history, given extensive moral consideration to their treatment of animals. Modern secular reason in the forms of economic rationality and instrumental utilitarianism has advanced a loss of respect and care towards the earth and its creatures.

It comes as something of a shock to realise that one is caught up in an economy that systematically mistreats/tortures/uses animals.

It’s possible to perceive Christ (restoring to humanity a place among the creatures as in the Garden, as in God’s peaceable future, the creation healed and made whole, the kindom envisioned by the prophets and seers) – it’s possible to perceive Christ transfigured in the work of contemporary scholars like Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics in the School of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh.

“In the Kingdom, and hence at the Eucharist, the poor no longer have their land expropriated from them for the benefit of the tables of the wealthy, but instead are welcomed to the messianic banquet alongside the rich, where they find not only a place, but a voice in the gathering around the breaking of bread. And in the Eucharist, animals are no longer sacrificed or eaten, since sacrificial slaughter has come to an end on the cross of Christ.”

Northcott’s essay entitled ‘Eucharistic Eating’ is eye-opening, and one of several I will read again as I make notes for a workshop at our Pentecost conference on ecotheology. “Recovering the anti-imperial asceticism of the early Christians by rediscovering the Eucharist as a real vegetarian meal, and not just a token meal, will provide opportunities for contemporary Christians, in their worship and homes, to resist and repair the sinful alienation between humans and other animals promoted by the modern imperial food economy.”

These are first thoughts, stammering words. Still, it’s worth sharing, I hope, a glimpse of “glory” – and the excitement of new conversion, trusting each other with these kinds of experiences – experiences of transcendence about which, like Peter, James and John, we “do not know what we are saying, so overcome are we with awe”. Amen.