About the Author:
Mark Kutolowski lives with his wife and three children at Metanoia of Vermont, a lay Catholic homestead guided by the spirituality of Saint Benedict. metanoiavt.com
“Thank you, Dimitri, for the gift of your life.”
I speak the words softly to the 90 pound lamb I’m holding. I have him up on his bum, sitting at a right angle from how a sheep normally stands on the ground. I’m holding his body against my legs, and with one arm I’m nestling his head as I talk to him. I hesitate, not because I doubt what I’m about to do, but because of the poignancy, – dare I say even sacredness? – of the moment.
Then, I turn my eyes slightly upward, and offer a prayer to Dimitri’s creator, and mine. “Thank you God for this animal, and for nourishing my family.” I bring a bolt gun up to Dimitri’s head with my other hand, and pull the trigger. Instantly, a three inch rod pierces the lamb’s skull and he goes limp. I set down the bolt gun, pick up my knife, and in one motion slit his throat as I lay his body to rest on the ground. I place my hand over the heart of the now-unconscious animal, and kneel next to him as his life blood spills onto the grass and soaks into the soil. “Thank you… thank you … thank you” I continue to repeat this simple phrase with each breath. Am I thanking the lamb, or am I thanking God for the lamb? I don’t exactly know in the moment. Gratitude rises in my heart, and the phrase just keeps repeating itself in my mind.
I’m a bit surprised to find myself, in my late 40s, with the (occasional) job of dealer of death. It’s an inevitable part of life on our Vermont homestead, where our family of five grows much of our own food, and where animal husbandry is an essential part of our farm’s ecology and food production. While I don’t relish the job of slaughtering animals, I do find it profoundly meaningful, even sacred, and an essential part of our home life.
I was fortunate to grow up in a devout home, where Sunday mass and daily mealtime and bedtime prayers were a part of our family culture. We shared a collective awareness of God’s grace and presence in our lives. However, living in the suburbs, my material world was structured to keep me separate from many realities of incarnate life. Food came from the grocery store, and it wasn’t until age 10 that I learned meat was made from animals. I had already begged my parents for and acquired a rabbit, a turtle and a tortoise as pets, and we’d recently gotten a family dog. Seeing my interest in animals, my dad would tell me stories about St. Francis of Assisi and his delight in God’s creatures. When I learned at age ten that meat came from killing animals, I became a vegetarian on the spot.
I kept that commitment for sixteen years, fueled by a love of God’s creatures and a desire to do no harm. In my teens, I read up on the horrific living conditions of animals raised in factory farms. I tried to limit animal suffering in all that I did, and learned the ethical, ecological, health, and even religious arguments for vegetarianism. I used to debate with my peers, and one of my passionate arguments was ‘If you’re not willing to kill an animal, you shouldn’t eat meat.’
Looking back, I now realize my ‘spirituality of no harm’ was rooted in an assumption of the very industrial agricultural system that I rejected. If we had to feed ourselves using industrial methods, the kindest way to animals and to the planet was to practice a vegetarian diet. I calculated out how many gallons of water and how much fertilizer and fuel was required to produce calories of meat versus plant foods, and it was clear that the most ethical choice was to forgo meat. If I could live on less, there was more for others – both other people and animal. Without intending to, I had built up a worldview where the kindest thing I and others could do was to make ourselves small, with an assumed separation between myself and the living and dying of other creatures.
Sixteen years later, I was visiting a Native American reservation when I saw a traditional deer hunt, complete with prayer and ceremony. As I watched the butchering, and helped carry a quarter of venison, it slowly dawned on me that the Anishinaabe hunters had a deeper respect and reverence for the animal before us than I did as a vegetarian. I had become a mostly raw food vegan two years earlier, and my body was slowly starving. A wild, fierce hunger arose as I watched the men around me roast and eat that deer. I gradually came to the conclusion that if I was to remain on this earth for long, I would need to learn to eat meat. My own words came back to me, ‘If you’re not willing to kill an animal, you shouldn’t eat meat.’ I would need to learn how to kill.
The first animals I killed were wild, as I began to learn to hunt, fish and trap. Perhaps the most surprising thing about hunting was how natural it felt. When I killed and ate an animal, it didn’t feel like a violation of the created order, but rather a participation in it. I was owning my part in the natural cycles of animal life, of eating and being eaten. I came to realize that I belonged on this earth. Just as the wolves and coyotes could rightly take and feed on the body of a deer, I too could be nourished by the death of others. My ethic began to shift from ‘do no harm’, to taking life with respect and reverence. As my body healed and grew stronger, my prayer life and gratitude to God grew stronger, too. When I acknowledged that other creatures would need to die for me to live, I felt an increased urgency to make my own life a sacrifice of love and service that would honor the deaths that were feeding my mortal body.
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As I’ve shifted from hunting and fishing to homesteading and raising animals for meat, I’ve come to embrace a new role – that of a conscious steward of life and death. As a homesteader, I play a role in maintaining the health of the soil, the grass, the trees, the gardens, and the animals on our 41 acres. This land is not ‘mine’ in any ultimate sense, but I’ve been given the great blessing to be the caretaker of this small corner of God’s good earth. Part of this role involves nurturing life – tending to vulnerable chicks and fragile seedlings in their first days of life. Equally, this role involves stewarding death – whether it’s felling ash trees to feed our wood stove or slaughtering lambs to provide the winter’s meat. There’s simply no way to live off the land here – or anywhere in God’s creation – without death. By participating directly in the death of both plants and animals on the homestead, I’m reminded of this basic reality. Life and death are forever in an intimate embrace. If I steward the land well, the lives and deaths of the creatures on our property not only feed us, but also contribute to an ongoing increase in the fertility of the soil and the health of the farm ecosystem. Rather than trying to minimize harm to individual animals at all costs, I now see my role as stewarding their living and dying in a way that nurtures the health and the well-being of the whole.
The Christian agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry puts it well, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”
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I’ve come to believe that we, as humans, have two basic tasks in this life. The first is expressed in the classic formula of the Baltimore Catechism:
God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.
In short, we are called to love and serve God, and, by God’s grace, to be saved and drawn into participation in God’s own divine life. This is the universal call to holiness.
But what of the second vocation? What were human beings made for in relationship to the rest of the created order? The story of Genesis makes it clear – our call is to be stewards of Creation, viceroys of the great King in guiding the flourishing of the natural world. Uniquely created as both physical and spiritual beings, we are perfectly fashioned to be God’s agents on earth. Among the creatures, we alone have the God-given capacity to see the whole, and to see the good of all, and to gather the life of all creation into a hymn of praise and glory to its Creator.
On our homestead, the closer to God we grow in our life of prayer and service, the more fully we come to discover this original vocation as stewards of Creation. As our own self-centeredness is gradually purified by God, we come to discover, little by little, our capacity to understand, love, and guide the creatures and the ecosystems under our care. As we gradually heal from the objectification of nature that is the norm in our secular, industrial society, we increasingly take delight in the works of our Lord in creation, and grow in abiding love for the world God has made. We feel an ever-deepening awe at being tasked with the role of stewarding and caring for this land, its creatures, and its people.
This stewardship is a messy, and sometimes bloody thing. While I’m deeply convinced that we as humans remain called to the stewardship of creation, I also recognize that the primordial covenant of Eden has been broken by human sin. I can’t recreate a world of perfect peace and harmony wih all creatures through my own efforts. The created order we now live in is a world that is imperfect, yet still good. It’s a world where humans and animals are not in total harmony, yet where we are still called to love and to bless in God’s name.
As I prepare for a slaughter day on the homestead, I feel sorrow in my heart as I acknowledge the necessity of shedding blood, and at times I long for the New Creation where the lion and the lamb will lie down together in peace. Mixed emotions rise within me as I sharpen my knives. I feel that the work ahead is blessed by God, and that this work is also incomplete. I feel that this act of killing is both just in our current reality, and incomplete in light of God’s divine perfection.
Then, my thoughts turn to our Lord Jesus. I remember both his perfection, and that he came to walk with us and to be with us in a world both blessed and broken, filled with both love and with death. I remember that his path in this life was to enter into our suffering, into our mess, and to do so in a spirit of sacrificial love. I remember countless times of worshiping his Eucharistic presence, where his broken body and spilled blood is offered to me and to all of us. I am invited to take, eat and drink, and enter into the dance of holy, broken, sacrificial love. I have come to know that the body and blood of Jesus Christ is given to me, in a superabundance of divine love, for the eternal nourishment and salvation of my soul. In a parallel way, I am coming to understand that God, in His abundant love, gives me the bodies and blood of his creatures to sustain my life on this earth. It’s a temporary gift, yet a holy gift. A partial sustenance as I labor and long for the banquet of eternal life. I receive the gift.
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