The existence of the meat and dairy industries preclude humanity’s love for the earth and its creatures being a total and visible reality. As human beings we carry ‘the awareness that each creature reflects something of God and has a message to convey to us, and the security that Christ has taken unto himself this material world and now, risen, is intimately present to each being, surrounding it with his affection and penetrating it with his light’ (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, p85). What right do we have to interfere and impose our will to violence and our dynamic of dominion? Pope Francis continues: ‘We read in the Gospel that Jesus says of the birds of the air that “not one of them is forgotten before God” [Luke 12:6]. How then can we possibly mistreat them or cause them harm? I ask all Christians to recognise and to live fully this dimension of their conversion’ (p85). Acts of brutality and oppression against creatures are nemesistic violations and defacements of God’s radiant Image within them.

‘The Lamb was always on the offensive’ wrote John Punshon. Refusing to consume meat and dairy is one of the weapons of the Lamb’s War. Through it we absolutely reject this organised and systematic evil. Every slain creature bears the imprint of the Eternal Lamb. What meaning does the Peace Testimony have if those who talk about it feed on the fruits of slaughter? Is it possible to practice humility and insist on habits requiring the annihilation of millions of lives? Shouldn’t our witness include standing with those slain like the Eternal Lamb and against those who kill and benefit therefrom? Shouldn’t we reject, with repugnance, what Oscar Romero called the ongoing ‘humiliation of the Lamb’ enacted by the world?

In stillness and silence we are nourished so that we have the strength to know and reject this hypocrisy of the human heart. It marinates in its own wrath, convinced of its goodness. It connives with the disease of violence, forsaking mercy for its own appetites. It imposes a covenant with death where in fact should be a covenant with life. I am thinking of those pretending compassion and love whilst consuming products of cruelty and brutality. We say with St. Paul: ‘I will eat no flesh whilst the world stands, because I will not hurt my brother.’ All creatures are our sisters and brothers, as Saint Francis of Assisi recognised centuries ago.

Our refusal is part of a self-transcendence which insists not on imposing its appetites but on effacing them where they cause death and destruction. Our affirmation is of life neither curved in on itself nor chained to destructive habits of consumption.

If we are to maintain the covenant of peace, then let us reaffirm with courage: ‘It is impossible to love and to be just unless one understands the realm of force and knows enough not to respect it’ (Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, p67). Lewis Benson summed it up perfectly: ‘When we walk contrary to the customs of the world, our behaviour should indicate that our singularity is a consequence of hearing a word that comes from God’ (The Future of Quakerism Part 3).We may then ‘witness the crown that is immortal that fades not away, from him who to all your souls is a friend, for establishing of righteousness and cleansing the land of evil doers, and a witness against all wicked inventions of men and murderous plots, which answered shall be with the light in all your consciences, which makes no covenant with death, to which light in you all I speak, and am clear’ (George Fox, Journal, p493).