Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

(A brief note that this is in no way a criticism of actual vegetarians.)

I’ve been mulling over this idea for a while but it was only in a conversation with Plush Appendix over the weekend that I put a name to it. I call it vegetarianism of faith not because of an abstenance borne of good will. Rather, this is the choice to avoid the “meatier” elements of faith, because they are disagreeable to the person.

That is, rather than go for the real core of faith, we stay at a comfortable surface level, where differences are matters of opinion rather than truth and honest discernment. This mentality leads to a tricky kind of idolatry, one which tends to replace God with a shifting notion of “social good” and, as Chesterton put it, “not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

The common good is certainly a Christian idea, but the mistake is in mistaking that for the whole of faith. These are the sort of people who point to Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day as examples of their kind of Catholocism or Christianity, and then proceed to make all sorts of unjustified assumptions that will aid in their avoidance of the center of their faith. They are very results focused- Mother Teresa is a hero because of all the help she gave the poor. But easily overlooked is why she did those things.

Mother Teresa didn’t do these things because she believed in a social good- she did those things because she loves Jesus. It wasn’t an ideology of common good, or a high ideal, even though those can be parts of it. But mistaking the effects of a deep love for Jesus as the equal of that love is an easy way out of the more difficult parts of faith. The moral requirements, the challenges to the ego, the reliance on God, and perhaps most importantly the awareness of one’s flaws– all these are easily set aside when faith is reduced to “being a good person,” which is an effect, not the source.

And yet practicioners of this meatless faith will claim that those who go beyond the broth are polemical because, having had the better portion, they will not surrender it or compromise its potency.

At the risk of adding even more to my various food metaphors, I will offer one last though, which is a challenge to everyone, myself included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m often a vegetarian when it comes to faith. But I have found a useful reminder in the wedding feast at Cana: a lot of times we settle for the cheap wine. But if we will wait, and plead for help, and follow Mary’s injunction to “do whatever he tells you,” we will get the better wine. Our task then is to discern what are the hearty things we leave in the bowl, what is the cheap wine we’re settling for.

Thanks for bearing with my long absence and any lack of cohesion due to writing this on the small screen of an iTouch.

Best,
-Rosy