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Gopala, Jesus, And The Friendly Beasts

December 22, 2017
INTERSPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIPS AND THE CARE OF ANIMALS
by Michael J. Iafrate

A few months ago, I sat in a crowded movie theatre watching the local premiere of
the documentary Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It
All. The majority of the audience was made up of members of a nearby West Virginia
Hare Krishna community called New Vrindaban founded in 1968. The film tells the
story of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s journey from India to the United
States, virtually penniless, in 1965, his founding of the International Society for
Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), and the explosion of his spiritual movement. Many
of the devotees around me knew Prabhupada personally and have been connected with
New Vrindaban since nearly the beginning.

Michael and Ed Sloane with a friend after Wild Church service | photo by Matt Smith

There was a certain surreal quality in the event, as I felt both like a guest among
adherents of a religious tradition very unlike my own, but also like an “insider”
among friends. Though I am Roman Catholic, the story of the “Hare Krishnas” is well
known to me, having met devotees through the punk rock scene while I was in high
school in the early 1990s. Sitting among the devotees, I smiled at the film’s
vibrant presentation of the history and its impressive collection of archival
footage. I laughed out loud with the rest of the audience at its inside jokes and
nodded at its articulation of a contemporary spiritual figure’s ancient wisdom.

Like the devotees, too, I knew the film glossed over some of the more troubling
aspects of Prabhupada’s views. But the evening was an appropriate celebration of a
religious community with a remarkable history, particularly in this part of the
country. And as the film concluded with some of the ways the Hare Krishna movement
has touched national and global cultures, the event was an opportunity to pause and
be thankful for perhaps the most important gift the Hare Krishnas gave me—a gradual
deepening of awareness about the sacredness of creation, and particularly of other-
than-human animals.

Wild Church altar | photo by Michael Iafrate

As a teenager, several of my friends had “gone veg” for a variety of reasons:

animal rights, environmental, health, political, and so on. And so the
conversations among us began. Krishna devotees I knew, though, situated all of
these very good arguments for vegetarianism within a wider spiritual context that
I, as a fairly typical young Catholic omnivore, found intriguing—and eventually
very challenging to my own worldview and lifestyle as I entered adulthood. Though
it would take a few more years, after college I realized that through these
encounters I had come to internalize an evolving commitment to nonviolence, to
seeing creation as sacred, and to understanding eating as a religious act—or
better, a sacred or sacramental act. I have been vegetarian, and sometimes vegan,
ever since. And when people ask about my reasoning—whether it is for animals
rights, environmental, health, or religious reasons—I simply say all of the above.

Becoming a Catholic vegetarian at that point in my life, and before I entered into
graduate theological programs and various forms of church and activist work, helped
me to enter a path of discovery of resources within my own faith community that
witness to a neglected but important tradition of concern for animals, one that is
now, thankfully, becoming more well-known and widespread. In the twenty years since
I’ve embraced vegetarianism, I have watched the development of deeper reflection on
animals among Catholics: a richer appreciation for the care of animals from our
tradition’s past, as well as creative expressions of “animal theology” among
Catholic theologians, often deeply connected with wider social justice and “life”
issues and with more recent eco-theologies as well. This recent reflection has even
arguably “trickled up” into “official” church teaching, as concern for animals is
seen in the Catholic Catechism and in the teaching of Pope Benedict, and most
recently as Pope Francis affirmed the intrinsic worth of animals in his encyclical
Laudato Si’.

The gifts I received from these early interspiritual friendships did not end with
my own vegetarianism, however. Often, when Christians open themselves to encounter
with other faith traditions and learn what they teach about vegetarianism or
meditation, they realize that their own traditions contain lesser-known ideas and
practices along these lines as well. And they are then content to return to a
Christian context which now “meets their needs,” thankful to non-Christians for
bringing to their attention aspects of Christian tradition they had not previously
seen. While these kinds of revelations are certainly worthy of celebration, I have
come to appreciate a more relational and dynamic approach to interspiritual
friendships.

Since returning to the Ohio Valley after a time away, I have been blessed with
continuing and deepening (and multiplying!) interspiritual friendships with people
of many faiths, including members of the New Vrindaban community. Together, in both
informal and formal ways, we have initiated a number of local practices of
interspiritual friendship, not only to “take” from one another, or to become more
aware of obscured aspects of our own traditions, as valuable as these might be, but
to nurture real friendships; to share experiences of common worship and
contemplation; to enter together into that Holy Mystery within, between, and beyond
the words of our particular traditions; and to work together as people of many
faiths to create a better world.

One of the ways we have done this is through a small interspiritual community we
are calling Wild Church West Virginia. My friend and colleague Ed Sloane and I had
heard of the outdoor Eucharistic liturgies of the ecumenical Wild Church Network
and Watershed Discipleship movement, and thought it would be appropriate to explore
the possibility of a Wild Church community here in West Virginia, bringing to it
the uniqueness of the place where we are rooted. From our Catholic context, it
seemed especially fitting given our own involvement in the Catholic Committee of
Appalachia (CCA) and the Roman Catholic Church’s ecological turn under the
leadership of Pope Francis.

Inspired by CCA’s place-based liberation theology, Francis’ theological vision of

global eco-justice, and the Wild Church Network’s various expressions of deep
ecological liturgy—and deeply moved by the interspiritual experimentation of Bede
Griffith’s Saccidananda Ashram (Shantivanam) and the monthly Yeshu Satsang in
Toronto—Wild Church West Virginia was born on Pentecost Sunday 2017. Our current
mission statement reads:

Wild Church West Virginia is an experiment in “re-wilding our faith.” We believe

that many people of faith and good will seek a connection with God and one another
that is not limited by institutional walls. Loving encounter grounds and nurtures
tradition. By stepping outside and going to the margins we can more readily
encounter the mystery of God.

Our monthly outdoor agape meal liturgies witness both to the goodness and
brokenness of creation. We have gathered in the hilly, wooded terrain of land
connected to Bethany College in West Virginia and in the breathtaking natural
“cathedral” of Raven Rocks in Southeast Ohio. Yet we also plan to gather at
ecologically damaged places—mountaintop removal sites and street corners which
represent to us the destructive social environments humans have constructed and
which cry out for justice.

As the community grew, we saw that many people attracted to Wild Church West
Virginia were from non-Christian faith traditions, or people alienated from various
Christian churches, or people who, like us, share a deep curiosity about “other”
faiths and believe that we can and should celebrate with and learn from one
another. Though rooted in the Catholic tradition, we soon, very consciously, made
more of an effort to become a wildly inclusive, interspiritual community that
acknowledges the holiness of the many names of the Divine and welcomes people of
all religious traditions to the table.

For our December Wild Church liturgy on the second Sunday of Advent, we worked with
a number of devotee friends to hold an Advent/Christmas celebration at New
Vrindaban’s goshala (cow shelter), part of their cow protection program. Gathering
in the chilly barn among the community’s cows, the interspiritual and multispecies
liturgy celebrated Christ coming into the world among people of many faiths and
among other-than-human animals, blending Hindu and Christian chants and hymns
accompanied by harmonium and guitar (including “The Friendly Beasts”) and readings
from Vedic, Hebrew, and Christian scriptures. Ed gave a rich homily on the
readings, stressing the unique ability that animals have to teach humans about the
Divine and reminding us how fitting it is that animals and their caretakers were
the first to welcome the coming of the Light of the World. The lay-led agape meal’s
offertory included a Hindu arati service led by a devotee (including the waving of
lights before the altar and icons), and we blessed and shared locally made bread
and apple juice made from local apples—no wine, as devotees abstain from alcohol.
The liturgy was followed by a short kirtan with communal chants to Krishna under
the name Gopala (“protector of the cows”) and a sharing of prasadam, a vegetarian
sanctified meal, in this case paneer over spinach rice.

Arati service | photo by Jocelyn Carlson

In our Wild Church liturgies, silent interfaith meditation gatherings, and sacred
conversations, the friendships begun in our local interspiritual community continue
to deepen, and we dream together of new possibilities around the arts and in
activism. Together, we are coming to believe in a vision similar to that of Sufi
mystic, scholar, and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that we are called “to return to
our own root and rootedness: our relationship to the sacred within creation.” With
Vaughan-Lee, we believe that “Only from the place of sacred wholeness and reverence
can we begin the work of healing, of bringing the world back into balance.”

That work of healing and of bringing creation back into balance, we believe, must
include all of us, learning across traditions. It must also come to include all
beings, and indeed may even be led in many ways by those beings long considered to
be less than human. Here in West Virginia, a place deeply damaged by the so-called
First World’s extractive mentality, we continue to “rewild our faith,” and to learn
from the friendly beasts and from their caretakers, including those whose spiritual
traditions have been most attuned to non-human animal lives.

Michael J. Iafrate is a theologian and songwriter from West Virginia and a doctoral
candidate at the University of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. He
currently serves as Co-Coordinator of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia (CCA)
and was the lead author of CCA’s “People's Pastoral” letter The Telling Takes Us
Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us. His writing has appeared in
National Catholic Reporter and Religion Dispatches, various journals, and the
collections Secular Music and Sacred Theology (2013) and Music, Theology, and
Justice (2017). He is also a singer-songwriter and old time musician, and his most
recent album, Christian Burial, was released in 2017.

In Guest Author Tags gopala, jesus, friendly beasts, advent, wild church,
interfaith, interspiritual friendships, catholic, Michael J. Iafrate
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