When my parents visited Ohio, we attended service at First UU Church of Columbus.
Now that I am living in Columbus, I have been active with the First Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church of Columbus. The first week I visited them, I was recruited to teach kindergarten Sunday school and have been doing that ever since.
Another First UU member contacted me to ask if I would work with him to start a Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (UFETA) chapter. Recently we held two open meetings at the church where we talked about the issues and developed a plan of action so that our chapter can become a positive presence within the church.
One of our outreach efforts will be staffing an informational booth at the church. To engage the congregation I created a survey on animals and faith which we will ask people to complete. I created it so that people who take the survey are both learning and thinking about animals and their faith, values, and behaviors.
The survey seems like both a good tool for engaging the public and educating them on the issues, so I wanted to share it here so that other UFETA chapters and church congregations can adapt it and use it in their own places of worship. Please feel free to download it and change it to best suit your needs.
We are the living graves of murdered beasts
Slaughtered to satisfy our appetites
We never pause to wonder at our feasts
If kine, like men, can possibly have rights
We pray on Sundays that we might have light
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread
We’re sick of war - we do not want to fight -
The thought of it now fills our heart with dread.
And yet - we gorge ourselves upon the dead!
Like carrion crows we live and feed on meat,
Regardless of the suffering and pain
We cause by doing so. If thus we treat
Defenseless animals for sport or gain,
How can we hope in this world to attain
The peace we say we are so anxious for?
Wow! That’s quite the poem. If you haven’t yet, maybe now it is time to Edge Towards Veg. Peace!
Bless Mrs. B, the kitty who was taken to the shelter twice for simply talking too much. Meow!
Many of you were interested in my previous blessing of the animals blog. To follow up with that, I want to direct you to Elizabeth’s blog which has a detailed outline of the blessing of the animals service that was used at her church. Good stuff!
I especially like the Fyodor Dostoyevsky quote they read:
“Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”
Our faiths must not forget that the spiritual values of mercy, personal responsibility, strength, love, and compassion also apply to our treatment of other-than-human beings. It is only appropriate for our faiths to reinforce this fact in their sermons. Yay!
At a 1838 conference of the Society for the Establishment of Peace among Men people of faith discussed what would be necessary to create universal peace. One of my biggest heroes is the abolitionist and social justice advocate William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879); I even named my mountain bike (Spencer Garrison Douglass) after him. Garrison (the man, not the bike) was present at the conference and summarized their conclusions in the below declaration which they then all signed.
I think it is important to revisit the work of those giants who came before us, to gain new insights and fresh ideas. So check out this document and share your reactions to it in the comment section. The rest of this post consists of the words of Garrison. Read the rest of this entry »
“Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one with love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.”
Rev. Lerner blesses Wagner, the companion of Laura Ellis
I went to my first blessing of the animals this past Sunday. It took place at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring and was conducted by Rev. Elizabeth Lerner. There were so many creatures in the sanctuary; I had to keep looking outside to make sure it wasn’t starting to rain for 30 days and 30 nights.
Rev. Lerner blessed every animal, saying, “May you be as blessed in the coming year as you have been a blessing in the past year.” The only exception to her saying this was when she blessed a three-month-old puppy, causing her to change the blessing accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »
All beings suffer during wars. A dog at the March 17, 2007 peace rally in DC.
Thousands of people, myself included, marched to the Pentagon yesterday to voice our opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why oppose the war?
According to a factsheet accompanying an open letter to Congress by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President, William Sinkford:
The toll of the war on Iraqi civilians has been devastating. Estimates of the number of Iraqi dead range up to half a million.
More than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq in 2006 alone. That is equivalent to 93 civilians killed every day….
More than 3,100 American service members have been killed since the invasion, and more than 23,500 soldiers have been wounded. As many as 300,000 veterans have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, two-thirds of whom are not being treated….
As many as 3.8 million Iraqis have already fled their homes, and an additional 10,500 civilians become refugees on average every week….
We must always remember that these people are who are being killed, injured, and harmed are people like you and me. Read the rest of this entry »
