2.

5
TAKING ON THE GAZE OF JESUS
Perceiving the factory farm in a sacramental world

Jim Robinson

Introduction
In vivid, eucharistic imagery, Wendell Berry asserts that in order to exist, “we must
daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation.”1 When we do so “know-
ingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament,” but when we do so
“ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”2 And it is by
desecrating the body of creation that we “condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral
loneliness,” while simultaneously subjecting “others to want.”3 This is our situa-
tion: Our sustenance as selves depends, tenuously and intimately, upon our rela-
tionship with the broader body of creation, which we must break and eat on a
daily basis. Each meal marks our intricate complicity in the breaking and taking of
life. The food we consume issues a call to contemplation, prompting us to question
whether we are involving ourselves in a loving communion with the broader body
of creation, or in destructive desecration. And yet, the rippling ramifications of our
daily bread far too often elude our view. The food that we purchase at a restaurant,
or in a supermarket is, as Peter Singer observes, all too frequently the “culmina-
tion of a long process, of which all but the end product is delicately screened
from our eyes.”4
In this chapter, I attend to factory farms as obscured sites of desecration, within
which bodies are mechanically broken and blood is methodically shed. The beings
who are moved through these spaces are seen through a desensitizing economic
lens, and are consumed as meat, deliberately sanitized of its association with grave
desecration and concrete suffering. I lift the factory farm from an economic con-
text, and ground it instead in a dramatically different worldview, which takes the
entirety of creation to be a sacrament, suffused with the presence of God. I propose
that the sacramental worldview is a particularly vivid resource, developed within
the Christian tradition, for promoting a capacity to see and sense the irreplaceable
174 Jim Robinson

sacredness of the beings who are routinely defiled in factory farms, and for
emphasizing the immense moral and spiritual gravity of this defilement. I stress the
necessity for sensitive perception that sensing the sacramentality of our world
requires. And I argue that an enhanced sensitivity to the sacramental nature of the
world might animate a capacity to more deeply perceive and more readily respond
to the desecration of creation, especially as manifested in the deliberately concealed
spaces of factory farms. I additionally emphasize the extent to which our desecra-
tion of creation signifies not only our ruptured and deeply wounded relationship
with the broader body of creation, but our estrangement and alienation from God.
To desecrate creation is to distort its sacramental quality, thereby obscuring divine
presence and obstructing our capacity for relating to God in all. I therefore read
the renunciation of meat to be a centrally significant ascetical practice, which
interrupts our complicity in desecration, and moves us into a more sensitive,
harmonious, and reverent relationship with this sacramental world and with the
loving God underlying it.

Receiving a sacramental world

In Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis quotes and affirms the
remarks of Patriarch Bartholomew, delivered at the inaugural Halki Summit in
2012, in which Bartholomew identifies the world itself as a veritable sacrament of
communion.

As Christians, we are … called “to accept the world as a sacrament of com-

munion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbours on a global scale. It
is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest
detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of
our planet.5

In echoing Bartholomew, Francis urges his readers to receive creation as a

sacrament of communion, to recognize that we ceaselessly meet the divine in the
myriad contours of materiality, down to and including the specks of dust drifting
amongst us, and to relate to the world in light of these insights. Each thread in the
garment of creation, within which we, as a species, are inextricably interwoven,
announces our interdependence with everyone and everything, as well as our
constant capacity for acknowledging and connecting with the subtle, loving pre-
sence of God undergirding all. There is, in this vision, both a luminous transpar-
ency and a fluid harmony about our world. It is a seamless garment, a relational
space within which we might freely mingle and share with each other, meeting the
divine in all of our encounters. The cleanly delineated borders, the rigid walls, the
oppressive sanitization, the rows of cages, the maze of machinery, the agenda of
containing, concealing, and controlling animal bodies that characterizes the atmo-
sphere of a factory farm are utterly foreign to this vision of the world. The non-
world of the factory farm, conceived by human minds and constructed by human
 Taking on the gaze of Jesus 175

hands, collides violently with the sacramental vision of creation articulated by

Bartholomew and Francis.
Francis declares that the “entire material universe speaks of God’s love.”6 As
such, the soil, the water, the mountains, and every other aspect of creation serve as
a “caress of God.”7 God, in this picture, ceaselessly reaches through matter,
affirming every aspect of creation as worthy of love and capable of revelation. Just
as God makes intimate contact with our bodies through caresses of soil, water,
mountains, sky, we might likewise celebrate our communion with God in and
through the textures of creation. To attune ourselves to the touch of the divine in
the suchness of every moment is to receive the world, in its shifting actuality, as an
endlessly novel sacrament of communion. This option, Francis avers, is definitively
on the table. And yet, we far too frequently fail to receive and reciprocate. The
earth “cries out” in a muffled and unheeded chorus of voices in response to our
violent and violating footprint.8 The severity of the ecocrisis, which is epitomized
in factory farms, signals the degree to which we are so radically out of touch with the
natural world, through which God goes on caressing us, despite our callousness. To
begin to sense the presence of the divine amongst us, and to see the unrepeatable
sacredness of each unique being, might compel us to work more fervently to dis-
mantle systems of desecration, which warp our world into so many zones of
devastation, oppression, and death.

Opening to ecological conversion

The patterns of violence that exist in our hearts and minds are, for Francis,
“reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air
and in all forms of life.”9 We have turned our backs upon the earth, even as we
inhale the earth’s air, even as we drink in the earth’s waters, even though our very
flesh is an assemblage of earthly elements.10 To heal the sickness which has infil-
trated our hearts, and which has come to bear bitter fruit in the degradation of soil,
water and air, will require both an internal and external interruption of the status
quo. We are called, in this context, to undergo what Francis terms an “ecological
conversion.”11 We are called to re-turn to the earth, to acknowledge our inter-
dependence, and to begin to develop healthy, holy and mutually enriching modes
of living into the future.
To encounter the world as a sacrament of communion must aid in stimulating
this necessary metanoia, for, in the words of Leonardo Boff, “a sacrament without
conversion is condemnation.”12 In order to receive the world as a sacrament of
communion, in order to relate to reality as a seamless garment, saturated with the
divine, we must work to disentangle ourselves from desecrating patterns of being,
which fragment the earth community, and lock us all into sickness and suffering.
As Aristotle Papanikolaou emphasizes, the “sacramentality of creation” is encoun-
tered through the concrete “performance of ascetical practices that opens one up to
communing with the life of God that is in and around creation.”13 There is, then,
a direct correlation between an enhanced attentiveness to the sacramentality of
176 Jim Robinson

creation and a commitment to ecological conversion through concrete ascetical

practices, such as the renunciation of meat. While our deepening reception of the
earth as a sacrament animates a more vivid commitment to ecological conversion,
our ascetical practices of disrupting desecration feeds a deepening sensitivity to the
sacramentality of the earth.

Sacramental participation as training to be a beholder

Pope Francis opens the section of his encyclical explicitly devoted to sacramental
theology, “Sacramental Signs and the Celebration of Rest,” with the observation
that the “universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely.”14 His sensitivity to the
extent to which the unfolding cosmos is saturated in the presence of God leads him
to affirm that there is deep mystical meaning to be found in the entire order of
creation, from leaves to mountain trails, from glittering dewdrops to the faces of
people experiencing poverty.15 There is, by way of extrapolation, deep mystical
meaning to be found in chickens and cows, lambs and lobsters, pigeons and pigs.
Francis presents the seven public sacraments of the Church as particularly privileged
instances in which nature becomes an efficacious “means of mediating supernatural
life.”16 It is in the Eucharist, he asserts, that creation finds its “greatest exaltation.”17
It is here that Christ intertwines with our most “intimate depths” in the form of a
humble “fragment of matter.”18 The Eucharist confirms that God “comes not from
above, but from within” so that we might “find [God] in this world of ours.”19 As
such, the celebration of the Eucharist should enhance our capacity for attending to
the presence of God within, where God touches even our most “intimate depths,”
as well as in the world around us, which God accompanies, loves and indwells.20
For Francis, the Eucharist is an “act of cosmic love,” which “embraces and pene-
trates all creation” and which should function as a “source of light and motivation
for our concerns for the environment.”21
Fr. Michael Himes proposes that to participate in the life of the sacraments is to
engage in a gradual process of “training to be beholders.”22 In this perspective, to
enter into the rhythms of liturgy consists of an attunement to the divine mystery,
which is always present but seldom sensed, reflected upon and responded to.23 This
sensitivity to divinity, which is uniquely developed in liturgical life, bleeds out into
a far broader vision of sacramentality that numbers the sacraments as “virtually
infinite.”24 For Himes, there are as many sacraments as there are “things in the
universe,” as any person or place, any event, sight, sound, any taste, touch, or smell
that prompts us to acknowledge the love that undergirds our being and all beings
can be received as a sacrament.25 In this respect, Himes insists that nothing is “by
definition profane,” as everything possesses the potential to operate sacramentally,
by opening us to acknowledge the divine presence, which unfailingly “supports all
that exists.”26 We can encounter the presence and gratuitous love of God in all,
but we must first learn to properly perceive. Himes’s insight resonates closely with
Leonardo Boff’s assertion that it is only when we are “awake” in the world that we
can perceive it as a “sacrament of God.”27 To become awakened beholders, to
 Taking on the gaze of Jesus 177

cultivate a capacity for sacramental seeing, is to assume a stance of radical atten-

tiveness, receptivity, and sensitivity to the world, and to the presence of God
penetrating all. In a context of obscuration, the struggle to see might be adequately
assessed as a radically transgressive act.
A sacramental worldview refuses a vision of divinity cordoned off from the
contours of creation, hovering forever elsewhere. It simultaneously refuses the
move to reduce non-human beings to mere objects, stripped of the inherent value
indelibly impressed upon them by the presence of God underlying their beaks and
eyes, their muscles, tongues and tails, rendering them sacred, revelatory, irreplace-
able. A sacramental worldview affirms the inherent depth and significance of every
aspect of existence, and directs our attention toward the beings of our world as sites
of divine disclosure. In this spirit, Thomas Berry declares that “when we destroy
the living forms of this planet,” we “destroy modes of divine presence.”28
John Hart asserts that the universe is sacramental because it is a “revelation of the
Spirit’s ongoing creativity.”29 To hold the cosmos as sacramental means, for Hart,
to acknowledge the fact that the “totality of creation” is “infused with the vision,
love, creative presence, and active power” of the Spirit.30 As such, the cosmos,
both in its holistic, expanding scope, as well as in its most delicate detail, can be
properly read and related to as the milieu in which we confront divine presence,
grace and blessing.31 It is in and through the textures of creation that we sense the
sacred, and experience our intimate relationality with the entire earth community.
The fact that the Spirit suffuses all of creation, taking its aspects as its dwelling
place, confirms, for Hart, that all space is sacred space.32 Wendell Berry reminds us
that “there are no unsacred places;” instead, there are “only sacred places” and
“desecrated places.”33 The factory farm is, definitively, a radically desecrated place.
Our training to become beholders, awake and alert to the sacramentality of crea-
tion, must aid us in attending to the desecration of our world, which is not only
hidden in our midst, but deliberately concealed.

A place of desecration
In a harrowing depiction of contemporary hog farming, Matthew Scully captures
the extreme degree to which American consumers are removed from contact, let
alone communion, with pigs. He additionally conveys the extent to which these
animals are extracted from, and denied access to, the rhythms of the natural world.
According to the National Pork Producers Council, Scully notes, 80 million of the
95 million hogs brought to slaughter in the United States on an annual basis are
“intensively reared in mass-confinement farms,” which translates to a life deprived
of soil and sunshine.34 Scully writes,

Genetically designed by machines, inseminated by machines, fed by machines,

monitored, herded, electrocuted, stabbed, cleaned, cut, and packaged by
machines—themselves treated like machines ‘from birth to bacon’—these
creatures, when eaten, have hardly ever been touched by human hands.35
178 Jim Robinson

This is the portrait of an obscured site of desecration. Annually, 80 million unique

beings, who are loved into being by God, whose bodies are saturated with mystical
meaning and revelatory potential, who might communicate to us the divine caress
in the textures of their flesh, are ensnared in and eclipsed by the machinery of our
factory farms. We cannot see them. We cannot reach them. We cannot sense their
suffering. The workers36 recruited to electrocute, stab, and carve the bodies of
these pigs—those who do the dirty work of desecration—wear earplugs in order to
muffle the howls.37 Scully sensitively links the systemic degradation articulated
above to a simple impulse: The “hankering for a hot dog.”38 Beyond the space of
the factory farm, the remnants of sacramental bodies are related to as bacon, hot
dogs and ham, sanitized and scrubbed of the residue of deep and concrete suffering.
To give into this “hankering for hot dogs” is to solidify one’s complicity in this
system, and therefore to involve oneself in desecration. To give up this hankering,
along with the desires for animal flesh, milk and eggs in all of their carefully
repackaged forms, can be adequately assessed as an ascetical act of deep ethical and
spiritual significance.

Conclusion: Taking on the gaze of Jesus

In the section of his encyclical entitled “The Gaze of Jesus,” Pope Francis portrays the
historical Jesus as an intimately “earthly” figure, engaged in what he terms a “tangible
and loving relationship with the world.”39 Christ, for Francis, existed in “constant
touch with nature,” lending the contours of creation an “attention full of fondness and
wonder.”40 Sensitively, and tenderly, Christ constantly reminded his disciples to attend
to each and every creature as irreducibly significant, worthy of our awe.41
In imitating this gaze, in taking on the eyes of Christ, we might attune ourselves to
both the sacramental nature of creation, as well as its lamentable desecration, with a
radically heightened sensitivity. As awakened beholders, in touch with the revelatory
textures of our world, receptive and responsive to the sacramental beings with whom
we share this planet, not only will we be imitating the gaze of Christ, we will be
encountering him. For Francis, “The very flowers of the field and the birds which his
human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.”42
And, we must add, the pigs, the chickens, the cows, the veal calves howling for
mother and meal, they are all imbued with his presence and glory. We are called, then,
to take on the gaze of Jesus, to attend to this sacramental world, and to reciprocate the
caresses of God, lest we perpetuate desecration, “condemn[ing] ourselves to spiritual
and moral loneliness” and “others to want.”43

Notes
1 Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays
Cultural and Agricultural (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981), 281.
2 Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” 281.
3 Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” 281.
4 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002), 95.
 Taking on the gaze of Jesus 179

5 Patriarch Bartholomew, “Global Responsibility and Ecological Sustainability,” Closing

Remarks, Halki Summit I, Istanbul, June 20, 2012. Cited in Pope Francis, Laudato Si’:
On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015),§ 8. In
an earlier address, delivered during the presentation ceremony for the Sophie Prize in
2002, Bartholomew asserts that the “original sin of humanity” in relationship to the natural
world is our “refusal to accept the world as a sacrament of communion with God and neighbor
[emphasis his].” See: Patriarch Bartholomew, “The Sophie Prize,” in Cosmic Grace,
Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I, edited by John
Chryssavgis (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 284.
6 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §84.
7 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §84.
8 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §2.
9 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §2.
10 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §2.
11 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §2; §5; §217; §219; §220. In advocating an “ecological con-
version,” Pope Francis is echoing Pope John Paul II, who calls for this in his general
audience of January 17, 2001. John Paul II declares that “we must … encourage and
support the ‘ecological conversion’ which in recent decades has made humanity more
sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading” (§4). In her Ask the Beasts:
Darwin and the God of Love (London, England: Bloomsbury, 2014), Elizabeth Johnson
stresses that a genuine conversion to the earth must include three “discrete turnings”
simultaneously: an intellectual turning, an emotional turning, and an ethical turning
(258). Intellectually, conversion to the earth requires a shift from an anthropocentric
worldview to a theocentric one, which would be capacious enough to include the non-
human in the sphere of what is perceived to be “religiously meaningful and valued”
(258). Emotionally, conversion to the earth involves a shift from the “delusion of the
separated human self” and the “isolated human species” to a “felt affiliation” with all
beings (258). Ethically, conversion to the earth consists of an expanded vision of the
moral sphere, so that “vigorous moral consideration” can be extended to the entirety of
creation (259).
12 Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments, trans. John Drury (Washington,
DC: The Pastoral Press, 1975), 92.
13 Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 2–3.
14 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §233.
15 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §233.
16 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §235.
17 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §236.
18 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §236.
19 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §236.
20 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §236.
21 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §236.
22 Michael J. Himes, “‘Finding God in All Things’: A Sacramental Worldview and Its
Effects,” in As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellec-
tual Life, ed. Thomas M. Landy (Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2001), 100.
23 Himes, “Finding God in All Things,” 100.
24 Himes, “Finding God in All Things,” 99.
25 Himes, “Finding God in All Things,” 99.
26 Himes, “Finding God in All Things,” 99.
27 Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life, 8.
28 Thomas Berry, “The Earth Community,” in The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, CA:
Sierra Club Books, 1988), 11.
29 John Hart, Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 1.
30 Hart, Sacramental Commons, 61.
180 Jim Robinson

31 Hart, Sacramental Commons, 12.

32 Hart, Sacramental Commons, 3.
33 Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,” Poetry 177, no. 3 (January 2001): 269–70. Cited
in: Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28.
34 Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy
(New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 29.
35 Scully, Dominion, 29.
36 The women and men who do the dirty work of desecration are often amongst the most
marginalized and vulnerable members of society, and are subjected to immense health
and safety hazards. In For the Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action (Cincin-
nati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2013), Charles Camosy notes that most factory farm
workers are poor, generally do not belong to unions, and are often undocumented
immigrants or temporary foreign workers (95). Their vulnerability renders them less
likely, and less capable, to “complain or quit in light of the horrific and damaging tasks
they are required to complete” (95). These workers, he notes, are at risk for bacterial
infections, as well as other extreme health problems, including upper respiratory issues
due to the inhalation of toxic gas (95). Francis, echoing Leonardo Boff, declares that we
must be careful to “hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (§49). These two
entangled cries are all too often muffled in unison.
37 Scully, Dominion, 282.
38 Scully, Dominion, 44.
39 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §100.
40 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §97.
41 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §96.
42 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §100.
43 Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” 281.

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