On July 31, 1974, the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, I concluded my annual retreat by committing myself to no longer eating meat. This discernment was a turning point in my life as a young man. It made me a little different, distanced from those around me, and certainly from the ordinary diet of Irish-American Catholics like me in the 20th century.
My reasons for becoming a vegetarian were in the beginning contextual. I was a young Jesuit at the time, in regency—between philosophy and theology studies—teaching mainly English-language subjects to high school age students (all Hindu and Buddhist) at St. Xavier’s School in Kathmandu, Nepal. Nepal was (and still is) a poor country, and meat was a luxury only for special occasions.
At our boarding school, we Jesuits (almost all Americans in those days) ate meat at least twice a day. By contrast, the boys in this relatively affluent school would have meat perhaps three times a week, and the lay staff just a little more frequently. Seeing the disparity even on campus, I decided that not eating meat was a way of fitting in better, a quiet sort of solidarity with the poor—and a way of gaining a bit of credibility with our sharply observant students, who could not reconcile the luxury of Jesuit meat-eating with the Jesuit vow of poverty.
It is true that most Nepalis would eat meat when they could get it, and even strict Hindus and Buddhists were rarely absolutely vegetarian. But there were religious reasons in that ancient culture, as in India, for not eating meat: respect for all life forms, divine, human, animal and plant, and horror at the bad karma that comes from killing other living beings. As a budding scholar of Hinduism, I began to get the basic Hindu insight into the great unity of life, the great web of living beings of which humans are simply one, albeit the foremost, part.
After regency, I returned to the United States in 1975 for theological studies for ordination and had a lot of adjusting to do in a culture where vegetarianism was still considered odd, exotic. I readily made exceptions to my vegetarianism when visiting my family in New York, since most of my mother’s best recipes—and my childhood favorites—were meat-based. For a decade or more, I made an exception on Thanksgiving, so as to share in the feast’s turkey. But little by little, I not only did not eat meat but stopped even wanting it.
Red meats went first, then chicken and fish, and finally I was likely to check on soups to see if beef bouillon had been used or not. Perhaps 25 years ago, I distanced myself from eating eggs, and while I still consume dairy products, I am slowly tending toward a vegan diet at this point in my life, in my mid-70s.
Social and community life, too, had to be readjusted. Unlike today, many restaurants 50 years ago did not have any vegetarian entrees, and the request for a vegetarian option not infrequently resulted in a plate of boiled, unseasoned vegetables. Vegetarianism has ancient roots in American life and piety, but in the 1970s, books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet were still something of a novelty. Jesuit houses, then as now, tended to serve largely meat-based entrees at meals. Even after all these years, it is rare to find a really good vegetarian entrée in one of our houses.
Over the next decades, I added other reasons for my change in diet, including the simple fact that vegetables and rice, fruits and nuts are good for you. As the past 50 years have shown me, meat is not necessary for health or energy. I was learning, too, as we all were in the 1970s and 1980s, that the mass production of animals for slaughter was a wildly costly endeavor that meant more protein for the privileged few.
In 1979, I published an article in America, “Vegetarianism and Religion,” which was later reprinted in a 2001 edited volume, Religious Vegetarianism. At that early date, only five years into my new diet, I was consolidating my experience and life-choice in a more objective manner. I pointed to the value of a simpler lifestyle as a rejoinder to the inequities of an unjust economic order, a daily commitment to respect for all living beings in a created world that need no longer be divided into binaries such as eater-eaten, killer-killed.
My main point in the brief essay was a hope for the church. If we in the church after the Second Vatican Council were eager to reintegrate spirituality and theology in fresh ways, we would do well to reimagine our table fellowship, ways of meeting one another in meals ordinary and sacred. Might vegetarianism gain a kind of liturgical power in a global church seeking to recalibrate its natural and cultural frames worldwide?
What surprises me now—having recently re-read my 1979 essay for the first time in many years—is that it does not mention at all that I had become a vegetarian myself five years earlier. I suppose I wanted to make the case objectively, without an appeal to my own experience. By the present moment, however, I am unashamedly personal in my writing. In fact, I just published a memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar. As I get older, I am more and more sensitive to the fact that what we believe to be true and good has more power if rooted in our own life stories. Late in life, I want people to think more about how what we eat does really matter, especially at those deepest points of our lives where soul and body, spirit and matter touch.
Five decades of vegetarian diet has changed me, for the better, I think: simpler, more natural, more connected to the smaller and larger life forms around me. I am mindful of what I choose to eat and not eat, less likely to rely on processed foods and fast foods, a bit more adept in resisting other ordinary cravings, such as alcohol or sweets. For us Americans, it seems clearer and clearer: What most of us already have is more than enough.
Needless to say, my Hindu friends in both the United States and India have always been happy that I am a vegetarian. As a teacher, it helps, too. We know that today many young people prefer to be vegetarian or vegan. While perhaps—statistics vary—only 4 to 5 percent of young people are strictly vegetarian or vegan, it seems clear—as least in the Boston/Cambridge area—that more and more young people are eating less and less meat. I have been teaching at the university level for 40 years now, first at Boston College and now at Harvard, and it pleases me to see that more and more frequently, my students and I often have made similar dietary choices and share simple views on what it means to be spiritual and embodied at the same time. That I’ve kept my resolution for 50 years can be inspiring for some.
I concluded my 1979 article with the hope that we might “discover anew in our age the Lord who has always chosen to be found in the context of the meal.” We have a long way to go as Americans and as a human family in reimagining even our Eucharistic hospitality, to celebrate more intimately the truth we recall at every Mass, that by God’s goodness we share “the fruit of the earth and work of human hands,” which become the “bread of life” and “our spiritual drink.” Or, as Pope Francis put it in “Laudato Si’”: “Thus, the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.”
Such are my hopes today as well, as in gratitude I keep trying to live by gifts of God nonviolently given to us from the very beginning.
