Gracia Fay Ellwood, Editor
The Peaceable
Table
April 2017
Photo of hen and chick by Alena
In the June, 2011 Peaceable Table we featured an essay by Carol J. Adams entitled
“Under Her Wings: The Pollomorphic God,” meaning the chicken-shaped God, or
the God who is like a chicken (see Pollomorphic ). The author describes
several passages in the Hebrew scripture that represent God as similar to a
bird sitting over her eggs, keeping them warm until they hatch, feeding and
caring for the baby chicks, sheltering them under her wings. Jesus takes up
this theme, presenting himself [or speaking, as a prophet, for God] as a
compassionate mother hen who wants to shelter her scattered babies, the
people of Jerusalem, under her wings.
Human beings, described in the Hebrew Scriptures as created in the image of
God, often see God as like ourselves, having a voice that speaks to us, an
outstretched arm that rescues us from trouble, and the like. There are a
number of such anthropomorphic images in the Bible, and they are helpful to
many. But in other ways, Adams points out, we humans are not like God, are
aliens; humans are not the measure of all things as we tend to assume.
Nevertheless, we are enjoined to love and to welcome all our neighbors,
including the human aliens in our midst, and, by implication, other beings
who seem alien as well. Like God symbolized as a mother chicken, Adams
concludes, we, who are and are not made in God’s image, are to take the
animals under our wings.
Because most people eat the flesh of chickens and other animals, they do not
like to think of themselves as animals too--though of course we humans all
are. Chickens, along with fish, are probably the “food” animals who seem
most alien to flesh-eating humans. A certain percentage of meat-eaters have
begun to get the sense that there’s something bad about killing and eating a
cow or baby calf (which, indeed, there is). A little troubled by the message
of the Animal Concern but not wanting to make uncomfortable changes in their
lifestyle, they will say they have cut down on meat, and now eat just
chicken (or fish). Bird-brained (and scaly) animals don’t really matter,
right?
But what if we have a pollomorphic God? Carol Adams illustrated her message
with a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip in which pint-sized Calvin,
sitting at the dinner table and perhaps looking at a chicken’s leg or wing
on his plate, ponders the implications of such a disturbing possibility.
Calvin and Hobbes comic strip © 1992 by Bill Watterson. Permission to
reproduce sought.
If God can be symbolized by a chicken, perhaps a flesh-and-blood chicken
has a special link to God? If so, what might the eternal consequences of
killing and eating her be?
A Great Judgment?
I want to tease out some of the rich implications I see in Carol Adams’ “pollomorphic God,“ as illustrated by the Bill Watterson strip. To begin with, we need to ask what “eternal” might mean. Most people assume that “eternal consequences” refers to something happening after death; thus Calvin is perhaps imagining that after we die we will be confronted by the Great Chicken, who will be in a towering rage and attack us for the way we have treated all her chicken-people on earth. Calvin’s parents clearly find the whole idea too silly and naive to take seriously, and it seems likely most readers of the strip agreed, finding it amusing for that very reason.
Why should we take Calvin’s consequences seriously? The idea of the Great
Judgment after death of our deeds, derived from traditions in the three
Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and appearing in other
religions as well) is one that most educated people, both secular and
religious ones, have dismissed as hopelessly unrealistic and outdated, for a
number of reasons.
Some of them are sound. For a long time religious authorities, especially in
Christian religious establishments, have painted horrifying images of the
Judgment resulting in hell as blackmail to tighten their control over the
faithful. (I think of the odious clergyman Mr. Brocklehurst in Charlotte
Bronte’s Jane Eyre, who sadistically tries to terrify the ten-year-old Jane
with such images.) But even when the intent was not primarily control but to
motivate people to have faith and/or live good lives in order to attain to
paradise (surprisingly, even strands of Buddhism takes this line), the
concept is rather suspect. For one thing, the heaven/hell either/ or doesn’t
fit the facts of human motivations; humans are not divided between fiends
and saints. Most people have varying degrees of both good and evil in them.
And the idea of a great divide between saints and sinners too often goes
along with a self-congratulating attitude that God is with Us, and against
You.
Secular thinkers have also condemned the reward-and-retribution idea, primarily the reward.
Karl Marx
As Karl Marx made memorably clear, the concept is used by
people with economic power to help them exploit vulnerable workers: they can
pay abysmally low wages, meanwhile supporting religion’s God as a kindly
parent-substitute that offers the sufferers solace in heaven. Thus, in his
famous “opium of the people” passage, he described religion (borrowing from
Ludwig Feuerbach), as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.” He is saying that in a
class-divided society, people are alienated from their own hearts,
projecting heart-values outward onto God and heaven, rather than rightly
claiming their own hearts--finding fulfillment, and working toward a fair
and compassionate society, here and now. Marx was of course thinking of
laborers exploited by capitalists--farmed animals confined in their
heartless and soulless world were, unsurprisingly, left out of the picture
altogether.
There is truth to Marx’s accusation--many religious people have in fact
abandoned any concern for the well-being of the world: the have-nots because
they are trapped in misery and see no choice, the haves because it is easier
and seems more rewarding to keep taking what they can get, as their
colleagues are doing, than to awaken their hearts to injustice, change their
ways, and work to remedy it on earth. But, as so often, generalizations such
as this show too simple a picture. Religion has many dimensions; Marx’s
prophetic thunder itself reverberates from the outraged cries of the great
prophets of justice among his distant Hebrew forebears.
See "Eternal Consequences," That's What! Part II.