For reasons that I will write about at another time, I find myself not eating meat. I'm having trouble with expressing this succinctly and purposefully to both my loved ones and myself. What does this mean? Am I a vegetarian now? And why does saying, "I am a vegetarian" feel so very uncomfortable when the actual decision not to eat meat happened so effortlessly that it was almost unintentional?
It's made me think about other labels and the value and discomfort in them. I have two friends who became addicted to running fairly recently, in their mid-thirties. Friend A has done a number of races, 5Ks, 10Ks and a half marathon. Friend B has worked up to a similar pace and has done a ten-mile race. Both run regularly and with some discipline. Friend A will begin tales involving her running with the preface, "Well, I'm not a runner...." Friend B joyfully and proudly embraces the label of runner.
And how about "Christians." There are those who go around with WWJD bracelets and cross necklaces and would proudly proclaim to anyone they came across in the grocery st"ore that they are Christian and will be so bold as to ask their not-yet-acquaintance if she has been "saved." (Yes, this happened to me. I told the Christian that hopefully we won't know for some time.) But there are those who would hesitate to call themselves Christians but quietly go about studying Jesus and trying to live by his example.
Why does the name matter?
Perhaps it is inevitable, this desire to label and name. We are linguistic creatures, hard-wired, or so it seems (if you haven't read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, I highly recommend it.) We begin to order the world with words before we can even move through the world on our own. The things that a baby can name are always most exciting and most eagerly sought out. It's comfortable to know the names of things. Labels help us order who we are and what we do. They keep every moment and every act from being a surprise, from distracting us from things that are truly new and unpredictable. A runner is a person who runs, a person who knows about chafing and can have long conversations about shoes or certain bodily functions or injuries. A vegetarian is a person who is not going to be appreciative of the steak you serve her. It's helpful, the label. If nothing else it gives others a fair warning. And Christians? Well, that one's a bit more tricky.
A name can be a tool for inclusion and community. We runners hang out together; we have things in common. It's also good for discipline. You get up and do your morning run even though it's raining and still dark because you are a runner and that's what you do. I find these aspects of the vegetarian label both useful and disturbing. On the one hand, it's helped me find cookbooks. (All this time trying to cook without milk and eggs, and I never thought to check out a vegan cookbook!) On the other hand, I had just told my friends that I might now be a vegetarian, and then they asked me to join them for sushi. I did not care to put the discipline of my new eating habits over the relationships that I so value, to cherish the label more than people. And anyway, is sushi considered meat? Would eating it be breaking the discipline?
Taking a word and it definition too seriously, one gets all tangled up in a new mess of names and definitions. Does it really matter if sushi is meat? It does not seem to violate the ecological, political or health principles which motivated my abstention from meat. Not eating the sushi would have interrupted a precious opportunity for communion with people I love. The definitions can get in the way of good things. Commitment to the label rather than the spirit of a decision is perhaps why, in spite of our need for naming and ordering, I tend to pull away from declaring myself one thing or another.
As far as I can tell, all good things have the potential to also be bad things. For all of the understanding and fair warning a name often provides, it can also mislead. It can assume a life of its own, more unmanageable than the thing it was meant to tame. A label is intimidating. If you call yourself a runner, will people assume you can run a sub-8:00 mile? Will they assume you do marathons? Will they be disappointed if you do not? If you start down that vegetarian road, will people think you're little more than a poser if you go out and gorge on sushi? Will your entire faith journey be discredited if you wear your religious affiliations on your chest and then are discovered to be, in private but in reality, your everyday unoriginal sinner? Yes, a word may call one to discipline, but it's almost certain to set that same one up for miserable failure when the discipline turns out to be more of an ideal than an achievable reality.
The truth is that a single word never ever tells the whole story. If you study the Bible, you see that even a whole single story never tells the whole story. Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna illustrates over and over that the most important part of the story is the hole within it. A person takes an entire lifetime to tell the true story of who they are, and it is constantly subject to revision and, for most of us, a few literary techniques, like hyperbole, just to make it more interesting and, sometimes, more true. This is why my husband complains that at every social gathering attending mainly by my running friends, he gets dragged into multiple 30-minute conversations about races, about injuries, about shoes or even about shoe stores. And the stories are all different. There isn't one "runner" story. I have a running friend who wins her age group at major international marathons, a friend who runs 80-100 miles a week, friends who never run faster than a nine-minute mile, even in a short, fast race, and some friends who don't race at all. I have friends who train all year for one marathon and friends who do a few a year without being too concerned about any particular one. I have friends who don't care to run in snow and cold and friends who run every day, no matter what. And don't get me started on the Christians.
So here's some of my story: I have not eaten meat (except for sushi) for a week and a half. While I find that I haven't particularly missed the meat, and I've been pretty comfortable with my internal rationale for my behavior, I haven't defined well enough for myself what that means to be able to declare anything to the world. Two days ago my husband came home with some grocery bags, one of which contained a package of sun dried tomato and chicken sausages, a meat product I have in the past eaten without much concern. This morning, he suggested we eat them for dinner, grill them outside, given the lovely warm spell and extended daylight we are enjoying. I haven't decided what to do about that. And if I do not eat the chicken, how will I explain that?
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