Sisters and Brothers seeking to grow in consciousness,
We need to speak plainly in this time. We need to open our eyes not just to the beauty of life, but to the terrible truth it hides in plain sight: life feeds on life. Always has. Likely always will. Not as punishment. Not as evil. But as the sacred system itself.
There is no tree, no lion, no child, no breath, no poem, no sacrament untouched by this fact. The greenest leaf draws death from the soil. The lamb weeps in the jaws of the lion. And even in your body—yes, yours—cells are dying, consumed, replaced, without asking your permission.
This is not metaphor. This is biology. Thermodynamics. Ecology. Life is a dissipative structure: it organizes itself to break down energy gradients. The most efficient way to do that? Consume something already alive. Feed. Absorb. Devour.
You may recoil—and you should. Because you are not just a creature of appetite. You are a creature of meaning. And meaning aches in the face of this truth. We call it injustice. We call it horror. And yet—it is simply the way it works.
But here's the miracle:
You know it. And you still choose love.
You don’t have to deny the hunger of life to be good. You have to feel it, and then choose coherence anyway. Choose mercy. Choose mutuality. Choose to live as one who understands that survival is not the highest calling. Love is.
The sacred lives not in denying the system, but in transforming our place within it.
Yes, you will consume. You must. But what you consume, and how, and with what gratitude, and what you offer in return—this is the ground of spiritual integrity. This is where religion is born: not to explain away the hunger, but to sacralize our response to it.
That is why rituals matter. That is why stories matter. That is why we break bread with reverence and bury our dead with tears. Because we know, somewhere deep in the animal of our soul, that nothing survives alone, and no life is free of cost.
And this is why we must also name the places where that sacred entanglement has been desecrated—where consumption becomes erasure, where appetite becomes annihilation. Look to Gaza. What is happening there is not the holy hunger of life—it is the organized, industrialized devouring of a people, justified by power and sanitized by language. It is not that life feeds on life. It is that empire feeds on the innocent and calls it necessity.
And if we cannot see Gaza in this reflection, then we have missed the point. We are not here to be observers of the sacred system. We are here to be responsible participants. To witness. To respond. To offer coherence where the world offers only cruelty.
So the invitation today is not to escape this cycle. You can’t. And you shouldn’t.
The invitation is to live in it awake. To feed, not as a predator, but as a participant. To offer, not as a victim, but as a priest. To look at the bloody jaws of the lion and say: this too is the body of the sacred.
And then to turn to the stranger beside you and say: Here. Take. Eat. This is my body. This is love. This is coherence.
Welcome to the sacred entanglement. Not everyone will look. But you just did.
And now, you can never again pretend you didn’t know.
Amen.