Humble pig offers example for new year

My aunt on the old family farm in northeast Missouri gave up raising pigs. She found them affectionate, intelligent and loyal. Sending them off to market nearly killed her, so she stopped the pig part of the farm production.

I was on another farm in Indiana visiting a young couple just starting to revive an old farm. Their farmhouse picture window did not overlook a green lawn but the piggery. As a guest, I had the side of the dinner table facing out the window. There was a tall fence around the pigs and another larger one around the field surrounding the pig barn. Just into dinner, a piglet went flying over the fence. Five minutes later, another one came sailing over.

I asked the young couple if they had raised pigs before. "No. First time," they said. "Well," I said, "Pigs are very athletic and the younger ones especially so. Two piglets have jumped your fence and are roaming in the closed field. They look very happy." Of course, the young man and woman had to jump up and chase the piglets back to mama.

"Charlotte's Web" is a child's novel about a pig and a spider. It is extremely popular with the children in our parochial school. Their conversations in that book are wise dialogues good for life.

But all this is not really about pigs. It is about the New Year. Somewhere between Halloween and the Lantern Festival in February are not one, but two, New Year celebrations. There is the civil one, Jan. 1, and there is the lunar one. On the lunar calendar, the Year of the Pig will begin Feb. 18.

The civil calendar invites us to change by making resolutions. The Moon Calendar also promises a new start and especially blesses the gathering of families in a celebration that adds much of our elements of Thanksgiving.

I have told all the pigs that I know that God loves them especially because pigs were banned from the menu of two major religions: Judaism and Islam. If this is a prejudice against pigs, we should all be so fortunate to be the victims of that kind of prejudice.

In 2007, there will be another slaughter going on, the one that started some years ago, the one that was not supposed to happen.

Besides the Year of the Pig, I hope this will be the Year of Peace, Salaam, Shalom. Nobody really cares about resolutions to lose weight or get more exercise and stuff like that. But intelligent, kind and loyal beings -- like pigs are and human beings can be -- can find something more than a slaughterhouse solution to the problems of the world.

The Rev. Halbert Weidner is pastor of Holy Trinity Church and St. Sophia's Ukranian Greek Catholic Church.

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