Although it is near impossible to sum up any human in one word, should you meet me in the streets and cry “Hippie!” you would come very close to summing me up. I am a vegetarian, I have over half a dozen tie-dye shirts, and there’s a good chance that at some point in a conversation with me there will be a heated discussion about politics. Like anyone else, I didn’t get this way over night. However, what is unusual is that one of the biggest influences on my behavior has been the Catholic Church. I am aware that few would ever link Catholicism to the hippie movement. After all, the church is fairly conservative, and I have a funny feeling that it’s rather difficult to fit a miter into an old Volkswagen van. However, regardless of how Catholicism actually plays out, certain core values on paper do mesh quite well with what are generally considered hippie values. These values being unconditional love, the communal lifestyle and (in my own life at least) vegetarianism.
The first time I went to a music festival, the first thing anyone said to me there was “You’re beautiful!” For the next three days, this positivity was ever-present. People were eager to talk and share ideas, and even more eager to boost each other up, praising whatever good values they saw. Around noon the second day, my friend and I met a man named David. By that evening, we were hugging, saying “I love you!” and regarding each other as family. This kind of openness is rarely seen outside of these types of events. In regular society, emotions are guarded, and you watch out for yourself. Yet, Jesus’ great commandment to us was to “love your neighbor as yourself.” By commanding us to love each other the same as we love ourselves, Jesus is asking for a lot more than politeness and courtesy. Jesus is asking for an unconditional love that, at a minimum, asks for the openness and kindness I found at the festival and, at its greatest, asks for a type of sacrifice few are willing to give.
When one thinks of the hippie movement, one might be inclined to think of communes and intentional living communities, where everyone works for the common good, and property and wealth are shared equally. Although they are rare, such communes still exist today, both as secular and religious communities. For Catholics, these communities might sometimes be better known as monasteries, where the monks all work, pray and live together, working for the common good. Such communities often draw comparisons to the early Christians, who famously shared all that they owned. Living in a communal style and sharing what you own would fall under the Christian value of taking care of those in need. Again, we are called to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. One of the most famous proponents of such a lifestyle was Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers movement. Dorothy Day taught that we should volunteer to help each other and was an advocate for Distributism, an economic model arguing for small-scale businesses (think greasy spoons instead of McDonald’s) and the more equal distribution of the means of production.
The last influence I will go into is my being a vegetarian. This is not necessarily a Catholic value. After all, after Noah returns from the flood, God promises man’s dominion over all the animals, now allowing man to eat the animals. However, religion is a personal journey, and every person draws something a little different from their belief system. In my own journey, I looked around at how we treat animals and decided that if they are creatures of God, they should be treated with more respect. This started off with rather intense prayers any time I ate meat, thanking the animal for its sacrifice to nourish me. I started eating less and less meat, feeling less comfortable with it every day. To specify for my Catholic audience, that means fish too. As I said, this is not considered by many to be a core Christian value. The only vegetarian Abrahamic religion that readily springs to mind is the Rastafari faith. However, as I said, religion is personal. Although each belief system has more or less universal tenets and rules, it’s what you do with those rules that matter. After all, the Westboro Baptist Church claims Christianity, as did Mother Teresa, and ISIS claims Islam, as does Malala Yousafzai. There are those who will take any religion and unwittingly run its name into the ground in their hate-filled quest to do “good.” As for me, I will try my hardest to do what Jesus told me, and love unconditionally. And if that makes me a hippie, I think that’s pretty groovy.
