I can’t remember a time when spiritual exploration didn’t seem like the reason for being here. Just before I turned three—I know this because we moved on my third birthday—Dede, my nanny, took me out in my stroller late enough that I could see the stars. I looked up at them and thought, “That’s home. I’m here now. It’s fine. But it is not home.” Now, some 73 years later, I’m still entranced by points of light—those in the heavens, in my fellow beings, and in my own heart.
Having a spiritually eclectic upbringing helped. I was supposed to be Catholic, and although I loved the stained glass and incense, I found the theology, at least in its 1950s Midwestern iteration, confining. Once in catechism class, I tried to make a point for interfaith reconciliation when I raised my hand to share, “Buddha and Zoroaster had virgin births, too!” Sister Mary Xavier was unimpressed. Dede, grandmother-aged and a student of mysticism, consoled me by saying, “The nuns mean well. They just don’t get out much.”
When I was five, I brought home from first grade my new knowledge of the 4 Food Groups. Once the USDA nutritional standard, its groupings were meat, dairy, grains, and fruits and veg, Dede, not one fond of governmental edicts, said, “There are people who never eat meat. They’re called vegetarians. I could take you to the Unity Inn and get you a hamburger made out of peanuts. You’d think you were eating beef.” That was the moment it hit me that there would be a lot to learn in life, and I probably wouldn’t get most of it at school.
The Inn was at the suburban Kansas City headquarters of Unity, an open-minded Christian denomination founded in the 1890s by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore. They adopted a vegetarian lifestyle after conversations with their Seventh Day Adventist printer and after Charles’s study of teachings from India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism.
Adventists, then and now, are encouraged to eschew meat and other animal products to recreate a bit of Eden in a fallen world. Genesis describes the Garden of Paradise as vegan. Adam and Eve were to eat “every plant bearing seed…” (Genesis 1:29); other-than-human animals also ate these, plus grasses and grains. The Genesis story contends that humans remained plant-eaters after the Fall, although more vegetarian than fruitarian. (When toil, sickness and death came on the scene, people really needed kale.) Even in their post-Edenic state, humans were said to live for centuries. After the Great Flood, our allegorical ancestors proceeded to consume everything (and everyone) available, and yet the Edenic ideal was never fully lost. Isaiah prophesied that the Edenic state would come again, a time when wolves and lambs would cohabit, and “the lion will eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 65:25).
The Indian traditions that also motivated Unity’s founders include vegetarianism because of the value placed on ahimsa, non-killing and nonviolence, yoga’s first moral precept. Ahimsa knows no species barrier. The Fillmores were so vegetarian that they bound the Bibles they printed with a faux leather called Keratol—130 years ago.
With this information shaping my worldview, I had the persistent notion, even as a kid, that I would eventually figure out how to stop eating animals. It took some time, going vegetarian in my late teens and fully vegan at 33. (Okay, it took a lot of time. Cheese is a foodie’s cocaine.) But as I look back on the past half-century or so, the commitment to include other-than-human animals in my circle of compassion has been, and continues to be, central to my soulful life.
The hairs on my arms stand up when I think of Kafka, looking at a fish in an aquarium, and pronouncing, “Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.” Ditto Tolstoy: “If a [person] earnestly seeks a righteous life, [their] first act of abstinence is from animal food.” And with the Jain saint Mahavira who uttered my favorite sentence of all time: “To every creature, their own life is very dear.”
Even so, I realize that this choice which to me seems so obvious, so reasonable, and so soulful, can put a wedge between some fellow spiritual seekers and me. They see my veganism as elitist, judgmental, or at the very least misprioritized—”Why do you care so much about animals when human beings are suffering?” This concern isn’t new. St. Paul (Romans 14:1-3, 15; 1 Timothy 4:1-5) expressed it often, feeling that there were more pressing matters to attend to than the plant-based diet then prevalent among followers of Christ. (It’s also possible that Paul, too, had a thing for cheese.)
I’ve long been fascinated as to why so many early Christians, facing Roman persecution and the rest, chose to complicate their lives further with a change in diet. The answer that has come through for me is that Jesus brought so much love to earth that it had to be shared with all creatures. For some 200 years, it was. I believe that’s why choosing to be vegan is pivotal to soulful living for me. It’s a way to show love and caring to someone I don’t know: a chicken, a cow, a pig, a fish. I won’t see that being’s suffering or be there for their death, but we have the same Creator and we are connected—the way a three-year-old connects with the stars.
© Copyright 2025 Victoria Moran. All Rights Reserved.
Victoria Moran has been associated with Soulful Living for the past 15 years. She was listed by VegNews among the “Top 10 Living Vegetarian Authors” and has written fourteen books on wellbeing and compassionate living, including Creating a Charmed Life, Main Street Vegan, and Age Like a Yogi. She hosts the Main Street Vegan Podcast and is a founder and director of the Compassion Consortium, an online spiritual center for animal advocates. Victoria was lead producer of the 2019 documentary, A Prayer for Compassion, on spirituality and food choices, and is now in pre-production with Miss Liberty, a feature film that tells the story of a fictional dairy cow who escapes from a slaughterhouse and the human drama that ensues. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Interfaith minister Rev. William Melton; James, an adopted chihuahua; and Thunder, a visually handicapped pigeon, rescued from the streets of New York City. Find her at https://www.victoriamoran.com, and on Instagram @VictoriaMoranAuthor.
