What makes a place holy? We build places of worship and a religious authority sanctifies them: that is one way. Another is for a teacher to be born, teach, die, or be reborn at a place, and for the followers to congregate there. Yet another is that a miracle occurs and pilgrims travel to the site to attend, in some intangible manner, to the echo of that rupture of the quotidian.

Yet none of these sanctifications quite capture the mystery of the place. When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and tells him to take off his shoes because the ground he is on is holy, we do not know whether the place is divine because God has appeared in it or that its coordinates of astonishment pre-exist this particular event. Perhaps what makes the ground holy is simply that Moses’ bare feet touch the dust, the human touches the humus, and that is the point of sanctification. Or perhaps it is something else entirely: something to do with being called and giving an answer: Here I am.

I was reminded of the power of place a few months ago when I paid a visit to Farm Sanctuary, an organization that advocates for animal welfare and runs two shelters for farmed animals (one in northern California, the other in the Finger Lakes region of New York State). The cows, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, and pigs were rescued from stockyards, farms, or slaughterhouses. Typically they were too sick or weak to walk to where they were to be sold or killed, and were abandoned for dead or were thrown away to die. Some were taken—starved, disease-ridden, or frozen—from abusive situations on nearby farms; others were victims of natural disasters. All were unwanted, except at the Sanctuary, where they are able to live out the rest of their lives, taken care of and protected.

It’s a heartwarming story, even though the animals at Farm Sanctuary represent a tiny fraction of the ten billion animals killed for food each year in the U.S. Yet even in this sanctuary, this place of respite, the realities of life intrude. The animals in industrial farming today are bred to grow fat, and to do it fast. They are routinely killed before they are mature (in the case of broiler chickens and pigs) or before they are more than five or six years old (milk cows or breeding sows). As a result, it is only at Farm Sanctuary that you get to see the enormously enlarged breasts or the arthritic legs of the grotesquely obese turkeys, chickens, or pigs; or the playing out of the mad pecking of chickens or violently anti-social behavior of genetically altered roosters At times, as I walked around the farm, I wondered whether it was to their benefit that these creatures are kept alive to experience the degradations of an old age that has been pre-ordained by their genes but not by the industry that manipulates them. Would it not be better for them to be put out of their misery young, when their bodies, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, are still able to bear the weight of their imperfection?

But shelter and respite are not the only point of Farm Sanctuary. It exists to show us what we do not expect to see, and then to take us to a place where we are called upon to act. We have lost contact with the animals we eat. The vast majority of us know them only by the shrink-wrapped slabs of flesh or containers of milk and eggs we come across in the supermarket. The animals do not have names; they do not have characteristics, let alone characters. To the industry that creates them (we can no longer talk about farmers who rear them), they are production “units.” Notions of husbandry and stewardship are quaint residues of an old way of developing the land using the natural cycles of life. They are irrelevant in an economy of commodification and endless, relentless consumption.

Farm Sanctuary makes the animals evident to us. It allows us to see them in their individuality, with their quirks and, yes, personality. It provides them with space so that they perform behaviors denied to them in the battery cages and veal crates and sow stalls: to stretch their wings, to turn around, to lie down, to be with their own in comfort. Yet most of these animals’ lives will still be abbreviated by their genetic make-up. Arthritis and obesity will hobble them and their hearts will give out prematurely. For they are, after all, not meant to live.

What Moses heard that day on holy ground did not please him. He felt unprepared and inadequate, unequal to the apparently impossible task laid before him. He tried to argue his way out of the inarguable commission. And yet God summoned him, not only in spite of but because of his inadequacies and physical deficiencies. It was because he was broken and powerless that he was to be the messenger to the earthly powers. We tend to think of sanctuary and places of faith as locations where we are protected from the horrors of violence and cruelty, where we will be safe from the profane world beyond the gates or outside the doors. And sanctuaries do serve that purpose. But as Moses discovered, holy ground can also be a place of awe and mystery, where demands are made of us that challenge us deeply. What if these broken and battered animals are our messengers of liberation? What if the ground we think of as a respite from harshness and cruelty is actually the starting point of our effort to confront them? What if the sickness of these animals is a demand for us to be whole and holy? What if our liberty depends upon theirs?

Our world is awash with suffering, as it was when Moses was asked to go down and tell Pharaoh what he didn’t want to hear. It seemed a crazy plan then, and it’s a crazy plan now: the idea that we might run against the common wisdom and demand of an institution that it stop treating living beings as production units to be exploited until they are spent or sick or destroyed. It’s a dream that even the Israelites couldn’t tolerate, when, soon after entering the wilderness, they’d had enough of manna and demanded of Moses that he supply them with meat and the delicacies of their captive land. Moses went to God, who furiously decided to teach his people a lesson. He provided quail that the people consumed so much of that many died. Where they were buried became known as The Graves of Craving.

We crave comfort in an intolerable world. We seek security and peace. We look to home and hope we will find rest there. Yet we are also craven: desperate for material comforts; insatiable in our need to consume more and more. The victims of our consumption are nameless and uncountable, but they too have been sent from God. What if bird flu, obesity, environmental pollution, water scarcity, food poisoning, and the host of discontents that our affluent society struggles against are our Graves of Craving?

Sanctuary. We enter upon the miracle ground at our peril. Once there, we are surprised by revelation, arriving at the point where our humanity touches the earth from which we sprang; and in the interstitial point between the divine and the mundane, we are transformed.