Eddie Lama's inspiring and life affirming journey to compassion is the subject of the award-winning documentary, The Witness. Eddie, a construction contractor who grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood steeped in violence, transformed his own experience of being victimized into a commitment to protect the vulnerable.

Eddie runs a New York City-based construction company, and is also the Founder of FaunaVision, a charitable non-profit organization which operates the Oasis animal sanctuary in Upstate New York, providing homes for hundreds of abandoned and neglected cats, dogs and farm animals. FaunaVision also designs unique audiovisual mobile systems that empower the efforts of activists to educate the public about animal issues.

At the Peace Abbey on June 17, 2001, Eddie was presented with the award by Mary Margaret Earl, who said the following:

I’m happy to be the person honoring Eddie Lama today with the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award.

The Peace Abbey for many years has been giving the award to the men and women who inspire us. It’s been given in years past to Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama; Ingrid Newkirk and Patch Adams, Muhammad Ali and Maya Angelou.

Eddie Lama once upon a time may have been surprised to find himself in such company.

But, like them, Eddie Lama is a peacemaker.

He seeks peace by giving comfort and aid to those in need.

He seeks peace by calling for justice.

He seeks peace by being a prophetic voice on the streets of New York City, asking men and women there to face hard truths about a painful world we humans have created.

Eddie Lama’s is a fitting name to add to the list of Courage of Conscience award winners. His is a fitting name to add to the list of people we call heroes.

But there is a tension in such hero-making.

On one hand, we rightly lift up those who make special contributions to healing this world. Women and men are singled out for the inspiring ways they’ve answered a call to change the status quo. The ways they’ve faced scorn, or ridicule, or violence, or their own self-doubt -- to rise up and challenge the way things are.

We are moved by such heroes. We remember renegades like Thoreau, railing against slavery. Or self-disciplined saints like Gandhi, leading a march to the sea. Or articulate men of God like Martin Luther King Jr. standing in Washington and summoning a nation’s imagination to racial harmony.

We read about them and see movies about them. We give awards. We watch videos like The Witness finding inspiration in Eddie Lama’s compassion and resolve as he swims against the mainstream tide of violence against animals.

It’s important to have heroes. The images can sustain us through great hardship, and against great odds. And what movement faces greater odds than the Animal Rights movement?

But there is a shadow side to the making of heroes.

We have a tendency to lift our heroes too far above the rest of us. As if they were like the vegetarians Eddie Lama once envisioned -- people who sort of came into the world special. Who are so different in what they do and who they are -- that we sit back and admire them but do not see ourselves as one with them.

And the fact is, we all are potentially heroes. We each of us is called to make change. To challenge. To bring comfort. To risk.

Some of you are heroes right now. Or heroes in the making.

And so giving an award like the Courage of Conscience award does not so much lift another human being above us; does not distill from the masses the few capable of such heroic action.

Rather, the Courage of Conscience award reminds us what is possible for all of us when we submit to the call of our conscience.

That’s why it feels so good to present this award to Eddie Lama. Because Eddie in The Witness did not depict himself, as he might say, as some special ethereal being come straight from the bosom of God with special powers.

He is among us. Among his brothers and sisters.

And he presents himself in no other way.

What he did is to step more fully into his own loving, beautiful humanity -- something of which we all are capable.

He submitted to transformation. He submitted to his own expanding heart.

He demonstrated the power that a single individual has to make change in this world.

In The Witness Eddie shared a powerful definition of a Miracle. A miracle, he says, is a change in perception.

He is a living miracle. A regular guy from Brooklyn -- who works construction and who watched his first cat to get a date -- has become a hero. He is changing the world for the animals.

He is inspiring others to follow their own conscience and change the world, too.

For standing as an inspiration while standing among us we thank him, and we joyfully present him with this Courage of Conscience award.