More on Sacrifice

I brought up sacrifice in a recent post but didn’t explain what I meant by it. The word can evoke strong reactions and associations: slaughtered animals on the altar, Christ on the cross, children’s guilt (“just think of how much we have sacrificed for you”). But there is a simpler way of thinking about it.

“Sacrifice” derives from the concept of “making something sacred” through an offering to God. Yet in secular terms it may mean that we are mortal and can’t have or do everything. Having one thing means not having something else; doing one thing means not doing something else. Not only do we have to choose, but we have to give something up.

We come under pressure to be and do everything, or at least to believe that we can (and to speak the jargon of such belief). Especially in U.S. American culture, with growth mindset, positivity, happiness movements, and such, it is shameful to suggest that we have limits.

Limits mean not having something, giving something up, letting something go. There is something sacred (even for the secular) in those relinquishments, as insignificant as they may seem, because we make them for eternity. True, at a different future moment we could take a different tack, but that’s already a different moment.

Understood in this way, sacrifices don’t have to be particularly virtuous, grandiose, or even conscious. They happen whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. Sometimes they do stand out; sometimes they do involve some kind of greatness of spirit. But often they escape our notice or just dimly cross our mind.

Wait, someone might protest, aren’t you betraying the meaning of sacrifice here? Isn’t it supposed to involve the holy? Well, holiness hides in unlikely places. Maybe Abraham’s not sacrificing Isaac was a sacrifice in its own right. Maybe holiness lies not in grand acts, but in the willingness, here and there, even invisibly, to let something go. Or, in some cases, to insist on something, even to the point of alienating others. Or to live quietly, without fanfare.

This all seems to get confusing and equivocal: if anything can be a sacrifice, then sacrifice means nothing. But that isn’t so. Each person has to live out a life that won’t be anyone else’s. Within it, nothing can be undone. Some choices, directions are better than others, but every life will have its mistakes.

This gives no guidance about right and wrong, but at least it makes room for a certain kind of finiteness, the kind which in turn may open into infinity.

Posted by Diana Senechal on April 20, 2023

https://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2023/04/20/more-on-sacrifice/