Sacrifices Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Easter is in the rear view mirror now, but I can’t shake the whole concept of sacrifice – giving up something for the sake of something else. Like a kind of shawl, it’s hanging around my shoulders. Only it’s not made of all the same material: I look to my right, and there’s a glowing warmth to the fabric…but turn the other way, and I see dark and threadbare material, offering no comfort at all. Can such different experiences really be described with the same word?

I don’t know about you, but ancient religious rituals involving the sacrifice of living creatures – going back to the Greeks, let’s say, and continuing on through the Old Testament – make me pretty queasy. The killing of one innocent being really serves to appease divine power and bring about good results? This is hard to fathom. Once we get to Jesus, however, and I know I’m condensing an awful lot of important history here, we’re in the midst of something else. My husband pointed out this famous line from the Book of Common Prayer, describing what Jesus provided: “A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” Calling this merely a “good” kind of giving-up-one-thing-to-gain-another is an understatement if there ever was one.

Staying in the general realm of Christian life, we can think about what happens every Sunday with the collection plate. People make a kind of sacrifice by contributing money, but it’s one they make happily. (I’m putting aside those of us who have been occasionally embarrassed to find an empty wallet when that plate comes around.) By contributing, they become part of something larger than themselves; the giving adds to their life rather than diminishes it. Our local public radio stations want us to see an offering of support in the same way, and they have a point. This is the part of the shawl that keeps us cozy and connected.

Since I just saw the movie Bull Durham again, with all of its reminders about how baseball is a kind of religion unto itself, I’m comfortable heading into that realm now. Nobody ever met a sacrifice fly or a sacrifice bunt that didn’t serve a worthy purpose on the field. Essentially one batter is putting the team’s need to score runs ahead of his (or her) own normal desire to get on base and improve his (or her) batting average. Besides the fact that it’s more or less expected to try to advance a runner, s/he loses nothing really significant and gains the approval of a manager and teammates. These at-bats go in the plus column, definitely.

Now let’s head into trickier territory. Sometimes a sacrifice can be one part heroic and another part plain foolish. In love, especially, people can get all mixed up. Maybe you’ve heard that pop song by Bruno Mars called “Grenade.” The chorus goes like this: “What you don’t understand is/ I’d catch a grenade for ya/ Throw my hand on a blade for ya/ I’d jump in front of a train for ya/ You know I’d do anything for ya.”

Besides being glad that nobody’s asking us to prove our love by hurling ourselves in front of a locomotive, we’re apt to question the guy’s sanity more than we admire the depth of his devotion. When he tells us that the feeling is not mutual — apparently, she wouldn’t do a blasted thing for him – we know he needs help, or at least a new girlfriend.

Parents can also slip into the self-congratulatory mode sometimes. For the most part, we choose to devote big hunks of time to our children; nobody’s making us, and we also reap the benefits. In moments of stress, however, some of us have played the sacrifice card, pointing out just how much we have done for them, blah blah blah. This never goes well. In the plaintive Beatles song, “She’s Leaving Home,” it’s no surprise that the daughter takes off. Remember this one? “She (We gave her most of our lives) Is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives) Home (We gave her everything money could buy).”

Then of course there’s the giving up of life in the call of duty, bringing us to the dark realm of tragedy. The recent disaster on Mount Everest, in which a dozen Sherpas were killed by an avalanche, was heart-stoppingly horrific. In reading about the event, we learned a whole range of disturbing facts, including: Everest has become crowded with Western climbers who pay exorbitant amounts to climb the world’s highest peak; they are supported by men who face risks on a much greater scale than their own, mostly because they have to traverse the most dangerous parts of the route so many more times; the Nepalese government, meanwhile, has been sucking in the revenues. While it’s true that the Sherpas earn a better living than most of their countrymen, it’s hard to calculate how much they are “worth” when it comes to the likelihood of death on the mountain. This is the part of the sacrifice shawl that leaves me shivering. What happened to the good, anyway?

No, one single word for these vastly different kinds of experiences really will not do. Such are the limitations of language, I guess. As usual, we must rely on our minds and hearts to get us to something like true understanding.