feel as though you’ve lost everything? [or sacrifice comes full circle to sanctification]...

In many religions sacrifice is the most effective way of invoking the Divine.
In early societies it was symbolized in the killing of an animal or the pouring out of a precious liquid. Today we might feel the sting of sacrifice in personal decision-making or strokes of fate. In all these cases sacrifice is an emptying out of personal will so that the spirit can have a greater presence. In everyday life certain losses and surrenders may signal an opening of the self that serves the purpose of sacrifice in the religious sense.

It is possible to stumble across the sacred already in existence, as in an old moss-covered oak in the thick of a virgin wood or in a hoary statue of the Buddha hat has been resting in an ancient temple for centuries. But sometimes the sacred has to be brought into being through art and effort.

"The Glen" by Maxfield Parrish

In ancient times people sacrificed an animal, placing their prized possession and important food in the hands of divinity rather than using it for themselves. They gave up something they cherished to make room for the holy.

Life gives us plenty of opportunities to make sacrifices. Getting a divorce or changing jobs may entail the kind of sacrifice that increases the holiness of one's life depending on how we deal with it. Sacrifice and sanctifying are natural processes available in every life.

Today it easy to dismiss the importance of sacrifice. We may consider only the giving-up part and not the sanctifying element. The very idea of sacrifice may seem anachronistic. Only primitive people kill animals in the name of their gods. Or the idea of sacrifice may go against all that seems reasonable in a secular world. Why give up the very things one has worked for and achieved? What good is an attitude of self-denial? These sentiments are full of worldly wisdom, but they overlook the profound insight of religion:

The giving up of ego transforms the person radically, placing him in a much vaster notion of what it means to be a human being. It puts him in touch with the incomprehensible mysteries that shape life regardless of our awareness and appreciation of them.
A modern person may find it difficult to imagine living from a place other than ego. Secularism and ego go together, and it may seem only prudent to do whatever is possible to be a conscious, evolving, and successful individual. But the religions teach a different set of values with a focus on eternal concerns and radical community.

They promote a different notion of self—if the word self is appropriate at all. They suggest that a person might feel profoundly fulfilled by being a receptor of life rather than a doer and achiever, a conduit of power rather than the originator.

When in the past people killed their precious livestock for the sake of religion, they were doing something both symbolic and literal. The animal represented what they considered valuable, and they were willing to give it up for a divine blessing. Giving over what they most prized, they felt a great loss. If sacrifice is a mere formality, it simply doesn't work because the emotional sting indicates a letting go of something felt as precious.

Every sacrifice
transforms the person
in a
small way,
and bit by bit
life becomes
holy.


By allowing a greater will to have a role, the person is deliteralized, made into something less centripetal. Even the mystic, so interiorly absorbed, looks beyond the self for meaning. Sacrifice chips away at the self, allowing the deep soul to take over.

The need to insist on our own existence gives way to a more relaxed appreciation of the life passing through us, achieving its own ends, which, mysteriously, creates a fuller version of self than what we might have created from our own designs.


- excerpted from In Every Sacrifice, God is Born
from "The Soul's Religion" by Thomas Moore -