To sacrifice and make sacred

I have been musing on the word sacrifice since I received it as part of a worship service last Tuesday. The worship leader asked us to contemplate how the word that we picked out of a basket might be a potential route that God wanted us to ponder. Besides the fact that I don’t view God as exerting a particular will over my life, I have been wondering what a thorough thinking of the concept of sacrifice might yield for me.

I have always thought that sacrifice was to lose oneself or to give away something most dear. Looking it up in the dictionary, I find the word comes from a Middle English verb that means "to make sacred." The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others or a short-term loss in return for a greater gain, such as in a game of chess.

If I, indeed, have to embody sacrifice, I prefer to think about making something sacred than subjugating myself. I think that this is an issue that I struggle with when faced with what I perceive as unfair situations or other forms of painful interactions. I have trouble thinking that I deserve to be treated poorly, or that by letting insult go unnoted, I am accepting that the painful situation is somehow justified.

In reading the first pages of “Legacy of the Heart,” I was intrigued by the concept that the pains of our childhood are healed by our recognition that we are hurting. Rather than saying “I am hurt because of …,” author Wayne Muller writes that it is more helpful to simply acknowledge that we hurt. If we can cut the attachment to the why of our hurt, we are set free from the cycle of suffering.

Today, I spoke to a woman who said that she had been abused as a child and violated as an adult. In order to ease her pain, she had turned to drugs. Now straight and clean, she wondered why life was so hard. Additionally, she understood what she had been running from. She said that she had tried to talk with her abusers but that it only seemed to become more painful. She said she had taken the abuse from her male relatives with the idea that she was saving her younger siblings from the same treatment.

She had sacrificed her innocence; she had made herself victim. As some of the abuse was from family members, she she did not want to deal with other family members about it. Feeling alone, she was fearful that if she was to talk with her family, they would attempt to take action against the victimizer and she thought that she would become even more vulnerable and that her troubles would intensify. She was trying to convince herself that her only option was to forgive and forget, although that was extremely difficult.

We spoke about counseling, which she said had not been helpful so far; we talked about a physical kind of counseling or therapy, noting that we store much of our pain in our bodies. We talked how she might honor and name the pain in her life, and wondered aloud whether embracing the pain, rather than fending it way, or attempting to move beyond it without recognition might yield some sort of peace.

I am wondering if we can truly honor our pain and suffering—not that we deserved it and not that it is a blessing in disguise, but that it is, that it happened and that it has shaped us—whether treasured and grieved, it might be sacrificed.

Transformed and made sacred, perhaps it might release its grip on our psyche so that we may be restored to well being.