Sacrifice

It’s not a popular word in its full panoply of meaning where I live.

Ones doing sacrificial things tend not to speak of them in such ways.

Others, ascribing the impetus, the motive, speak all too freely.

We are hardly edified by either approach.

Here’s the thing we perhaps miss about sacrifice.

To sacrifice, to give up something for someone else, presumably for their benefit, has a cost.  

Sacrifice is the cost.

The learning curve is just that – what is learned in the aftermath probably cannot be known in the doing.

Hence to sacrifice is an on-going thing.

At the time of the sacrificial act, one may know one is making a sacrifice.  What one cannot know is that the thing surrendered, given up, lost, is surrendered, given up, lost, forever.

It does not come back.

It does not replenish.

It does not magically reappear.

It is simply gone.

There is a humbling enormity to it.

When something is lost forever, that loss is carried – always.  

It shapes and redefines.

It changes the person.

There is a lessening.

Maybe it was worth it.

Maybe not.

But there is always a cost.

There, perhaps, should our honor guards, our parades, our memorials and speeches be gathered – there, where people in ways visible and invisible, where acts small as well as large upon the pages of history, where the ways things could have been and the way things are eternally co-exist.  

For whether the cost be counted or not, it is always lived and lived with.

There is sorrow in that.

And whether it should be honored or not, it should be noted.  And noticed. 

In Need of Allies

We are all in need of allies.

To be an ally requires sacrifice, thoughtfulness, awareness, intention.

To have an ally – what does that require?  Humility enough to ask for the help, I suspect.  Willingness to match our pace to the one we’ve asked to walk with us, perhaps.  Ability to recognize our own need for such, a certainty.

In the world of nations just now, the United States needs Turkey as an ally, but it is not at all clear whether Turkey needs the United States.

And to be an ally always seems to involve a cost-benefit analysis, at least in the world of nations.

But what of the world of individual relationships?

Where then is the cost?  Is it fair, right, appropriate, to count the cost?

Well, Jesus tells those who would follow him to count the cost before taking even the first step – his point being, as I would gather, that there is always a cost.

Knowing, then, that there is a cost to the other in walking alongside, in being an ally, how can I ask anyone to take on such a role for me?  Is it ‘fair’ to ask for help knowing in advance that the help will be costly to the other?

But are we not made to walk in tandem?  To help as, where and when we can?

Bonhoeffer speaks of Christian fellowship as burden bearing.

That rings so true to me.  It also rings true that all of we Christians – not just the professionals among us – are to be burden bearers, each with the other.

Does this change my understanding of burden bearing?  Perhaps.  Perhaps it is just taking turns the way we did when we were kids.  Sometimes I’ll follow you, sometimes you’ll follow me.  Sometimes I’ll help you and sometimes you’ll help me.

But allies do more than simply help or provide succor.  Allies are advocates of a sort – the ones who do not stand silently by when bad stuff comes to town.  Allies walk alongside, provide practical aid, raise their voices in protest.

There, surely, is the greater cost, given the great resistance of humankind to such activity in all but the rarest of occasions.

Which brings us back to the beginning – allies – where to find them?  How to ask them?  How to be one?  If these were easy questions, one suspects, there wouldn’t be much need for allies in the first place.

So I am left to wonder – who have been your allies?  Did you ask them for help or did they merely appear at the needed time?  Have you been an ally?  How did you know you were needed?  What prompted you to act this time when you had not, perhaps, acted before?  What did it cost you to be an ally?  What did you gain from having an ally?

Those are the questions I’m asking today.