To Love Is to Sacrifice

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

The Season of Lent prompts us to ask the questions: What do we achieve by “giving up” or “offering” something that we desire? How do we explain this to a culture that has lost the religious sense of the idea of sacrifice, and recognizes its value (if it can see any value at all) only in terms of self-discipline?
The idea of sacrifice usually implies giving up something, suppressing a desire. And yet, religious phenomenology shows that originally, as the word itself implies, sacrifice designated a desire to experience communion with the sacred, a “making sacred” or “consecration” of a human activity. The original sacrifice was a ritual meal through which the participants experienced their communion with the universe’s source of Life. The death of the “victim” (the “giving-up” involved in the sacrifice) was not itself important; it was simply necessary for its consumption during the meal. Later the ritual began to concentrate on other aspects–especially the immolation of the victim as an offering to please, pacify, or influence the deity–but originally the purpose of sacrificial rites was the communion with a Mystery perceived to contain the ultimate truth about everything that exists. Originally sacrifice betokened affirmation, not denial.
Divine revelation exposed the uselessness of these sacrifices to bring about the desired communion with the Mystery. However, the idea of sacrifice remains embedded in the religious consciousness. Christian faith asserts that only the “sacrifice” of Jesus can reconcile us with God and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, keep us within this new relationship. Our “sacrifices” have meaning only as participations in this sacrifice of Jesus. But to what experience does the Christian conception of sacrifice correspond?
The fundamental desires of the heart direct us toward the destiny for which we were created and move us to act in a particular way to reach it. Our desires are activated, so to speak, when certain things point toward this destiny. In other words, the original desires of the heart become particular affections when that for which we were made is perceived to be present in specific realities. Guided by this affection, our knowledge of reality is faithful to its truth as created by God.
Knowledge of reality and our affection are thus inseparable. Morality, as Father Giussani says, is to act while remaining within this relation between knowledge and affection. Morality, that is, does not require us to deny or diminish our affections. They are something completely natural. It would be unnatural to deny them, to “sacrifice” them for some “higher purpose.”
The problem begins not with our affections for concrete realities, but with our liberty. We must freely choose to move in the direction pointed out by symbolic reality. And here is where the inexplicable occurs. Something terrible happens. We experience the consequences of a great tragedy, of something that should not be, that does not correspond to the way we were made. This is a great mystery. For some reason, we freely choose to separate our affection for particular realities from the destiny that they symbolize. Somehow we choose to destroy the link between our particular affections and the destiny symbolized by the things we desire. Knowledge is thus separated from affection. As a result, our affections become pure feelings detached from the truth, the sheer desire to possess what attracts us without any regard for its truth. Instead of embracing what we desire with love, we distort it so as to satisfy our feelings.
This is, of course, what theology calls “original sin,” something totally inexplicable, whose origins can only be expressed in poetic and mythological language. And yet it is as real as the beating of the heart.
It can only be overcome by an event with the power to restore the harmony between knowledge and affection, between our experience of reality and our destiny. This event has indeed the form of a sacrifice in that it leads us not to suppress our affections, but to fully satisfy them by linking them to the ultimate truth of what they desire.
Such is the event of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the encounter between humankind and divinity, between human beings and our destiny. He is the full truth of everything that exists. Only in Him can our heart find what it desires. His Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection–which establish and secure this perfect union between our hearts and our destiny–can be called a sacrifice because it brings about the communion and liberation sought by our hearts.
When the way we love expresses our participation in the life of Jesus, “sacrifice” is the consequence of loving the truth of a reality, not a denial of its goodness.
The season of Lent calls us to restore to its original harmony our stand before reality, to return in Christ to that “beginning” where our affection and knowledge of the truth allow us to love this world as God loved it when His only-begotten Son sacrificed Himself for it.