Why sacrifice?

Sacrifice was certainly a central factor in the Catholic spirituality of my youth. We attended the "sacrifice of the Mass" daily. Sacrifice was not only strongly suggested as the appropriate response to the suffering of others, as in appeals for the missions or the poor; it was also taught as a good in its own right, as an important part of the process of following Jesus Christ. We were encouraged to venerate those who sacrificed for others, including fathers, who sacrificed in their jobs to provide for children, and mothers, who sacrificed of their time and energy to care for children.

Today most of us have been taught to be suspicious of appeals to sacrifice. Over the last few decades, countless examples have been cited where calls to sacrifice masked self-interest, sadism, or naivete, or resulted in great suffering that accomplished nothing positive. We have become especially suspicious of appeals for sacrifice aimed at socially powerless or subordinated groups.

The last 40 years in our society have destroyed popular faith in the goodness and salvific power of sacrificial suffering. Many servicemen and women who served in Vietnam and the families of those who died felt frustrated that their sacrifice fell into a void. Beginning in the 1950s, African Americans began to despair of their patient sacrificial suffering under centuries of slavery and legal oppression ever saving them. Since the '60s, American women have become suspicious of demands that women sacrifice their own aspirations to those of husbands and children and are rejecting outright the message that they should offer up to God whatever suffering they experience in domestic violence.

Suspicion of many specific appeals to sacrifice, however, has been too often oversimplified into rejection of all forms of sacrifice as masochistic, naive idealism: only chumps sacrifice, because sacrifice is unnecessary.

In the church today, we are caught between a venerable popular spirituality of sacrifice that is problematic for Christian biblical witness (see sidebar on pages 14 and 15) and a secular world that denies any need for or importance to sacrifice. Yet there is no Christian life without some degree of sacrifice. In fact, there can be no human life without sacrifice. Sacrifice is the cost of being human, for to be human is to be social. The qualities that make us human our ability to communicate, to reason, to love are all qualities that we learn in community. But to live with others requires sacrifice in the interests of our relationship with them. If we want others to sometimes cede to our interests, we must also sometimes cede to theirs. And the more intimacy we desire with another person, the closer to the core of our person will be the sacrifices we make in that relationship.

There are different kinds of sacrifice. Sacrifice can be religious, when people forgo something of value in order to consciously offer it directly to God in ritual or indirectly to God through others. Sacrifice can also be simple rationality working in one's own self-interest. When my son forgoes candy and soda to save his quarters for the latest model of roller blades, he learns that sacrifice--as personal discipline-pays off. Actually, this kind of sacrifice is really not altogether different from the religious meaning of sacrifice.

What all kinds of sacrifice share is that the meaningfulness of the sacrifice depends upon the greater value of that which the sacrifice procures. When early humans burned sacrifices of grain and animal fat to their god, they understood themselves as establishing a relationship with that god. They believed their offerings pleased god, who was then disposed to act kindly toward their community. Because the sacrificers took comfort, security, and even identity from this relationship, they understood their sacrifices as well worth while.

If our sacrifices are to have moral and spiritual worth, they must first be made for good ends. A person may undertake great personal sacrifices--of friends, leisure, income, even freedom--in the pursuit of revenge or hate. Because hate or revenge are obstacles to moral and spiritual advancement, sacrifices made to promote them also fail to be valuable. Some parents make great sacrifices for their children but attempt to use those sacrifices to create guilt by which they can manipulate their children. Such sacrifice is not in the service of love or justice, or any other good, but rather further domination and control of others.

Even when the motivation for sacrifice is something good, we still must ask whether the good outweighs the loss to be suffered in the sacrifice. The gospels tell the story of how Jesus reached the point of willingly heading toward Jerusalem where he knew that death at the hands of the authorities awaited. Given that his only alternatives were to remain on the run or disband and give up his mission, Jesus' sacrifice was a worthwhile price to pay for the coming of the reign of God, which he understood his mission would initiate. Likewise, when we consider making a sacrifice, the most important question we need to ask is also whether the good end the sacrifice advances outweighs the cost of the sacrifice itself. This is true whether we are talking about sacrifices we make to God, sacrifices we make to other persons, or sacrifices we make in our own self-interest.

Any sacrifice that is not in favor of a good end, or whose good end does not clearly outweigh the cost of the sacrifice itself, should be rejected.

Sacrifice is not to be sought

Sacrifice in any given situation can be a rational and loving choice. Frequently in our lives we choose to sacrifice one good for the sake of some other good that is either a higher good or one more necessary in our particular situation. Couples sacrifice a great deal of personal freedom when they choose to have children--little freedoms, like travelling without diaper bags, car seats, and strollers; and big freedoms like sleep, leisure time for lovemaking, and conversation with adults. Most of us feel that this exchange is prudent, that the good obtained in parenthood outweighs the costs.

Sacrifice is not something that we should seek in our lives. Jesus did not come to earth seeking a way to suffer and die, and neither should we. God did not send Jesus to suffer and to die. Jesus is not a masochist; God is not a sadist. Martyrs do not seek martyrdom; they accept it when all the alternatives are morally deficient. Christians are called to seek actions that are loving and just, prudent, honest, and truthful.

We are not called to seek sacrificial actions, although in a world permeated by sin, reaching out in love to the unloved often entails sacrifice. Our goal is to extend ourselves in love to another because we desire the good to be had in mutual relationship. We are willing to accept the suffering that may be entailed--the suspicion, distrust, misunderstanding, and conflict within relationships--but sacrifice should not be our motivation, our intention.

My sister her husband have, in addition to their original two children, adopted 13 children from 3 days to 16 years old, of various colors, from "crack babies" to teen victims of abuse. In none of these adoptions did they pursue sacrifice. If they characterized this path they have taken as one of sacrifice, they would have soon found themselves without the spiritual resources to pursue it. For humans are not made to pursue pain and suffering. We are made to pursue pleasure, not merely sensual pleasure but also pleasure such as that involved in personal and social relations of justice and love.

The greatest deeds of Christian love involve a great deal of sacrifice, but the sacrifice is somewhat submerged, obscured by the positive, pleasurable good that one is consciously pursuing. My sister set out to save these children from a succession of foster homes and temporary shelters, from abuse and neglect, from failure and discouragement because she found her heart was moved by these abused and abandoned children. She and her husband are rewarded for their sacrifices in the victories that they have helped bring to these children: the health and healing of those who were sick and abused, the literacy, pride, and confidence of those who were neglected, and the zest for life and family commitment that develop in children who have learned to love. Those victories enrich the whole family. The more successful each child is--the happier and more independent each child becomes--less needful that child is of adult help and the more able to help and enrich others.

My sister and her husband have made and still make a great many sacrifices for these children--months of sleeplessness until the crack babies stopped crying, many years of spending their evenings tutoring one children after another with homework, their afternoons and weekends at doctors, dentists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and carpooling, sports teams and church groups, This is not to mention the comfortable lifestyle they gave up and retirement savings that began to dwindle visibly sometime midway through their adoptions. If self-sacrifice had been their intention, they could have lost money, sleep, and time in numerous ways without taking on 13 additional high-needs children. But their mention was for these neglected and abused children to thrive; their joy is in the children's thriving because a part of all of us thrives when those we love thrive.

Voluntary but not freely chosen

To be worthwhile, sacrifice must have some degree of voluntaries, but freely chosen sacrifices are the exception, not the rule. Sometimes sacrifices seem to choose us.

My Aunt Sis, a youthful octogenarian, has been caring for her wheelchair-bound older sister for five years at tremendous personal cost in energy, tears, and emotional strength, not to mention pivacy and independence. But Sis is resolved to continue so long as she is able because her sister desperately wants to remain in her home of many years. Sis' love for her sister costs personal sacrifice. Sis has always lived alone, valuing her privacy and even needling solitude; I know no one for whom living on call 24 hours a day with another person would be more difficult. But she did agree to this way of loving her sister. It was the best of the less-than-desirable options facing her and her sister.

To value Aunt Sis' sacrifice for her sister does not legitimate any demands for similar sacrifice from another. A person who refuses to devote 24-hour-a-day care to a disabled relative is not necessarily selfish or less than loving. The options available, and the costs of the options, differ from situation to situation, from person to person. My sister who can raise 15 kids could no more stay sane caring for one invalid parent than Aunt Sis would have been able to raise 15 kids.

We all have responsibility to families, friends, and neighbors, and that responsibility entails seeing to their well-being-as well as to our own. Only we as individuals can choose how to contribute to their well-being, to which of the needy among them to assign priority, and what weight to give our own well-being compared to theirs.

Sometimes we seem to have no choices about sacrifices. And yet choice is not truly absent. Most of our personal sacrifices occur within relationships we have repeatedly chosen to make and maintain, such as marriages, parent-child and sibling relationships, and friendships. We feel obliged to accept sacrifices in these relationships because we have chosen to be the kind of people who are faithful to those with whom we have established loving relationships.

Often when we hear people say they have no choice but to take on some sacrificial burden, they do not mean they are physically coerced upon pain of death to make the sacrifice; they really mean they feel internally obliged, as by conscience, or externally obliged by the opinion of those whom they respect. We need to claim these feelings of obligation, to acknowledge them as part of us, and reject the implication that our true selves only impel us toward what is either easy or enjoyable.

Obligations to others are necessary in human society. It is the obligations that parents have to children, that adult children have to elderly parents, and that all adults have to the weak and helpless, that provide the security humans need in order to form communities, to grow and mature as persons. When we feel overburdened by obligations that are not fairly shared in our families or society, we are easily seduced by secular notions of human persons as autonomous, free beings endowed with a variety of rights and no responsibilities. Much of modernity urges us to act as if there could be rights without corresponding responsibilities, as if humans were not always bound by finitude, as if the material riches and abundance of developed societies had eliminated all forms of scarcity, need, and obligation between persons.

We all know of situations where the needs of children or the poor health of adult family members create such heavy burdens, and continue for so many years that individuals are gradually and tragically ground down. Where obligation destroys individuals, we almost always find a serious failure of human community. Most sacrifices are meant to be shared in order that no one be obliged to lose their very self in the care of others. When refusals to be our brothers' keepers become the accepted norm in our communities, then those who answer the call of needy brothers and sisters are unjustly forced to carry the burdens of all. Yet even the support of others cannot completely eliminate the element of tragedy in great ongoing sacrifice.

When sacrifice is wrong

Unlike self-sacrifice, which means to sacrifice something that is of interest to the self, sacrifice of one's core self is contrary to the gospel. Jesus did not sacrifice his self when he died on the cross. He would have sacrificed his self--the calling which defined for him who he was and what he was to do--if he had dropped his ministry as his family intended. His family came to seize him in Capernaum (Mark 3:20-35) because they feared for him. They thought he had lost his mind to be publicly speaking out and doing such dangerous things as he was doing. Another language for sacrifice of self might call it the sacrifice of one's soul, where soul refers to the core of the person, what makes us truly ourselves. Sacrifice of self is a kind of soul-death in which we give away, or have taken from us, that capacity which makes our life human life, that capacity by which we recognize, appreciate, and care for the dignity and integrity of our personhood. We are supposed to love ourselves--loving ourselves is the best basis for knowing how to love others. This is why we are taught to "love your neighbor as yourself"--not instead of yourself, but as yourself. We are not supposed to put ourselves first, but we are to count our needs along with everyone else's needs. My minor needs do not outweigh the major needs of my neighbor, but neither do the minor needs of the neighbor outweigh my major needs.

The sacrifice of self that we most often see in long-term overburdened caregivers leaves them joyless, depressed, and focused entirely on getting through another hour or day of tasks with no expectation of deliverance. They have become less of a person because their particularity has been obscured, even obliterated, often of necessity, by the work of caretaking. Their own likes and dislikes, personal habits, and their ability to relate to self, to God, to the world, and to other persons have been obscured by the tasks of caretaking. The longer the obscuration or obliteration of self continues, the harder it will be to rediscover the person one was before.

We can all tell ourselves that we are too far away to be of help to the sister whose 4-year-old is slowly dying of inoperable brain cancer or the uncle who takes care of grandpa as his Alzheimer's gets worse. But most of us could use our vacation time to spell them for a week or even a weekend once or twice a year.

In the meantime people could send the funds to hire a nurse for a day of respite or organize a network of friends, relatives, and church members to provide regular relief. A replacement by a relative or a check for a weekend nurse, along with a reservation to a retreat house, campground, or hotel, could rejuvenate a lot of caretakers.

There seems to me to be a strange disjunction between the real lives of most people I know and the images of people that we receive in the media. The images of people in our society reflected to us by the media are incredibly preoccupied with self. But when I look at my family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and students, I see people who are for the most part involved in taking care of others.

One of my uncles nursed his Parkinson's-afflicted wife for two decades until her recent death. My aunt Yvonne is live-in caretaker for my disabled 95-year-old great-aunt Nellie, on top of a full-time job as a nurse-practitioner. My sister-in-law, Rosie, as the only near child, has had responsibility for my semi-paralyzed mother-in-law for more than two years. My husband's cousin visits a network of elderly relatives and neighbors in nursing homes every week dispensing cheeriness, little homemade treats, and bits of news. One of my brothers and his wife took in a nephew with their own children while the boy's divorced mother dealt with his delinquent older sister. A neighbor takes Communion to the local nursing home every day; another builds houses on Saturdays with Habitat for Humanity. My dry cleaner volunteers five nights a week at a foster-care home for children dying of AIDS.

I see many people doing voluntary sacrifice.

Still, there is a kernel of truth in the media depictions of this generation as self-absorbed. Some of the people in the list above carry a degree of resentment at other family members or friends who have not helped and whom they hear say, "Aren't you a wonderful person to be doing this extraordinary thing? I just appreciate and admire you so much!" But most caretakers don't want appreciation or admiration; they don't want to be put on a pedestal as people who do extraordinary feats. What they want is help.

The caretakers want all of us to realize that sacrifice is not extraordinary, it is ordinary; and all of us are called to do it. We are called to sacrifice some degree of our time, our energy, our money, our privacy, and our vacations to hold together the ties that connect and support us all. For many of us, adding such sacrificial help into our schedules requires a serious rethinking of the structure of our lives, for there is no open time.

Suffering is never good in itself

Much of the above thinking about sacrifice and the suffering entailed in it originated in my discomfort, often even anger, at what seemed to me shocking attitudes expressed by persons near me concerning suffering and sacrifice. Two years ago my oldest son caught a terrible virus and spent five months completely paralyzed on a ventilator and a peacemaker, with tube feedings through a series of holes in his belly. Due to complications from a chronic medical condition of his, for four months there was little medical hope for his survival, much less full recovery.

As he began to recover movement between his fifth and his tenth month in the hospital, a relative visited and heard him croak through a speaking tube his satisfaction and gratitude at simply being alive. She turned to me and remarked: "Well, his sacrifice--the whole ordeal--was really a good thing, because it made him grow up and gave him such a mature, spiritual attitude."

I cannot express the rage I felt at hearing this glib judgment. I, too, marveled at his lack of anger, his acceptance of what would be far less than full recovery, and his wonder and gratitude at simply being alive. Nevertheless, I had to restrain myself from screaming at her. I had a number of objections, but what especially enraged me was the idea that any good consequence can render suffering "good."

My husband and I had been through family deaths, life-threatening surgeries and illnesses, a kidney transplant, and near-fatal car accidents involving our children. None of these compared to the agony of month after month of submerging our own pain in order to try to help this son bear his severe neurological pain as well as his terror and despair at his absolutely total helplessness and immobility; there was nothing reassuring we could tell him. To blithely refer to this as "a good thing" was akin to telling Jewish survivors that the Holocaust was a good thing because it brought about the nation of Israel or saying that Hiroshima was a good thing because it led to research into the effects of radiation.

There are some real moral problems hidden in this well-intended but cruelly flip comment. Our culture has become so dominated by the instrumental rationality of the economy that we have learned to focus on utility and efficiency and to evaluate things by looking at a very narrow range of consequences. But no favorable consequence can make something repugnant to God "good."

Many things that are not good in themselves sometimes do produce a good thing--alongside tragedy and suffering. Families with problems sometimes work out those problems in the aftermath of violent deaths in the family; societies sometimes address serious health and sanitation conditions in the wake of epidemics. These good consequences do not make violent deaths or epidemics morally good. Suffering is negative, if only because it is not what God wants for us.

The God of Israel, who delivered the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, and the Jesus of the gospels, who exhibited and demanded compassion for the sick, the poor, children, women, and those considered sinners, demand from us a love of neighbor which is incompatible with acceptance of unnecessary suffering. God does not want suffering for us: suffering can deform both body and soul. When we hear suffering connected with nobility and dignity, it is not the suffering and pain itself that is noble and dignified, but the person who is resisting the suffering and pain.

To meet unavoidable suffering and pain with dignity and nobility requires a resistance that is costly in terms of energy and hope. When suffering is extended over long periods, hope and energy frequently run out, leaving persons open to self-hatred and despair. Fighting the temptation to feel defined by one's suffering, even to feel that one deserves such suffering, eats away at human dignity, leaving the sufferer vulnerable to despair. This is why suffering is acceptable to God as sacrifice only when it is a means to something good in itself.

"Offering suffering up to God" ought to be akin to making "pain management" deals: it entails accepting the pain as in some way ours, as having some control over us, but limiting the control pain has, refusing to let it cut us off from our relationships with God, our deepest selves, and others. Even here there is a calculus at work: "If I cannot get rid of the pain, I will accept what I have to, without letting it obliterate who I am." Of course, it would be wrong to imply that, if a person's will is strong enough, any degree of pain and suffering can be held at bay indefinitely. We cannot hold off death and disease forever, and various types of madness (or mental illness) are other ways of being overwhelmed by the pain and suffering in our lives.

A reappraisal of religious asceticism 

For some years now, theologians, liturgists, ethicists, and those in religious education have begun to encourage Catholics away from ascetical practices that have no demonstrable benefits and involve only a vertical relationship between God and the individual. Instead of being urged to fast for the spiritual discipline and closeness to God that bodily suffering has been assumed to produce, reduced Lenten fasts and abstinence, for example, have increasingly been linked to helping us identify with the sufferings of the hungry, donate our missed meals and meat to their advantage, and generally commit us to their welfare. In this way our spiritual practice integrates our vertical relationship with the divine and our horizontal relationship with the rest of creation.

Similarly, most religious orders no longer encourage their members to flagellate themselves as punishment for sin but instead urge forms of penance that redress the damage done to victims of sin or natural tragedy. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Sunday Mass has increasingly been taught as the celebration of the community of the Body of Christ, and not as the reenactment of Calvary (in the "sacrifice of the Mass"). Both are traditional themes, although they are difficult to ritualize together. Though one occasionally still hears the poor and oppressed sermonically urged to be grateful for their suffering--for it saves them a place in heaven--the more common message is that the church supports them in their affliction by working for the social justice that will grant them release.

Increasingly the church is teaching that because sacrifice acceptable to God must be voluntary, the only suffering appropriate for sacrifice to God is that which is either unavoidable--as in the chronic, untreatable pain of the seriously ill or aged--or necessary in order to secure some greater good--as the pain of childbirth or the suffering encountered in working for racial justice in a racist society. God values the suffering we undergo in doing God's work--in participation in the life and redemption of the world. No other suffering is acceptable to God.

We should not allow some good consequence of suffering to convince us of the goodness of suffering itself. It is inappropriate to deliberately choose to inflict suffering on ourselves or others and justify it as good moral discipline. When we look at the history of ascetical practices in the development of Catholic spiritualities, it is undeniable that unnecessary, self-inflicted suffering was often a valued aid in the spiritual journeys of saints who achieved real closeness to God. But such practices carry with them the dangers of callousness to human suffering, isolation from the Body of Christ, and scandal to others. Moreover, we do not need this kind of practice to learn virtue. Every step in the direction of the reign of God requires some degree of sacrifice neighborhoods, our parish, our city, and our nation, we are constantly called upon to make large and small sacrifices to protect the dignity and welfare of other persons who are also obligated to make similar sacrifices for us and our society.

The imposition of unnecessary suffering on another is torture. When we do it to ourselves we are masochists. God takes no pleasure in unnecessary pain; there is nothing to be learned from it but callousness to pain, whether to ourselves or others. If we want to teach children discipline, we are best advised to point them toward a clear good that will entail sacrifice--such as building up muscles or caring for a garden--and urge them to achieve the good. Even when disciplining them for misbehavior, giving children tasks that connect them to others and produce some real benefit to self or others are much better penalties than giving time-outs, paddling, or grounding.

Finally, we are constantly making decisions about the relative value of alternative uses of our energy, time, and material resources. When we consider whether specific sacrifices promote greater good, we should remember that God's preferential option for the poor, as repeatedly expressed in the Bible, suggests that God sees these decisions not from on high, removed from the particularities of human life. God rather sees these decisions from the perspective of the children and youth who need parenting and mentoring, of the elderly who need visits, of the sick who need human as well as technical care. God also sees our evaluations of the need for sacrifice from the perspective of those disciples whose ongoing sacrifices for love of the needy has been so unsupported that they, too, now fall under God's preferential option for the poor.

By Christine Gudorf, theology professor at Florida International University in Miami and author of Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Pilgrim Press, 1995).