Gazing in the Mirror

January 10 - Self-Sacrifice

Dreams do come true, if
only we wish hard enough.
You can have anything in life
if you will sacrifice
everything else for it.
~ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

We are not to suppose that
the physical act of fasting, or
the metaphysical act of prayer,
can move the throne of grace
to a kindness which is otherwise
withheld.
~ Ernest Holmes

I have a bit of a different idea about sacrifice. When we give to a useful cause of our overflow and excess, we are acknowledging that gift of abundance by sacrificing it to a greater good rather than simply hording it. For Taoists this is the last month of the lunar year and it is time to clear out all of the old and make way for the New Year. In Western society we can think of this as that impulse to begin our Spring Cleaning that many of us feel when cooped up during the still cold months of Winter's lingering. We can devote ourselves to the drudgery of cleaning knowing that when the weather warms and flowers burst forth in bloom we will want to spend more of our time out of doors. So many people make use of being driven indoors in otherwise productive ways.

In olden days the concept of sacrifice was quite traumatic – savages throwing virgins into volcanoes or ancient peoples standing atop tall pyramids to take the life of a chosen offering and that kind of behavior is told about quite commonly in the Christian Old Testament. Ruining something we love or hurting ourselves to appeal to the unseen is simply unnecessary and a form of making guilt visible. Life is not given to us to simply destroy it with wanton disregard. However many of the earliest sacrifices were also a sharing of the bounty of the hunt or harvest with the unseen forces that had benevolently supplied the needs of the people in the year past.

Early peoples had a lot of reason to be grateful for the feeding of the community. Sacrifice is an expression of thankfulness made visible. There is no need to allow such an impulse to degenerate into superstition. When desiring to make a sacrifice in acknowledgement of one's blessings we should make certain that our effort has no selfish motive (an appeal to receive something else in return for whatever we are sacrificing). The healthiest and purest kind of sacrifice should be an act of sharing and a gift. Then it becomes a positive and life-affirming form of reverence and devotion.

"What have you done for me lately ?" No matter how much we receive in blessings we find that we always have room to receive more. However sometimes we have to clear some space in order to be able to receive more. So we can "sacrifice" some of what we have received by sharing it or gifting it to another. It is also good to learn that place of pausing called "enough". It is good to know when we truly have "enough" and begin to moderate a consciousness of consumerism simply for the sake of acquiring more and more "stuff". This could be readily applied to realizing when one has enough spiritual understanding to pause and rest at that point. To allow what we have received to settle in and integrate with the self. If we are in a constant obsession to acquire "more", we have little time to appreciate what we actually have.

So whether you are Western or Eastern in perspective or practice and whether or not you have already celebrated an end to the old year and have embarked on a new one or you are preparing to celebrate that with the upcoming Chinese New Year – we do well to acknowledge the cycles of life. Every cycle comes to its end and after every end comes yet another beginning. And I suspect personally that can also be applied to the ending of a temporary physical incarnation and the beginning of whatever it is that comes after that.

~ perspective

I am free to put my attention, awareness,
discipline and effort wherever I feel moved
to do so and sometimes I must show how
much I truly care about another by making
some sacrifice to assist them along their way.
There are many kinds of sacrifice including
the kind so many people have made throughout
human history of laying down their lives in war
for some larger reason than their physical form
though I do not claim to understand war and
have a natural revulsion to it.
An often unnoticed kind of sacrifice is the
willingness to move forward in the presence of
physical pain or to endure the bland kind of
existence that does the necessary work each day.
The highest form of sacrifice is always based
in a foundation of love and often requires that
we lend our own personal strength to another
who lacks such strength for their own self.
Sometimes it takes a foolish kind of courage
to say what needs to be said or to do the
things that others fear to do.

#appreciation #blessings #Chinese #consumerism #cycles #death #enough #supply #Taoism #thankfulness