Love and Sacrifice

Almost at the summit we now move to the Left Side trail and consider Love and its companion, Sacrifice.  In the real world of relationships, it is impossible to love people with unattractive flaws or troublesome needs without in some sense sharing in or virtually changing places with them.

All real, life-changing love involves some form of an emotional exchange. It requires very little to love a person who is happy healthy, and resilient.  However, you cannot listen to and love emotionally wounded people and stay emotionally unharmed.  It may be that they feel stronger and affirmed as you interact, but that won’t happen without you being psychologically or spiritually drained. It’s them or you. To nourish them emotionally you must be willing to be spent emotionally.

Two illustrations. Imagine you are contacted by a man you know is innocent but who is being ruthlessly hunted down by the government. He reaches out to you for help. If you don’t help, he will be killed, but if you give him aid, you place yourself in mortal danger.  He gains safety and security but only because you are willing to enter into his insecurity and vulnerability.

Now consider parenting. Children come into the world in a state of complete dependence. They cannot become self-sufficient and independent unless their parents give up much of their own independence and freedom.

We’ve traversed the Central Corridor: Conduct and Consequences,

We hiked the Right Front trail: contrasting Revenge and Forgiveness,

Lastly we took the Left Side trail: Love and Sacrifice. 

We now arrive at the summit.

To Forgive

An alternative to revenge, is more problematic and yet far more effective. You can forgive.  Said with ease; done with difficulty. To refrain from taking revenge when you want to do so with all your being is agony; a self-administered torment, you forgo the appealing consolation of inflicting suffering as retribution.  You absorb the emotional debt, taking it completely on yourself instead of dishing it out to the deserving culprit. And still there is the obligation to do more than forgive.

There remains an obligation for the wrongdoer to be meaningfully confronted —at a minimum to constrain them, to protect others from being harmed by them. And, hopefully, to help them acknowledge their character flaws and stimulate them to become the better person they are meant to be. Note that this confrontation is not revenge. It is a confrontation motivated by love.

Only if you first forgive will a subsequent confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious and thus likely have the desired effect.  Only when you have relinquished your resolve to see the other person wounded will there be potential for a change for the better in them. But there is a consequence to this... act of love.

Almost at the summit, we next move to the Left Side trail and consider Love and its companion, Sacrifice.

Revenge vs. Forgive (RF)

We now turn onto the Right-Front Trail and consider two choices in addressing the damage done: Revenge and Forgiveness.

Take a purely economic example where someone damages your property: there are essentially two possible outcomes. The first is to demand that he pay for the damages. The second is to refuse to let him pay anything. There could also be some combination of the two in which you both share the costs.

But notice that in every option the consequences –here the cost of the damage - must be borne by someone. Either you or he absorbs the consequences of his conduct; neither the need for repair nor the associated expense vaporizes. More troublesome, is that most of the wrongs done to us are not as tangible as this example and cannot be measured in dollars. Someone may have deprived you of some happiness, opportunity, certain aspects of your freedom, or harmed your reputation. No price tag can be put on such things, yet we still have an instinctive claim on justice that does not go away - even when the other person says, “I’m really sorry.”

Here again there are two options.  The first is to forcibly extract compensation. However, even when you take reparation through revenge the evil done still does not dissolve. On the contrary, evil spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your character.

The second option, an alternative to revenge, is more problematic and yet far more effective.

You can forgive.  

Conduct and Consequences (CC)

Starting with Conduct and Consequences: my mother would often say to us children, “God always forgives, man seldom forgives, nature never forgives.”  The point she was making is that conduct has consequences.  And no matter the circumstances as regards nature, the damage is done.

Now think of sin –  as I use the term here – as having two forms: wrongdoing and personal rejection. Wrongdoing is causing harm in some visibly active manner, while rejection is more psychological but no less real and no less hurtful. In fact, the degree of pain corresponds to the degree of love the rejected has for the other.

Let’s consider the first sin.  There is the act of disobedience – eating the forbidden fruit.  That was sin as wrongdoing.  The more consequential sin, though, was turning away from God, personal rejection.  And with God loving Adam and Eve with an infinite love, the “pain” their rejection “inflicted” was equally infinite.

Furthermore, we learn from Genesis that rejecting God’s love has tragic, far-reaching consequences. Our first parents upended God’s entire creation doing incredible damage to their own nature – and thus ours – and to the nature of the world as God intended it.  It is important to note here that this was less about God punishing, and more about the consequences of our conduct.  

Not only do we have Adam and Eve turning away from God we also have Israel subsequently repeating this sin over and over again. As a collective inheritance we are born with original sin.  And if we are honest, we admit that, as individuals, we too have repeatedly turned away from God’s overtures thus personally replicating our parents’ and Israel's conduct.