The Halo And The Shadow

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

- Carl Jung

The word sacrifice has been hijacked. Whether it be athletics, entrepreneurship, leadership training, religion, it has been overused and many times maneuvered with agenda. I’m deeply curious as to why this word holds the weight and cultural importance that it does not to mention what it is doing to our internal perception of ourselves, and the world.

Do we use the word sacrifice to make ourselves feel more noble or righteous or worthy in our decisions?

At the root, a sacrifice is a decision we make. It is a choice. So why not say “I chose to do this because that.” What we often hear or say ourselves is, “I sacrificed this for ___________.” Our reasoning to sacrifice often involves a future potential outcome. I sacrifice time with family and friends to do something that will grow my business. Or athletes will sacrifice time with friends to get more time in the gym or in the weight room so they can be a better player.

For people who grow up in a Christian culture, we are taught that we are broken, sinful creatures and in need of a savior. We need the sacrifice of Jesus to make us whole, worthy. Has this idea of the divine sacrifice being a critical teaching filtered into our internal need to make sacrifices in our lives to feel worthy, to feel loved, to feel valuable. This internal desire is connected not only to the world but to our own internal self. I wonder if we need to feel as though we sacrifice things so we can experience love for ourselves. Because if I say I’m choosing to do this for that, now it has the perception of being selfish. The nobility is lost because we aren’t “sacrificing”.

But if you are sacrificing because it is what good people do, or good christians do, you aren’t choosing it because you want to. You’re likely choosing it in fear of what comes if you don’t. If I sacrifice time with family to go work in the office. I obviously don’t want to be in the office working. I want to be with my family but I’m saying no to them because something within me says “you need to put more work in.” And that word sacrifice peppered in to the statement moves my choice outside my responsibility. It defers ownership to a greater cause. I’m not responsible for choosing work over family. I’m sacrificing. It’s what I’m supposed to do to provide for my family. To be successful. To have financial freedom.

In season 1 of True Detective the two main characters, Marty Hart played by Woody Harrelson and Rust Cohle played by Matthew McConaughey are standing in the back of a church tent revival in the deep south talking about what they are observing.

Hart: I mean, can you imagine if people didn’t believe, what things they’d getup to?

Cohle: Exact same thing they do now, just out in the open.

Hart: Bull. Shit. It’d be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery, and you know it.

Cohle: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit.

I bring this up because I’m curious of the effects of people being taught that sacrifice is the noble version of choice and how that alters the way we show up in the world. If you can say you sacrificed it, it will produce an internal sense of worth and faithful obedience. Choosing something for yourself is taught, and therefore perceived, as selfish or even disobedient to God.

This word sacrifice carries a halo. We often use it to make our decisions sound holy. A cunning linguistic trick we picked up through osmosis. But underneath, I think it may be one of the most significant things keeping us from owning our choices.

Stay with me.

As I mentioned earlier, if I told you “I sacrificed time with my wife and kids to build the business,” I sound noble. Responsible. While it’s not an ideal setup and is tough, I’m doing what must be done to take care of my family. The person hearing this sacrifice understands that difficult situation.

But if I say, “I chose to spend less time with my kids because I want to build something that matters to me,” it hits a tad bit different. Now it’s mine. I’m responsible. I’m stripped bare in the moment. The normal moral scaffolding is still laying in pieces on the ground unbuilt.

This small word used so prevalently in our language transforms a choice we make into a confession of virtue. Viewing it as a choice forces us to confront what we truly value, not what we’ve been directed to believe we should value.

Somewhere along the journey, we have mistaken denying ourself for depth. We’ve baptized our exhaustion as evidence we are on the meaningful path. We have learned a theology that proclaims love must be proven through pain because you’re broken and unworthy.

Consider how we talk about greatness. It’s subtle but it’s present. It has crept into our family, work, sports, and even how we perceive rest. Because if you didn’t suffer for it, you didn’t earn it. If it isn’t a bit miserable, it doesn’t count. This is what we pass on to young people that they carry into adulthood.

I wonder how many of my own “sacrifices” are simply veiled attempts to feel worthy. From God. From family. From myself. When I talk to people and they share about their sacrifices they’ve made, I hear echoes of an ancient negotiation. “If I give this up, I’ll be rewarded later.” It’s the same transaction as the one that happened thousands of years ago. There’s less blood on the altar now but more burnout in our life.

Perhaps this is what Rust Cohle was pointing to in that True Detective episode. If our decency, our purpose, our kindness, relies on an external promise of reward, then it is a negotiation rather than an authentic pursuit. If our reason to remain disciplined, loyal,  ethical or moral is because we think it will lead to us receiving something later, whether that be salvation, validation, respect, reputation, I’m not sure that’s virtue. It sounds more like bartering.

Sometimes what we label as sacrifice is just avoidance dressed in righteousness. Avoidance of guilt. Avoidance of shame. Avoidance of agency. Avoidance of the mirror. Because choice exposes what we want or what we’ve been to taught to value most.

Using sacrifice gives us some cover. Choice inherently demands accountability. When we claim “I sacrificed this for that” it reeks of performative martyrdom. It helps us feel important. Obedient even. But when we remove sacrifice from the equation and only choice is left, there’s no applause of our selfless, responsible sacrificial decision. There is only the truth of what it is. A decision we made in the moment.

Perhaps the question isn’t what we are willing to sacrifice.

Perhaps the better question is what are we willing to choose and own completely without any need to sanctify it.

Have we ever considered that the reason we love the idea of sacrifice so much is because the figure we grow up being taught sacrificed the purest was Jesus. He gave everything. His life. His body. His blood. And we are taught that this is what love looks like in the flesh. It is what redemption requires. So along our journey we latched onto this idea and it planted roots deep in our subconscious. We must sacrificed to be redeemed.

So we began to chase the same script.

If I can just give more, hurt enough, lose enough, then maybe I will finally be enough. We embody the idea of the crucifixion in more subtle ways today. We do it in boardrooms, in gyms, in sport, in entrepreneurship, in families, in relationships. We bleed in the name of sacrifice being part of our purpose, praying someone out there in the heavenly realm is keeping the score. We buy in to the idea that denying what our heart is screaming for needs to be muzzled so we can sacrifice enough. And the louder the scream is, the more valuable the sacrifice feels.

Making the decision to stop kneeling at the altar of sacrifice is terrifying but it can lead to you living from agency. Switching from that perspective of justifying your suffering for another tick on the cosmic scoreboard is a critical aspect. It’s what we were led to believe we were supposed to do. At the heart of it, it was a choice. You chose it. Maybe we need to come to terms with our sacrifices being a hiding place, reenforcing our perspective that pain creates a more pure person.

Somewhere in the depths of our subconscious we built the need to chase the sacrifice. I wonder what it would look like to live as though we are living a life we know in our heart we were meant to live so our choices are simply us living into who we are created to be. What may appear as a sacrifice to others is simply us living into our passion, our purpose.

What if you made that pivot?

From sacrifice to ownership.

It will allow you the opportunity to stop living through the frame of “what I should give up”, to “what I’m choosing to create”. That shift holds power.

Taking ownership can pull you out of spaces of guilt and shame, and into clarity and agency by replacing obligation with intention.

Approaching our mode of operation in life by way of sacrifice runs the risk of operating out of fear.

The fear of being perceived as selfish.

Fear of disappointing or disobeying God.

Fear of not being enough.

If we can step into operating from a place of ownership, even when it feels inconvenient or misunderstood, because it will be, we are giving ourselves a shot of operating from our truest self. There is power held in saying “I choose this path and I understand there will be an outcome I cannot control but it is my path to carve through the wilderness.”

The shadow of sacrifice is darkened by appeasement. Sacrifice is a common way to stay safe in the system. So we sacrifice to be viewed as strong believer. We sacrifice to hold our place in the community, in the tribe. We sacrifice to avoid the brutality of being misunderstood. The shadow of sacrifice whispers “if you give enough, you’ll finally be seen as enough”.

By you parents.

By your coaches.

By yourself.

By your God.

By the mysterious they that determines your worth in moral currency.

So we take the first step in trading a small piece ourselves for the feeling of belonging. An unholy trade. We give over our rest, our authenticity, our joy. Not because we want to but because we’ve been taught to believe that choosing ourselves is the highest rebellion. And rebels get exiled.

Living from sacrifice will keep us obedient and blind us to reality around us. Living from ownership will make you dangerous to the system. It does this because when you decide to own your choice, you no longer can be controlled by guilt or shame. You quit performing an inauthentic role for the tribe because you’re operating from truth.

You quit asking for permission to exist.

You quit apologizing for wanting what your heart longs for.

This is when life begins to feel less like you are crawling toward a blood soaked altar and more like you are choosing your color palette for the canvas.

Choosing the paint and brushes you feel best represents you isn’t selfish. With purpose and intention it can be done from a space of integrity. Integrity isn’t doing the “right” thing. It’s doing the thing that’s most honest, most alive, most congruent with who you are, even when it doesn’t benefit you. While sacrifice can urge you to live to please, choice is the language you take when you’re ready to live because you know who you are. You know you are loved and valued in this world.

When you can live from this space of ownership, decisions feeling like punishment or blind obedience will begin to fade over time. The need to keep score fades. You can stop searching and hoping for divine validation because you are, and have always been, worthy of love. You begin to start trusting yourself a little more. You can discern when you choose out of the old programming and when you actually trust yourself. You start creating a life you’ve longed for from the inside out.

And maybe, just maybe, what freedom feels like is not sacrificing to feel worth,

but choosing from the worth you know you have.