Sacrifice

Forgiveness is to deal with our emotions by sending them away—by denying ourselves the dark pleasures of venting them or fondling them in our minds… Forgiveness is more than a matter of refusing to hate someone. It is also a matter of choosing to demonstrate love and acceptance to the offender… Pain is the consequence of sin; there is no easy way to deal with it. Wood, nails, and pain are the currency of forgiveness, the love that heals.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross… Costly grace is the gospel. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and grace because it gives a man the only true life… Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son… When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer.

I can't tell you what to do; I've been wrestling with this my whole life. I see 15 people held hostage on a bus and everything else goes out the window; I will do whatever it takes to save them. I mean whatever it takes. Maybe I thought if I save them I save myself.

By J.R.R. Tolkien The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called 'self-realization' (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that—even those brought up 'in the Church.’ When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. And of course they are, as a rule, quite right: they did make a mistake. Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. Only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life. In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an un-fallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth. *Abridged from a letter to Michael Tolkien, March 6-8, 1941. From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, 2000).

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Cheap grace means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as general truth...an intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross. Costly grace is the gospel. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son...it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life. Costly Grace is the incarnation of God... When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. That is why the rich young man was so loath to follow Jesus, for the cost of His following was the death of his will. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts.

Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... our freedom! There's a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.

Towards noon Pilate gave judgment, and they made such haste to execution as that by noon he was upon the cross. There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears, and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight, so as the sun, ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too. And then that Son of God, who was never from us, and yet had now come a new way unto us in assuming our nature, delivers that soul (which was never out of his Father's hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Father's hands; for though to this God our Lord belonged these issues of death, so that considered in his own contract, he must necessarily die, yet at no breach or battery which they had made upon his sacred body issued his soul; but emisit, he gave up the ghost; and as God breathed a soul into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soul into God, into the hands of God. There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Death’s Duel, John Donne http://www.thewords.com/articles/duel2.htm

for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart.

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown. Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.

If I slip into the place that can be filled by Christ alone, making myself the first necessity to a soul instead of leading it to fasten upon Him, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

Love begins when the needs of someone else become more important than your own.

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnapers and usurpers. What is Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn't imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped, naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified--at at the hands of mere humans to boot. I'd never heard of a Hindu god dying. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It's wrong...It was wrong of this Christian God to let his avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price?….

Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer….

And when one of her girlfriends asked why she loved him she answered that most men ran away from an inferno. But men like Ove ran into it. Chapter 18. A Man Who Was Ove and a Cat Called Ernest

“You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did. Chapter 21. A Man Who Was Ove and Countries Where They Play Foreign Music in Restaurants

‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’

If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.

The westward road seems easiest. Therefore it must be shunned. It will be watched. Too often the Elves have fled that way. Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be. To walk into peril –to Mordor. We must send the Ring to the Fire.’

‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’

I am glad. It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir’s sake. But that is not the only part they have to play. They were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains. Even as we talk here, I hear the first rumblings. Saruman had best not be caught away from home when the dam bursts!’

Aragorn. ‘One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters. You did rightly.’

‘A little people, but of great worth are the Shire-folk,’ said Halbarad. ‘Little do they know of our long labour for the safekeeping of their borders, and yet I grudge it not.’

We cannot achieve victory by arms, but by arms we can give the Ring-bearer his only chance, frail though it be.

‘I would bear you,’ answered Gwaihir, ‘whither you will, even were you made of stone.’

It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

Accordingly, Christians have always measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of a body on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives —these things tell us that the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy; O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The incarnation that starts on Christmas isn't finished until Good Friday. And the miracles that start in the strange, inexplicable Virgin Birth aren't finished until the resurrection.

Ye who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate. Mark the sacrifice appointed, see who bears the awful load; 'tis the Word, the Lord's Anointed, Son of Man and Son of God. Here we have a firm foundation, here the refuge of the lost: Christ's the Rock of our salvation, his the Name of which we boast. Lamb of God, for sinners wounded, sacrifice to cancel guilt; none shall ever be confounded, who on him their hope have built.