Freedom, Sacrifice and levelling up
“When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.”
Our central need for a long time is FREEDOM. Freedom to be myself, freedom to fulfill my own mandates; freedom to do as I please.
After leaving the confines of childhood, where the parameters of our lives are set by others, we need to reclaim our needs and desires and we all do.
We call this FREEDOM.
And for a long time, it is.
And then, if you’ve been paying attention to your own Hero’s Journey - a journey depicted by Joseph Campbell that describes every human life as it evolves - you leave the familiar comforts behind, and journey into unknown territory.
This journey into the unknown and the unfamiliar is a necessary step if we are to level up.
One of the first invitations we will receive once we’ve stepped onto foreign soil is a Sacrificial one.
The English word “Sacrifice” has its etymological roots in the Latin term that means to “make sacred.”
To offer up a Sacrifice then, is to come closer to The Sacred.
So what might this look like in real time?
This Sacrifice always comes at the hands of a great challenge. An illness…a relationship breakdown…a death…a rejection…a birth…an unexpected and sudden life change.
Life brings us to our knees and we realize quickly that the old, familiar ways will no longer work.
In Dante’s famous poem, Dante’s Inferno, Satan is described as beating his wings so furiously that the flapping freezes the water around him, encasing him in ice.
In his unwillingness to Sacrifice, he is rendered frozen in one place, unable to move.
But at some point along the trials and tribulations of our own lives, we must be willing to move beyond ourselves.
Left to our own devices, we would draw our own map and go the way we would have it. But that would, once again, leave us stranded in our own frozen waters, unable to move or evolve.
It seems we’ve never been able to get out of our own way by our own hand.
It is at this point that the lightbulb comes on and we realize, with a mix of incredulity and relief, that we can no longer be the architect of this plan; that the Sacrifice, must indeed be of a Sacred Order.
This Holy Invitation will never ask you to sacrifice something of intrinsic value or love. After all, its very invitation is one of intrinsic value and love.
I’ll give you a personal example.
My own Hero’s Journey has taken me down a road of significant health challenges. Lost in the deep, dark woods, I’ve seen that these challenges have been born of a lack of self-love, a staunch determinism to “do it all myself!!!” and a mandate to keep myself apart from love’s gaze…at all cost.
The in-built belief here, of course, is that I will be much safer in this set-up. This is an ancestral story that was meant to stop with me. The burden, at times, has been unbearable. And I am just emerging from woods.
Of course, none of us can emerge without a Deity on the other side, calling us forth. I’m going to assert that the venture from the woods as the central figure in your own journey (which by the way, may take lifetimes) can only be possible with a Deity waiting on the other side.
There is no room for Ego in the clearing.
For me, this Deity has been God. The Deity of all Deities.
With one foot still in the deep, dark wood and another in the sunny clearing, I’ve been given a very clear set of instructions. My own sort of Sacrifice.
Give my whole being to God…and give it formally. Give it through ritual and communion.
When this door opened last fall, I initially turned away. “No way,” I thought. “What will people think?”
It felt so foreign and so scary and so…unexpected.
But it’s been made abundantly clear, despite my protests. The path through the woods into the clearing, for me, will be through Christian faith; specifically, the Catholic faith.
I know. Trust me, I know.
I’m not here for the outdated beliefs. And I’m not here for the politics.
I’m here for the Sacrifice. The leaving behind of the Old Self…the one that clung to her beliefs and her way and to emerge into something new.
“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right then, have it your way.’” - C.S. Lewis
I’ve known for a while that the tearing down of the old guard in my ancestral line would require something radical. And I knew it couldn’t be my way. But I never, in a million years, would have guessed that it would have been this way.
But it seems that a rebirth not only wants to happen but needs to happen.
I was not baptized as a child. And I realize now how perfect that was.
A Baptism is, on a symbolic level - which is the only level at which we exist - a death to the old self, and rebirth to the Sacred one.
Baptism is followed by Confirmation and Holy Communion.
It is THE formal declaration of Surrender.
And I’m here for it.
I’m totally new at this. It’s like meeting someone new and falling madly in love with them.
My old self (the one that still has one foot in the deep, dark woods) always said, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” That made sense to me.
Because it was MY way.
I set the rules of the game.
But that worked as well as you could imagine :-)
This feels…different.
It feels Holy.
Sacred.
This Sacrifice that has been asked of me, as it turns out, is not sacrificial at all. And that’s the beating heart of all Sacrifice.
On the surface, it seems as if you’re giving up something important. But at its core, you’re gaining something profound.
You won’t know what is being asked of you until you ask the Universe, God….”What can I offer you?”
Until you whole heartedly commune with The Sacred and declare…”The Will of My Life is in YOUR Hands…Do what you Will…”…you will wander, alone, feeling lost.
It was never going to be ‘your way’ indefinitely.
But if you sense a clearing in the woods, the sun shining, the wildflowers growing…WALK TOWARDS THAT.
Be willing to offer up yourself for something greater.
The world has never needed you more.