Healing from Perpetual Sacrifice Syndrome

This image is from an art exhibit we attended. The painting was created by an artist who is incarcerated. Zoom in to read more. And consider finding a way to start writing letters to someone in prison. The exhibit demonstrated powerfully how important snail mail letters are for inmates.

Healing from Perpetual Sacrifice Syndrome

Original lyrics:

To obey is better than sacrifice

I don’t need your money, I want your life

And if you can’t come to me every day

Then don’t bother coming at all…

- Keith Green

Wait.

WTF?

This is God talking?

“If you can’t come to me every day [i.e. perfectly] then don’t bother coming at all.”???!!!

The God who is supposedly a God of Love, the God of unconditional love?

I think maybe the guy who wrote this song heard wrong.

Or rather, he heard God through the filters he’d been given, and things got scrambled.

And yet I sang this song AT myself over and over in my teen and early adult years­ like a bludgeon of perfectionism — and never questioned the lyrics.

There are many others like this one and worse. Songs and hymns that are just as distorted and damaging – or more so. Too many to count. Written by earnest and well-intentioned humans seeking to connect with the Divine, with Love.

And I imagine they often did connect with the Divine.

Because God/dess/the Universe/Love regularly meets us right in the middle of our imperfectly perfect mess of being human.

But this post isn’t about how whacked a lot of Christian praise songs are.

This post is about ushering in the demise of the Age of Sacrifice.

The reason this Christian praise song was in my head recently was because I am taking a stand against perpetual sacrifice as a prerequisite for creating a flourishing world.

And while this song says it’s not recommending sacrifice, in my experience the definition of perfectionist unquestioning obedience that it puts forth pretty quickly leads to lives of perpetual sacrifice, acceptance of violence, praise of those who override their inner knowing to do what’s right.

That’s an incredible sacrifice, actually.

It’s a spilling of our metaphorical/energetic life blood.

I believe these patterns are connected to the spilling of biological life blood too.

• like what is being shed in Gaza and a few blocks from me here in Baltimore,

• and in homes behind closed doors where domestic violence is the norm,

• and by women who don’t have access to safe and effective abortions, and are left unsupported in a system that is more ready to protect sexual abusers than women who are unintentionally pregnant, and children who are already alive and suffering from food insecurity.

• and, and, and…

Enough. It’s enough. We may have needed to live through the Age of Sacrifice as a species to learn how ineffective it is. I don’t know. But I do know that it’s not working.

So, I’m taking a stand FOR organizations, structures, systems and business models that NOURISH our Life Force, our blood. Especially as women.

Are you with me on this?

I’d love to hear where you see perpetual sacrifice showing up in your life…

and what would change in your life if you felt deeply NOURISHED and invigorated by Life instead of drained.

I’ll be back in the next day or two with a story of how the belief that we must sacrifice for nation/family/god etc. has played out in my lineage and my life, and the inspiration and lessons I’m taking from the sacrifices of my ancestors.

And then we’ll start talking about how we can let go of Perpetual Sacrifice Syndrome

Because we can.

It’s time that we co-create organizations, families and communities that run on a difference kind of fuel.

Because, as Audré Lorde said so well, “The master’s tools cannot tear down the master’s house.”

Perpetual sacrifice, whether chosen or forced on us by violence and coercion, cannot build a world that radiates Love.

It’s a big task. But we’ll do it together. With each other and the Nature/the Divine/Love/however you understand that bigger-than-you force that supports the blooming of trees and people.

Here’s to thriving as the path AND the goal – for all of us. Including you.

Note:  A quick reminder for readers who are Christians. I’m not against Christianity. And Dave is a practicing Christian. We’re just realizing how skewed a lot of what we received as Christian teachings are by the white colonialist patriarchal lenses they got filtered through.