Sacrifice, Unity, Victimhood, Compassion?

Besides being focused on planning for our upcoming trip south (and the possible hurricane involvement we might find), and putting the garden to bed for fall, and recipe-hunting and meal-planning, and various thoughts about various relationships, my time has been spent the last few days thinking about several things I’ve read and heard lately concerning sacrifice, suffering, ritual, victims and victimisation, developing compassion, and creating unity. The threads feel somewhat intertwined for me.

Some of the pieces:

>> Savi Hensman at Ekklesia, speaking about creating unity through sacrifice, and identifying with the victim. The primary question here seems to be, what does sacrifice entail?
“Indeed, sociologist and theologian René Girard has argued that religious ritual often involves uniting communities, at least temporarily, through finding a scapegoat who is sacrificed, literally or symbolically. In his view, Christianity can break through this pattern by enabling people to identify with the victim: through the crucified Christ, we can be freed from the urge to find outsiders to victimise but can instead recognise our common humanity, overcoming our divisions with our neighbours in a way that does not harm others.

…
“In responding to recent divisions in churches, some bishops have urged sacrifice in the interests of unity. After all, are these not religious values? However, it is prudent in such circumstances to probe more deeply. What sacrifice will be required, and from whom? What kind of unity is likely to result, and will this be short-lived? Will existing power relationships and prejudices be undermined or reinforced? How closely does this resemble the actions of Jesus and other great leaders who reached out to the most marginalised, and inspired those around them to show compassion across social barriers? …

“Sometimes it will indeed be worth giving up something precious for a greater good. But in other circumstances, mercy should perhaps be valued above sacrifice (Matthew 9.13), and divisions may need to be exposed (Matthew 10.16-39) before a deeper unity can be achieved.”

My questions: Is there a distinction to be made between a group or individual being asked to sacrifice or suffer for the good of all, and a group or individual making its own choice to sacrifice or suffer for the good of all? And if so, is that a real distinction? Can we make a choice that’s completely free of the expectations and desires of others (either aligned with those expectations and desires or reacting against them in some way)? And if it’s theoretically possible, does it happen often? In the case of making sacrifices for the sake of unity, how do we distinguish between unity (“deeper unity”) and conflict-avoidance (the appearance of unity, the suppression of conflict)? If we make a sacrifice to fulfill the desires of another, if we suffer on another’s behalf, how often does it further “deeper unity” and how often does it simply perpetuate a power imbalance, or allow us to ‘get ground’ by keeping us from venturing into the unknown?

I’m jumping ahead a bit, but in the Pema Chödrön book I quote from later, she also says this:

“Don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. … For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. It’s what’s meant by control.”

>>  Jacques Haers, a Flemish Jesuit, at Theology is a Process, asks a pivotal question, imo: How can we be a “victim or to take on the suffering of the victim, without entering into the self-serving powergame of victimization?”

“In a very interesting 1940 review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, George Orwell, the well-known author of Animal Farm and 1984, illustrates the perversion of victimization that can arise when someone like Adolf Hitler draws his appeal from being and embodying the suffering victim, seemingly similar to the Saviour Jesus Christ. This is profound misunderstanding and a perversion of deep Christian faith, but a very attractive perversion it is. Also Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the members of the Confessional Church understood this (pseudo-)religious features of Nazi ideology and denounced them, e.g. in the Barmen Erklärung. … This means that a human perversion — victimization or a calimero-attitude — of God’s dismantling of the scapegoat violence in Jesus of Nazareth the Christ, can become a powerful weapon to initiate and justify violence on quasi-religious grounds.

“Victimization as a response to victimhood is a cunning but perverse political strategy banking on resentment — it is not the christian way of dealing with ‘being a victim’. How to be a victim or to take on the suffering of the victim, without entering into the self-serving powergame of victimization? This question is at the core of a correct understanding of René Girard’s thought, at least I think so. Whereas there is, in the process of scapegoating, a tendency to divinisation of the scapegoat (who takes on the societal violence and so defuses its destructive character), the suffering and cross of Jesus represent a dark night in which God is present by being explicitly absent: the focus, here, is not on the suffering as such but on the suffering in the perspective of the resurrection as a gift of God.”

Haers is questioning, I think, the heroism we sometimes attribute to those who are victims or who “take on” the suffering of others, and he’s saying that the suffering is not what’s important — and certainly not to the point of glorifying it, particularly as it may derive from resentment of those seen as perpetrators — but what’s important is perhaps, as he halfway suggests in his next paragraph, the forgiveness and compassion that comes from knowing what it is to be a victim — and knowing that it is so be a perpetrator.

>> Re-reading Pema Chödrön’s book, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, and finding as before much in common with Girardian thought. She really has such a clear way of expressing herself.

“The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it, based on having worked with loving-kindness for yourself. Then there is no condescension. This nondualistic approach is true to the heart because it’s based on our kinship with each other.”

She also speaks of the ‘three basic principles,’ one of which is to ‘refrain from outrageous conduct’: “If you have this ideal of yourself as a hero or helper or doctor and everybody else as the victim, the patient, the deprived, the underdog, you are continuing to create the notion of separateness.“

I love this nuanced understanding of human motivation, which recognises that we tend to (I would say) fit ourselves into roles and take on identities that portray us as heroic, useful, helpful, healers, etc., and others as those who need us, who need what we have, who are there to receive what we give. This seems to me an extremely common way of being and perceiving in the world, and one that makes us prone to ’sacrificing’ for others.

What we don’t often sacrifice is our view of ourself as the sacrificer, willingly if possible (if we have the power in the relationship to make a sacrifice) and unwillingly if not (if we are too powerless) — we are the one who suffers for others, at the hands of others, on behalf of others. If we can choose to suffer or sacrifice, then we are strong, courageous, heroic, and beneficent; if we undergo suffering and sacrifice without choosing it, then we are the vulnerable victims.  We are often both at the same time. Either way, whether we see ourselves as victims or as someone who makes the sacrifice to suffer with or for the victims, sacrifice seems to be smack dab in the middle of our calculations about who is taking, who is giving, the mathematics of what we have lost and what we have gained, what we have given and what’s been taken from us. It makes modelling ourselves after Christ, as the one who underwent suffering at our hands, quite tricky.