My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

To Greece by train - and other journeys of the mind, body and soul

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A sacrificial option?

July 24th, 2009 by chris · 2 Comments · Greece

When I first talked to our friend Rachael about our jour­ney a few months ago, she described it as a “sac­ri­fi­cial” action. Rather an inter­est­ing choice of words, I thought. “Sacrifice” these days tends to have unfor­tu­nate con­nota­tions of osten­ta­tious self-depriva­tion, or empty ritual.

Rachael though, is a rad­ic­al chris­ti­an, a mem­ber of the Iona Community, and the word sac­ri­fi­cial reminds me of the time a few years ago when she chose to mark Lent by liv­ing on the min­im­um wage. Of course that’s a very far cry from the situ­ation of someone who is per­man­ently on a min­im­um wage, but it did seem a worth­while prac­tice to me. Why do some­thing like that? As I see it (and she might have dif­fer­ent reas­ons) such a prac­tice might:

  • help one devel­op compassion
  • be an act of solid­ar­ity with the poor
  • be an act of prac­tic­al redis­tri­bu­tion — if you give away the money saved
  • be a delib­er­ate act of dis­con­nec­tion from the unhealthy drives of consumerism

If it’s under­taken with mind­ful engage­ment, this kind of action can be a very fruit­ful exer­cise, far from an empty ritual.
In it’s root mean­ing “sac­ri­fice” is les to do with depriva­tion than with mak­ing some­thing sac­red. [I’m aware that Albert will be read­ing this, and will be brist­ling at such words. What I mean, Albert, is some­thing to do with ensur­ing that our actions are con­gru­ent with our eth­ic­al prin­ciples, that the means are fit­ted to the ends — which I hope you will recog­nise as a cent­ral aspect of non­vi­ol­ence. If not, skip the rest of this post and hope that I get round to dis­cus­sion of rail­way gauges in the Peleponnese soon…]
So how does our trip fit with all this? In one sense, it’s not a sac­ri­fi­cial act at all — we have spent rather more money than we can really afford, for a pleas­ure jaunt which involves quite a lot of loun­ging on beaches and ice cream eating 🙂
To be continued…

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Gordon & Martha

    Don’t under­stand why the trip should be seen as a sac­ri­fi­cial action — apart that is from the mon­et­ary cost!

    It’s cost­ing us a lot in terms of hard work to pick all the red­cur­rants and oth­er pro­duce from the allot­ment. No sign BTW of the prom­ised helper!

  • Gordon & Martha

    Thanks to a bene­fi­cent Jupiter Pluvius, the allot­ment is being reg­u­larly watered every day. All the red­cur­rants are now made into jelly, yum, yum.

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