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…