Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim “Feast of Sacrifice” is celebrated today. It marks the end of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and commemorates Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Ishmael in obedience to God. The name “Islam” itself means “submission.”
Is there any principle or value that you are willing to offer yourself to completely, whatever sacrifice might be involved?
Is there any principle or value that you are willing to offer yourself to completely, whatever sacrifice might be involved?…
Having little, I have nothing to sacrifice except my life – which I would give for my daughter, or my younger brother, or any of my lovers.
Blessings!
Dwayne
There’s no one thing I’m willing to sacrifice everything else for. There are things I care about deeply and would (and have!) sacrificed for, but there’s more than one and I’m not willing to sacrifice all the others for any one of them.
I try to be honest/truthful. However, I mislead people by omission if being completely open would put me or another person in danger or a few other cases. If the stakes were high enough – say, someone else’s life – I would do my best to lie convincingly. I care about honesty quite a lot, but not enough to sacrifice everything for it.
I used to think that music was the one thing I would give everything for. I wound up with carpal tunnel syndrome and couldn’t play at all (or do a number of other things) until I moved to another country where surgery is covered by insurance. The stress of studying music in college and the association with extreme pain took away all my joy for it for quite some time. I’ve learned that my health is more important than playing that one measure perfectly, both for my own sake and for the sake of music.
Even before I came to this realization, I was not willing to force other people to sacrifice. At no point would I have been willing to kill someone else like Ibrahim was. I would not have stolen, no matter how much a better flute would have helped my playing. I most certainly would not have been willing to torture other people to force them to teach me. And so on and on. I was willing to sacrifice myself, but I was most decidedly NOT willing to sacrifice everything.
I can’t imagine anything so important that I would do all of this; however, I would be willing to steal if it was a matter of survival. I doubt anything could move me to torture – but even as I say that, my siblings once had to yank a tick out of one of my dogs’ eyelids and I would have been willing to do the same, and she just might have considered that torture. There’s all kinds of medical procedures I’d be willing to inflict on my dogs without their consent, providing I fully believed that the long term benefit outweighed their short term discomfort. That means that I wouldn’t sacrifice everything to avoid “torture.”
I’m pretty sure I’d be willing to die for the sake of my dogs, friends, family, the planet as a whole, random strangers, and quite a few other things. That said, death is a relatively simple, one-time decision. I find living for things much more difficult, though I’m willing to do that as well. But to give everything, absolutely everything? No. There’s nothing in the world that I would be willing to give EVERYTHING for.