T. 26. I. 1 – 4. Jesus: “In the ‘dynamics of attack’ is sacrifice a key idea. It is the pivot upon which all compromise, all desperate attempts to strike a bargain, and all conflicts achieve a seeming balance. It is the symbol of the central theme that ‘someone must lose.’ Its focus on the body is apparent, for sacrifice is always an attempt to limit loss.
The body is itself a sacrifice; a giving up of all power in the name of saving just a little for yourself! To see a brother as another body, separate from yours, is the expression of a wish to see just a little of him as well, and sacrifice the rest.
Look around you at the world, and you will see nothing attached to anything beyond itself! All seeming entities can come a little nearer, or go a little farther off from one another, but most certainly, cannot join. The world you see is thus based on ‘sacrifice’ of oneness.
This world is a picture of complete disunity and total lack of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without. And what is outside can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall of matter. Each part must sacrifice the other part, the rest of what it truly is, if it is to keep this illusion of itself from breaking down. For it is thought that if they joined, each one would lose its own seeming identity. Thus by their separation are their little ‘selves’ maintained.
The little that the body fences off becomes the ‘self,’ preserved through a seeming sacrifice of all the rest. And all the rest must lose this little part, the whole remaining incomplete if only to keep your own identity intact. In this perception of yourself, the body’s loss would be a sacrifice indeed! For sight of bodies becomes the sign that your own sacrifice is limited, and something still remains for you alone.
The little that the body fences off becomes the ‘self,’ preserved through a seeming sacrifice of all the rest. And all the rest must lose this little part, the whole remaining incomplete if only to keep your own identity intact. In this perception of yourself, the body’s loss would be a sacrifice indeed! For sight of bodies becomes the sign that your own sacrifice is limited, and something still remains for you alone.
And for this ‘little’ life to belong to you, are limits placed on everything outside, just as they are on everything you think is yours. For giving and receiving are the same. And to accept the limits of a body is to impose these limits on each brother whom you see. For you cannot but see him as you see yourself.
The body is a loss, and can be made to sacrifice. And while you see your brother as a body, apart from you and separate in his little cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him and you. What greater sacrifice could be demanded than that God’s Son perceive himself without his Father?”