When our observance of Lent prompts us to drop bad habits or start good ones, those behavioral effects ideally go beyond rote and become “habits of the heart.”
Giving up candies for a while helps us to appreciate treats all the more—and to remember that last year’s plan to eat more kale was noble, but short-lived. This tweaks the lesson of Forrest Gump; we discover that a box of chocolates is like life, a sampler of opportunities to find value in gjfts when they’re received, enjoyed, or offered up.
A single word that captures this uphill climb of mindfulness is “sacrifice.” Lent takes on extra meaning when the season’s little, planned concessions prepare our hearts, even our appetites, for bigger surrenders.
This writer, a flawed pilgrim who slips and slides through Lent’s penitential practices, hopes to cultivate a taste for sacrifice by making it a kind of mantra—a repetitive thought modest enough to settle the soul but bold enough to suggest there’s potential energy in everything we do.f
Forty days in the desert. The Passion and death of Christ. The redemption of Easter. The motifs of this season find parallels in our travels through the post-modern wilderness of 2025.
Our secular society craves coherent stories to find purpose in everyday busyness, but we’re not keen to embrace this complexity. We too often miss the opportunity to see life’s spiritual plot thickening.
The Shakers observed that sacrifice is a through-line in the story arc Lent portrays. The Lord offers us gifts to be simple, humble, in right relationship, allowing us “to come down where we ought to be.” This is our default position of attentiveness to God and neighbor.
However, as the sect’s timeless hymn suggests, Shakers hoped their reined-in egos would allow much more rigorous follow-throughs of self-denial and repentance. They prescribed major sacrificial actions in order to “come round right” for particular standards of worship and solidarity. Their approach proved temporary.
Lent is our chance to share and calibrate sacrifice in more sustainable forms by viewing it through four lenses. What does the word itself say to us? What does it call upon individuals to do? Can it teach communities and societies to better discern what they’re progressing toward? And can it reveal a structured, Godly worldview that’s truly “right” for the human spirit?
Sacrifice, for What It’s Worth
Etymologists provide several root meanings for our word du jour. One analysis says sacrifice is an offering—something “done zealously, to serve God.” Our “sense-perceptible gift to the Deity” is “an outward manifestation of our veneration for Him and with the object of attaining communion with Him.”
Another derivation, my favorite, says sacrifice is also a verb. It means “to make sacred,” from the root sacra for sacred and facere for “make or do.” In other words, although we might think of our Lenten denial practices as passive or trivial, the insights behind them are more dynamic and constructive, fit for earthly practicality but also useful for transformation.
Sacrifice for Individuals
Public intellectual Jordan Peterson, in his new book We Who Wrestle with God, invites humans to see sacrifice essentially as “work.” This secular psychologist and spiritual seeker explains it as an investment:
“If I am doing what needs to be done, instead of what I want to do for the sake of present gratification, I am working…. Work is the subjugation of whim, or more precisely, it’s the integration with other needs and desires into something of a higher and more complete order.”
Peterson goes on to say “work is … the delay of gratification and a sacrifice made in the service of others. It is an investment made to best ensure the beneficence of the future whose price must be paid in the present; an investment, as well, in the good will of others on whose behalf something valuable (time, energy, attention) has been given up now.”
The author evokes the mundane idea of a contract, but he also incorporates transcendence across time and circumstances. He cites the Bible’s emphasis on “sacrifice as characterizing the relationship between God and man.”
The key contract of life is ultimately a “communal or covenantal” obligation to meet the needs of one’s family and community, and even one’s future self. We might call this the “best self,” or “truest self,” one wants to become, the self which simply can’t emerge if constrained in a world of spontaneous, thoughtless hedonism.
Sacrifice for the Common Good
A focus on sacrifice, saying no to our selfishness, prompts us to wonder what actions will be most acceptable to the “self, fellow man, and natural world”—essentially what “will most please God.” Determining one’s proper offering, Peterson says, becomes identical with asking, “What is the purpose or meaning of life?”
This habit of assessing our individual decisions in light of our future and the world we wish to shape goes beyond the little behaviors we might tinker with as Lenten minimalists giving up chocolates.
Higher aspirations clear the way to imagine the broader story of an entire society—indeed, a civilization—based on sacrifice.
We start by realizing we’re born and raised in debt to the sacrificial, generative love of our parents.
We build up our moral awareness by understanding that it’s now our turn to accept a role carrying on our family’s values and humanity’s transcendent purpose. We consider bearing children and shaping a better world for them. We focus less on erotic or platonic love and more on agape love—a deep commitment to the good of the other.
Our sense of obligation to those who came before us, as well as those who will come after us, can expand the love of family life to include community solidarity and patriotic loyalty to a country. As we identify our talents and our role in an interconnected society, we’re challenged to think like accountable contributors.
Peterson envisions civilization grounded in great love stories, not mere facts and functions, theories and ideologies. Having absorbed stories which explain and celebrate our priorities, humanity can keep building on its wisdom and experience in order to thrive.
This recalls Pope John Paul II’s “exhortation” to the European Union when member countries composed their first constitution in 2003. As reported by the BBC, the pontiff urged the founding nations to “include a reference to the religious, and in particular the Christian, heritage of the continent.”
John Paul was not insulting or excluding other religions. He believed Europe had a legacy of love-story experiences that could make people free and empowered, accountable and creative. These would be valuable traits whenever the EU faced crucial moments of course-correction. But Europe’s constitution wound up containing only general language about respecting cultural guideposts.
If a secular society rejects the continuation of self-giving as the source of meaning behind its activities, people find that their options are limited, not expanded, Peterson points out.
A civilization abandoning its structures of purpose will sing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which conjures peace in a vacuum. Motivation will derive from utilitarian judgments and personal desires for power, pride, and apparent virtue. Seeking a utopia, people might turn the tables, demanding for themselves the sacrifices of others!
As in present-day America, secular leaders adopting their stories from concepts of progress and judgmentalism may determine that some groups and behaviors are unworthy of attention or respect. Amid polarization, truth becomes relative and weaponized. The common ground of learning and wisdom withers without stewardship.
Sacrifice, for God’s Sake
Good students and stewards of sacrifice come to recognize that only an ethos of God-given dignity and rights will keep us on track to come down “where we ought to be.”
If we’re truly freed from self-centeredness, we’re able not only to honor our fellow humans as connected collaborators, but also to form a right relationship with a higher power who bestows higher purpose. Our offerings for each other yield the most fruit when we share what Peterson calls a spirit of “upward sacrifice,” focused on the ultimate effort for the ultimate good.
Our Judeo-Christian culture recognizes a deity of total self-giving, who speaks the language of family and covenant: “You will be my people, and I will be your God.”
The post-modern world pushes back mightily against this loving invitation, perhaps because we don’t want to bow down, to turn away from our pride and priorities. Or we don’t believe this God is trustworthy. Our declaration of inclusiveness, well-intentioned or strategic, precludes being trustworthy to only one paradigm of God. Thus, it precludes all paradigms.
We must admit that basing the promise of human flourishing on the prospect of giving things up is counterintuitive.
Fans of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and segments of the international administrative state met with pushback in America’s 2024 elections. Some campaigners stealthily embodied “Great Reset” thinking already widespread in Europe.
This vision of a globalized, technocratic age downplays national sovereignty and borders. To motivate followers, advocates rely largely on existential dangers, limited choices, and being on the right side of history. They stress one-size-fits-all values and enemies. WEF founder Klaus Schwab promised, “You’ll own nothing, and you will be happy.”
Voters harboring hopes for personal independence and societal abundance believed a globalized version of sacrificial “simplicity” actually risked inequality and a programming of the masses through persuasion and information control.
Bishop Robert Barron, a prominent evangelist who leads the “Word on Fire” online ministry, points out there’s another pathway to sacrificial simplicity that is more voluntary and inspiring. It’s rooted in Judeo-Christian faith, not as a bias but as a blessing. Alas, this approach also faces much pushback nowadays.
“We’re the weirdest religion around,” Barron has quipped. The Church has chosen a countercultural symbol—a crucifix on which the corpus of Christ hangs—to reveal its understanding of how reality functions.
This structure is a covenant sealed with the blood of Jesus. He calls people as humble penitents who can enter communion through His ultimate sacrifice, which broke the grip of sin so we need not veer off the trajectory toward our truest selves.
We build solidarity with this all-loving deity by picking up our own crosses. Catholics, for example, believe they pursue a mystical unity while preserving an identity that retains individual diversity. They re-present, and participate in, Jesus’ one-time sacrifice to God the Father at every Mass.
Christians offer their unique sacrifices of praise, thanksgiving, and contrition. They sing that “amazing grace” flows from this. They see their Sunday services as celebrations.
Globalism proponents should note that, yes, followers of Jesus trust they “will be happy,” but this joy, sampled on earth, is on the spiritual plane. Aristotle also saw happiness as an elevated goal. The Philosophy Termswebsite says “the real prize is becoming the hero of your own adventure,” although it’s neither ego trip nor solo flight.
This doesn’t require us to “own nothing.” Instead, we choose to “give up” our earthly experience in a deeper sense. When we face life’s inevitable sufferings and surrenders, and when we seek God’s forgiveness or confront malevolent resistance to deeds we deem virtuous, we invite God to turn our pains toward a higher purpose.
The aim of this happiness reset is to join in serving Him and spreading His glory through love for others.
“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” Jesus teaches in Matthew 16:25. Those who voluntarily go “all-in” with this sacrificial and hierarchical worldview aren’t motivated by forces of persuasion, guilt, and information control. Rather, they hope to liberate God’s creatures from these fears.
Such freedom yields the simplicity of which the Shakers sang. The mind frame of sacrifice puts us “in our place” in various ways. Psalm 51 says: “My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn.” Matthew 9:13, harking back to Hosea 6:6, says God “desires mercy, not [traditional, bloody] sacrifice.”
Sacrifice, for Now and the Future
Lenten choices represented by rituals and tweaked habits thus foster default conditions of simplicity from which we can grow to pursue the meaning of life in personal, social, and spiritual terms.
It’s no surprise that Jordan Peterson, who established an international organization to help preserve Western culture and wisdom, now considers sacrifice a gigantic topic.
In keynote remarks to his Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) at its 2025 conference in mid-February, Peterson declared that “reciprocal, voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end,” organized under divine principles, is nothing less than “the foundation of civilization,” at least in the West.
This idea of foundation, where something is being built, loops back to the etymological insight that sacrifice is a verb meaning “to make sacred.” The word cannot mean destruction, deconstruction, hatred, or nihilism.
Making the world better, during Lent and all year round, affirms Peterson’s thesis that we find ourselves today at a pivotal “civilizational moment.” We can, and must, take conscious actions and present clear explanations in defense of Western civilization.
Post-modern culture’s insular preferences for power games, self-gain, and avoidance of pain are not the stuff of a sustainable society, Peterson says.
Too many of us fail to see the error of those priorities, he adds. Our dumbed-down culture is “at a point where the obvious needs to be explained.” We need to honor the wisdom our forebears literally built into structures of the past. The altar of sacrifice is located at the center of a church, and the place of worship is located at the center of a town.
At today’s crisis point, disparate but open-minded forces can come together to build back our awareness of a fruitful, prudent, balanced moral infrastructure, Peterson argues.
Political conservatives and any groups with backgrounds in beneficent traditions can join hands with classic liberals, who have courageously advanced principles of human dignity. They’ll agree on the common cause of re-animating Western civilization at its best. Plenty of folks now suspect that humanity cannot thrive without it.
The season of Lent is an ideal time for looking back and looking forward, for challenging ourselves and bringing hope to others, for connecting theology and philosophy to concrete actions, for assuring the world that God does important things through us.
That’s why the word “sacrifice” makes a good mantra to exercise during Lent—and beyond. It honors all the little gifts that countless people offer to God and His creatures throughout each day.
We get to emulate the moral vigor our local heroes model in pursuits as diverse as health professionals, emergency responders, laborers labeled as “essential workers,” and the Forrest Gumps of the world.
The mantra also celebrates the ability to take our habits higher. Shaping them after God’s own heart, we spot opportunities to bless a community, country, or civilization with a sustainability we can share.
Taming our self-regard, we can strive to make our future so meaningful that it’s sacred. Lenten reflections on Christ’s Passion are a welcome reminder that it is high time to offer ourselves zealously, or better, passionately.
Image from Microsoft Bing’s AI Co-Pilot, based on the command: Create a church in the center of an old European town.
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