Sacrifice and Scapegoat

No one who has ever done dream work with Jeremy Taylor will forget his epiphanic evocations of The Willing Sacrifice Archetype. At times the sheer exuberance of its energy felt like the consummation of a lifetime of exploration. In The Living Labyrinth, Jeremy wrote:

"The eternal drama of struggle among Shadow, Trickster, and Divine Child eventually calls forth the healing and transformative archetype of the Willing Sacrifice. It is the Willing Sacrifice that is ultimately capable of reconciling the naturally opposed tensions embodied in the paradoxical Trickster. The Willing Sacrifice is capable of resolving the paradox of the Trickster's dual nature, and indeed, the dual nature of all archetypal images.

"…Organized religion in general, and Christian religion in particular, has done us all a great disservice by promoting the notion that Willing Sacrifice is present only in the largest and most dramatic acts of painful self-sacrifice and martyrdom. These great moments do indeed give dramatic shape to the Willing Sacrifice; but for most people, those moments are to be worshipped from afar and avoided at all costs.…

"In reality, the Willing Sacrifice takes shape in mundane details of our daily lives on a regular basis. The smallest and the simplest acts–like getting up and plunging into the morning commute traffic to get to the less-than-satisfying-job, so that the less-than-satisfying family can go on eating and clothing themselves; the decision to give my friend, or my kid, the benefit of the doubt and listen seriously to his or her latest craziness;…the willingness to laugh and accept, rather than judge and be angry–are all concrete exemplars of archetypal Willing Sacrifice."

This is beautiful, and those of you who also read Richard Rohr will recognize sympathetic echoes of the nature of Divine Love. To love, says Rohr, is by its very nature to open myself to suffering.

Would that Willing Sacrifice might really be the culmination of all things! But the story is never-ending. The Trickster, reduced to bones on the riverbank, again rises. And the Willing Sacrifice now casts a very long shadow.

Theologian Eric Law reminds us that the word sacrifice holds different meanings for the powerful and the powerless. Although all of us sacrifice willingly for the ones we love, our children, even our dogs, we are now living in an age where the sacrifice of Muslims, women and people of color are the price we must pay for "greatness." Although we've never gotten everything right, for most of my lifetime I've inhabited a democratic ideal of collaboration, diversity, participation and free choice. That ideal is changing into a jewel encrusted idol of autocracy. Autocracies are built upon the removal of choice. Indeed, the entire point of autocracy is the outsourcing of suffering.

When autocrats mount their thrones, the Willing Sacrifice archetype risks morphing into the Scapegoat, the icon of all whose lives are distorted by oppression: the poor who must sacrifice their civil rights because they can't pay cash bail, the homeless sacrificed to feed the cult of McMansion, children sacrificed at the Mexican border to stoke the flames of hate, women recast as a prey species for the delectation of males. If the Willing Sacrifice means assuming mature responsibility for self and others, the Scapegoat is the biggest and most deadly act of projection known to our species. 

The original scapegoat in Leviticus was sent into the wilderness for sins it never committed. It was not asked. 

Has anyone dreamed pathways through such paradox?