My wife is watching The Passion of the Christ in the next room. I’d join in, but I rarely feel in the mood for watching a television screen these days. And in truth, my ideal Easter (or pre-Easter, it being Good Friday) viewing would be a compilation of the Pontius Pilate-related scenes from both The Passion of the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth. The violence of the Crucifixion is something I prefer to reflect on without watching it depicted directly, whereas Pilate as he is portrayed in both movies — and, really, as he is depicted in Scripture and venerated in some Orthodox churches — is something I prefer to behold and study by that means.

I digress.

Sacrifice. The Virtue of the Desert, the Virtue of Artisans in Ultima lore. It’s something very prominent in my mind at this time of year, for reasons I hope are obvious even if they aren’t specifically shared. Sacrifice, as it has been described in various books that have accompanied the Ultima games, is:

…the courage to give of oneself in the name of love.

And:

…the placing of the interests of others and the ends of virtue over one’s own well-being.

And it operates thusly:

Sacrifice gathers Love in the palm of Courage. Sacrifice requires a love of self to be given without consideration to others when that selfish love suggests safer choices. Where there is no choice, therein lies no sacrifice. Where the shape of those choices blur and lose definition, the highest standards of the common good find expression. In finding the Courage to share your Love, you shall fine therein Sacrifice.

And these are all true enough. Sacrifice, the giving of one’s self or one’s resources to the benefit of another and (typically) the detriment of the self, is indeed an action that requires no small measure of Courage, and no small amount of Love.

And actually, there’s something interesting in the depiction of Love within Ultima lore. If we look at how the ancient Greeks broke down love into various categories, the Principle of Love in Ultima is typically not associated with what the Greeks termed eros, the physical aspect of love, the un-moderated expression of which is called lust. Indeed, it’s arguable that the closest we get, in Ultima lore, to a depiction of eros as a foundational principle for a city or conclave is Fawn, in Serpent Isle. And Fawn’s obsession with Beauty is not portrayed as a positive trait.

Nor is Love, the Principle, what the Greeks would have called xenia. Neither can it be storge, because the Principle of Love is active, as demonstrated by its contribution to, and embodiment in, the Eight Virtues.

In general, the Principle of Love in Ultima lore is kind of a hybrid of philia (“loyalty to friends, family, and community,” requiring “virtue, equality, and familiarity”) and agape (“unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love”). This Love, that informs Sacrifice, is at its very core a self-giving love. And we see that reflected in the other Virtues that Love helps form; true Compassion, Justice, and Spirituality all require measures of selflessness, and even self-giving, in order to be acted out genuinely.

And self-giving requires, in turn, Humility; a genuine sacrifice necessarily entails not seeking reward, recognition, or remuneration for itself or the one making it. For Christians, obviously, the exemplar of all such traits is Jesus, whose sacrifice on the Cross we profess as salvific, an atonement for the transgressions of all conceived…past, present, and future. And that sacrifice transpired in a most horrific fashion; I can hear Jim Caviezel’s depiction of that suffering in the background as I write this. It’s still one of the only scenes of cinematic violence I find myself unable to watch all that often…I think because it was, and remains, the most senseless and unnecessary violence.

Not in the sense of its depiction, mind you. The depiction is graphic, yes — you see skin being torn away from bone, for example — and it’s arguable that it reaches the very limits of what is really necessary to depict in film. But that is not what I mean by “senseless and unnecessary”.

What I mean is: so much of sacrifice is, at its core, something which could have been — and perhaps should have been — avoided. Look at the Sacrifice tarot card above, the one on the right. It depicts a traveller giving some of his own water to another, less fortunate traveller. In a hot, seemingly endless desert, sharing water is indeed a sacrifice, and a real risk. Equally, it shouldn’t have been necessary. However the fallen, thirsty traveller came to be stranded in the desert per the depiction, something went wrong that he ended up in that state. Whether he was left there unjustly by marauders or an unjust authority, or whether he failed to prepare adequately for the journey across the sands, something went wrong; a mistake or an injustice transpired that, ideally, should not have. In the times in my life that I have been called to make genuine sacrifices, this has often been the case; someone has done something, failed to do something, or been set upon by someone or something, and has ended up in a state that realistically they should not have. The context, the situation that made those sacrifices necessary was because something went wrong…and typically, the “something” is humanity proper.

Sacrifice is the messy Virtue, the Virtue that is (I think) most closely connected to humanity’s fallen (or imperfect, if you prefer) nature, and the Virtue that is called into action whenever humankind in its brokenness messes things up. Proponents of Earth Hour urge us to sacrifice our electricity-driven lights because, in their view, humanity in its brokenness has messed up the Earth, and must strive to counter or undo that damage. The beggar on the street pleads with us to sacrifice our hard-earned money, because some brokenness (either his own or something extrinsic to him — addiction, mental illness, or the vagaries of the job market, to name a few examples) have put him in that state. Ideally, we shouldn’t ever have to act upon Sacrifice, because ideally that brokenness…shouldn’t be broken. So too what transpired on the Cross.

Equally, though, there is a certain glory in Sacrifice. There are hymns and prayers that give thanks for humanity’s brokenness, because it has won for us in turn something so great as our Saviour. There are hymns and prayers that praise the Cross as “wondrous”, for the work of salvation that was executed thereupon. And even if these things are mere legend to you, Dragons and Dragonettes, the same general effect occurs in the everyday sacrifices me are all called to make; when we make a sacrifice for another, we can sometimes see the most astounding displays of human dignity, respect, and gratitude in the wake of the act…especially from those who have no hope of repaying those sacrifices with anything more than a wry smile. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does and can be seen, it is a singular moment of some of the very best things in the human experience, that make the messiness and brokenness bearable and even, in a bizarre way, a little bit beautiful for a while.