Understanding Self-Immolation

On the very first page of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she writes, “Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind.” When I quoted this, a friend said, “did she really use that word?” His understanding of the term was that it meant: to set oneself on fire – which, indeed, is the meaning you will find if you look it up in Wikipedia. That meaning of the term is not what this post is about, and I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not how Mrs. Eddy meant it either.

The Latin word it comes from means to sprinkle with meal in preparation for sacrifice, and the word in earlier times meant to prepare oneself as an offering for sacrifice. The first definition of sacrifice is: an act of offering something precious to deity. So you could define self-immolation as preparing to offer yourself as something precious to deity. This makes the term more palatable to me, but my desire is not just to make it more palatable. My desire is, and has been, to understand how to accomplish the Christianization and health of mankind.

A word about Christianization – my working definition is that it means establishing the rule of Love – that is, achieving the state of civilization where people are always motivated by love in what they do. The law of Love is that, at whatever scale you look, everything there is being tended with utmost tenderness and perfect provision of exactly what it needs to thrive joyfully. This is seen on the level of the individual, the family, the civilization, the planet, the galaxies, etc, and also on the level of the cell, the atom, and all the things we don’t even know enough to name. To me Christianization has nothing to do with what people say they believe. It has everything to do with Spirit moving within.

So when I consider how I might have a part in bringing this law into human consciousness and experience, I need an operational understanding of self-immolation. Setting myself on fire, as a suicide, wouldn’t do much, but perhaps setting myself on fire with the fire that burns but doesn’t consume would be a good idea. Being on the burning edge of aliveness, being the flame that dances in its embrace of the air, demonstrating the spontaneity, heat and brightness of the fire, could be good.

Self sacrifice as it’s most often understood is a cause of much harm to people. Sacrificing my voice to some other authority entails the loss of my ability to stand up for my heart’s wisdom – for what I know is true and good. Sacrificing my choice to do what I love for some assumed necessity deprives me and the world of the gifts I am meant to give, and also prevents me from making sure that the things done in the world are life-affirming. Self-sacrifice is a concept too often used to allow uncaring forces to be at the helm of civilization, designing structures that kill life. The design of the universe is for each being to be heard, honored, and given its place to fulfill its whole potential, and not be sacrificed for anyone else’s purpose.

There is a part of my experience of growth in grace that involves constantly putting aside things that I thought defined me. Judgments, justifications, the sense of being the one who understands, have to go. Since growth entails continually gaining new understanding, the need to put aside the sense of being one who has the answers is also continual. There are other flavors of this as well in life experience, related to gaining of skill and even to being kind and feeling the glow of goodness. To use another analogy: every time a wave comes up on a sandy shore, it leaves a little line when it recedes. I need to remember: no matter how beautiful or how ungainly each line might be, I am not the line. I am the wave. It is the sense of self as a line left on the sand of time that I find useful to continually put off. As I become more conscious of myself as the wave, it serves to make me a precious offering to God. I offer not my death but my life, my life that is bright and fervent because it isn’t stifled by these senses of myself that are not me. So that is how, for now, I am using the concept of self-immolation.