Sacrificial Love: What a Father is Actually Being Asked to Do

A reader writes: What is sacrificial love? How can a father live this reality? What obstacles are there?

The question carries a weight that is easy to miss on first reading. Behind the doctrinal form — what is it? — lies something more personal: can I actually do this? And what happens when I have nothing left to give? That is the question worth sitting with before any definition is offered.

What sacrificial love is — and is not

Sacrificial love is not, at its root, a feeling of generosity. It is a structural feature of how love works. Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing on prayer and the shape of Christian love, put it plainly: love is selfless only when it is ready to sacrifice pleasure, advantage, and independence for the sake of the beloved — and since no earthly love begins perfect, it must pass through purifications, through moments when the quality of the original enthusiasm is tested and either refined or revealed as something less than love.[^1]

That is a demanding account. But notice what it is not saying. It is not saying that sacrifice means depletion, that a father gives until he is emptied and then collapses heroically. The Augustinian and Thomistic tradition insists that love, properly understood, moves in two directions at once — what Benedict XVI described as the inseparable ascent and descent, the eros that seeks God and the agape that passes the gift on.[^2] Jacob's ladder runs both ways. A man who has not received cannot sustainably give, and a father who imagines he is a unidirectional conduit of self-donation will eventually discover, as von Balthasar warned, that what looked like love was covertly looking after itself — gaining satisfaction from the performance of sacrifice rather than genuinely attending to the beloved.[^3]

Sacrificial love, then, is not self-erasure. It is self-gift: the free and repeated offering of oneself — one's time, attention, labor, emotional presence — ordered not toward the father's own consolation but toward the genuine good of his children and wife. Aquinas would say this is the movement of charity as a virtue: a stable disposition of the will, not a mood, directing all that one does toward the other as an end rather than as a means.

What a father is actually offering

Alphonsus Rodriguez, the sixteenth-century Jesuit writer on Christian perfection, observed that the love God bears a human being infinitely exceeds what even the most tender natural father can feel — and that this excess is precisely what grounds confidence in fatherly providence.[^4] The point for the human father is not that he should attempt to match divine love by his own exertion, but that he is invited to participate in it. He is not the source; he is a conduit whose capacity depends on how frequently he returns to the source.

For a father, the daily practice of this love is rarely dramatic. It looks like being present at the dinner table when the phone is pulling him elsewhere. It looks like absorbing his child's irritability without returning it — what the tradition calls meekness, the ordered governance of anger in the service of relationship. It looks like working at work he may not enjoy because his family depends on the income, and offering that work consciously rather than resentfully. Royo Marín's account of the priestly vocation, applied more broadly, speaks of accepting one's own insufficiencies and the difficulties of one's ministry — offering them with Christ rather than simply enduring them.[^5] The father at home is not a priest in a formal sense, but the structure of his daily offering is analogous: the small penances of attentiveness, the sustained commitment to a vocation he did not fully understand when he entered it.

The theology of the heart — developed in Pope Francis's Dilexit Nos from the tradition of Margaret Mary Alacoque and Thérèse of Lisieux — adds a further dimension. Reparation, Francis writes, is best understood not as self-punishment but as the removal of the obstacles we place before the expansion of Christ's love in the world through our lack of trust, gratitude, and self-sacrifice.[^6] For a father, this means that the primary work is interior: clearing away the fear, the self-protectiveness, the disordered need for control or admiration that prevents his love from moving freely toward his family.

The obstacles are mostly interior

The reader asked explicitly about obstacles, and the honest answer is that most of them are not external. Busyness is real; financial pressure is real; the sheer physical fatigue of raising children is real. But these are the theater in which the interior obstacles operate, not the obstacles themselves.

The first is fear — specifically, the fear of not being enough. A father who is afraid that his love will not be adequate often responds by either withdrawing (avoiding the vulnerability of genuine presence) or performing (substituting activity and provision for attention). Neither serves his children. Balthasar's account of purification in love is precisely the process of discovering that the fear of inadequacy, when brought into prayer rather than managed through effort, becomes the opening through which grace enters.

The second obstacle is disordered self-love — what Aquinas called amor sui inordinatus, the turning of the will back toward itself rather than outward toward God and neighbor. In a father, this often appears as the need to be admired by his children, to be obeyed without question, or to have his sacrifices acknowledged. When the acknowledgment does not come — and with young children, it frequently does not — the disordered self collapses into resentment. The cure, classically, is the virtue of humility: the accurate perception of oneself in relation to God and others, which releases the grip of the ego on the return it expects from love.

Thérèse of Lisieux identified a third obstacle that runs through pious interpretations of sacrifice: the temptation to understand self-offering primarily in terms of satisfying divine justice, as though the father's suffering were a transaction that earned something.[^7] This account, generous as it sounds, subtly keeps the self at the center — suffering becomes a spiritual currency. Thérèse's alternative, which Francis draws on, is to offer oneself as a victim not of justice but of love: to become the surface on which God's love for the family is made visible, with no accounting kept. This is the harder path precisely because it asks for the surrender of the consolation of scorekeeping.

Living it without exhaustion

Von Balthasar's image of Jacob's ladder, and Benedict XVI's meditation on Moses entering the tent of meeting before going out to serve the people[^8], point toward the same practical conclusion: a father who tries to sustain sacrificial love without a regular return to the source will eventually run dry. The source is prayer — not as an additional obligation but as the condition that makes the other obligations bearable and fruitful.

This means that a father's first practical step is not to try harder at sacrifice. It is to receive more honestly: to pray, to go to confession, to receive the Eucharist, to allow himself to be loved before he attempts to love. A man who has genuinely encountered the love described in Deus Caritas Est — a love that descends before it asks anything in return — is not giving his family something he has manufactured. He is passing on what he has received.

Sacrificial love, lived this way, is not a burden that slowly crushes a man. It is the form his freedom takes when it has been aimed correctly: away from himself and toward the faces of the people God has placed in his care. The sacrifices remain real — the sleepless nights, the foregone ambitions, the patience required ten thousand times — but they are not losses. They are the shape of a life that has found what it was for.

[^1]: von Balthasar, Prayer — 'love is selfless if it is ready to sacrifice pleasure, advantage and independence for the sake of the beloved.' [^2]: Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est — 'one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow... one must constantly drink anew from the original source.' [^3]: von Balthasar, Prayer — 'covertly, he has always been looking after himself.' [^4]: Rodriguez, The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues — 'no tenderness nor affection can come near to that which God bears us.' [^5]: Royo Marín, Teología de la Perfección Cristiana — accepting 'all the difficulties that our ministry provides... offering ourselves completely to his disposition.' [^6]: Francis, Dilexit Nos — 'reparation can be understood as our removal of the obstacles we place before the expansion of Christ's love in the world by our lack of trust, gratitude and self-sacrifice.' [^7]: Francis, Dilexit Nos, citing Thérèse — 'I thought about the souls who offer themselves as victims of God's justice... I was far from feeling attracted to making it.' [^8]: Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, citing Gregory the Great — 'within [the tent] he is borne aloft through contemplation, while without he is completely engaged in helping those who suffer.'