The Meaning of Sacrifice

It starts with a sermon. On the drive home and around the house afterward, George Barclay keeps circling back to what the pastor said that morning about sacrifice, and about the challenge he handed the congregation. Mary Barclay admits she found it interesting, which surprises her a little. Jimmy Barclay confesses he could not follow any of it - sacrifices, lambs, goats, giving things up for Lent - and Donna Barclay teases him about drawing on the backs of the offering envelopes before explaining it herself: the pastor said people should be willing to sacrifice things in their lives to God. Jimmy fires back that Donna spent the service passing notes to Jessie Morales about her soap opera, and the two of them squabble happily over whether Kyle is finally going to propose to Jamie. Mary wonders aloud whether the family soap opera policy needs rethinking. George decides the pastor was on to something, and announces what the Barclays are going to give up. Not spinach, which Jimmy volunteers. Not pizza, which Mary guesses. Television.

The plan is not to get rid of the set but to leave it alone completely for a month - no shows, no videotaping, nothing connected to it. Donna is thrilled at the thought of Jimmy losing his programs until she realizes Zappazoids counts too, since he plays it on the TV screen at home. Jimmy protests that Zappazoids is not a television program. George rules that anything to do with the television is off limits, and everyone agrees. He unplugs the set with a drum roll and a flourish, and the family sits in the sudden quiet, discovering that nobody has the faintest idea what to do with an evening. It is going to take some getting used to.

George stops by Whit's End on his way home from work to ask John Whittaker to encourage Jimmy and Donna through the month, and the two men sit down to brainstorm things a family can do with all that recovered time. Meanwhile the sacrifice starts springing leaks. Jessie cannot bear the idea of Donna missing a month of Young Hearts Turning, so she proposes a loophole: Jessie will watch downstairs and come back up to describe every twist. Donna hesitates, then lets it happen. Over at Finneman's Market, Joe Finneman offers Jimmy a round on the arcade machine while he fetches the eggs Mary wanted, and Jimmy turns him down - then reasons that an arcade cabinet is not technically a television, and plays just once before heading home.

Two days, ten hours and forty-six minutes into the month, the family is sitting together after dinner and George makes a confession of his own. He nearly ducked into an electronics shop downtown to catch the news through the window. He wanted his children to know the month is hard on him too, and he asks whether either of them has run into anything similar. Jimmy and Donna go pale, invent urgent homework and unlikely bedtimes, and flee upstairs at half past seven. Donna corners Jimmy in his room, and the two of them circle each other in a tangle of accusations about who is acting anxious and who is acting guilty, each insisting there is nothing whatsoever to confess. Neither one gives an inch. Neither one sleeps easy.

A week goes by, and by most measures it has gone well. Donna tells Jessie about devotional bowling, the game George invented where the questions are the bowling ball and Bible facts are the pins, and about the photo albums she finally filled and the novel she finally finished. She is almost getting used to life without television. Then Jessie mentions the Weekly Soap Digest, a magazine that prints everything that happened during the week, and lets slip that Kyle is in the hospital in a coma. It is more than Donna can leave alone.

Everything collides at Finneman's Market. Jimmy has come back for the new upgraded Zappazoids machine, the one with turbo thrusters and hydraulic drive, and he is deep in a game when Donna and Jessie arrive at the counter asking for the new issue of the magazine. Whit is in the back fetching chocolate syrup and walks straight into the middle of it. Brother and sister catch each other red-handed and immediately start arguing over which loophole is smaller, while Joe warns Donna that if she keeps twisting the magazine like that she will have to buy it. Whit gently asks whether all of this has something to do with a certain vow, and invites them both back to Whit's End.

He tells them they are not in trouble. He also tells them they have been acting remarkably guilty for two people who insist they have done nothing wrong, and he introduces the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of it - doing what is technically allowed while knowing perfectly well it is not what was meant. Nobody wrote the promise down or made them sign it, Whit points out, but Jimmy knew Zappazoids was included, and Donna knew that giving up her program meant everything attached to it, not just the half hour in the afternoon. They were tempted, and they used a technicality to give in. To obey is better than sacrifice, he reminds them, words spoken to a whole nation of people who kept the letter and lost the spirit. Then he asks his last question: why did they agree to the month at all, if they never really wanted to? Because of Mom and Dad, they admit. Mostly Dad. He was so excited about it that saying no felt wrong. Whit sends them home to talk it over, and to think hard on the way about whether their hearts are in this at all, because there is no sense carrying on a sacrifice that is only for show.

The talk at home is a quiet one. Mary hardly knows what to say. George says he feels bad, because he thought the family was agreed and thought his children had been enjoying the evenings together, and he wishes they had told him at the very start that they did not want to do it. But Jimmy and Donna have already worked something out on the walk home. They want to start the month over and do it properly this time - no television, no Zappazoids, no reading about it either. Not because their parents want it of them, but because they want it of themselves. George asks if they are certain they are not simply doing it for him again. They are certain. This time, Donna tells him, they want to do it for God.