In an interesting book published last year, French scholar Guy Strouma suggest that following the end of antiquity (the fall of the Roman empire), people in Western Europe largely abandoned the idea of physical sacrifice (offering animals or grains to the gods) as a means to interact with the divine.  Henceforth, he concludes, people chose to come to God through the direct actions of their heart and spirits.
     Mr. Strouma makes a telling point.  Wouldn't we rather come to understand and enter into exchange with things beyond us directly, to use what is already in and around us to see what is beyond us?  After all, if we are made in the image of God, designed to interact with him directly, why would we not do so?  We do not need intermediaries to find what is already there.
     What we do need, however, is an inclination and reason to look.  It is ultimately a question of will, not, per Nietzsche, the will alone, but the will as an holistic and continuous integration of spirit, mind, and heart.
     So sacrifice remains, but in an entirely different and far more challenging way:  the sacrifice of a willing and open heart, the heart that is willing to look, the heart that is willing to see.  As the worm in Dr. Seuss's The Big Brag, responding to a rabbit and bear who had been boasting about, respectively, their sense of hearing and smell, said, "Well, boys, you can hear and smell well enough, but how far can you see?"