EMPATHY

It is not easy to walk in another person’s shoes. In fact, we cannot even as that old Indian admonition tells us that we must walk in another’s moccasins if we want to understand that person, understand what he or she is going through at this moment in time. When we care about someone who is suffering, it is much easier to sympathize with that person rather than empathize.

In a way it is also safer. We sympathize from a distance. Empathy demands a hands-on response. We have to be there with the other who is going through a difficult and, usually, a painful time. That is what makes being empathetic so hard. It involves, demands, our deliberately entering into a painful situation when every fiber of our being tells us to run away as fast as we can. Only fools, our inner selves tell us, bring on pain and suffering willingly.

St. Paul calls this being fools for Christ’s sake, for the sake of those Jesus loves, namely, everyone. We are not Jesus, of course, and we cannot love everyone. We can only hope to love and empathize with those we do love and care about. It takes the grace of God, sometimes, to almost force ourselves into those situations where we must suffer along with the one we love in order to help that person deal with his or her suffering.

Empathy, of course, does not mean that we suffer physically with the one we love. It does mean that when we say “I feel your pain,” we actually do feel pain, that there is an inner hurt that we cannot really describe or define or even number – “Is it a three or a seven?” It is simply there and we hurt because someone we love is hurting or because of the vagaries of life in this world.

Life is complex and that is putting it mildly.  And while we may wish life’s issues were black and white, either good or bad, we know they are not. When they are not, when there is no right answer to a problem, no logical reason why this person is suffering and that person is not, why, for instance, in battle one soldier is killed and the one next to him survives – when we find ourselves in such confusing and complex situations, we suffer with the one grieving and in pain while at the same time being thankful we have been spared.

And sometimes the knowledge that we have been spared is often more painful than had we been the one to suffer in the first place. Much of the post-traumatic stress from war comes from having escaped that which your buddies in battle did not. “Why them and not me?” is empathy to the nth degree. Added to that is the empathetic pain we suffer when we deal with the question of why any of this is so, why we have to suffer in the first place and, even more, why we inflict pain and suffering in others.

What all this means, I think, is that empathy often means having to live with unanswered and even unanswerable questions and suffer the pain that comes with no recourse other than to know that we are not alone and that empathy is demanded not only if we are to be human but also if we are to make it through this life with some sense of sanity.