Sustainable Empathy
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Traveling home at the end of a really hot day, I got to Grand Central Terminal and made my way down to the 7 train like I always do. There was obviously a problem with the train because the platform was packed solid with commuters waiting, tight like sardines, sweating in the intense heat.
I could barely get onto the platform there were so many people. I asked around and nobody knew what was going on and there were no announcements forthcoming and no station agents in sight. So we all just waited uncomfortably, absorbed in our smartphones.
For some reason I looked up and noticed this guy slowly trying to make his way through the crowd. He touched someone on the shoulder and I thought he had met up with a friend, but then he moved past her and kept going. And as he threaded his way through, he lightly touched each person on the elbow or arm as if he knew them and had now arrived at his destination. There was something intimate about the way he moved through the crowd. As if he knew all of us. I found it so interesting to watch and I developed all kinds of theories about what his deal was. Maybe he wasn’t a New Yorker; maybe he was from another country with a different sense of personal space. Or maybe he was a politician, skilled in the art of connecting, just for a split second, with each of hundreds of strangers. Maybe I was witnessing the secret of great leadership.
I turned back to my Blackberry and then looked up again as I heard a gasp. Somebody was falling in the midst of the crowd. People were catching him and lowering him to the floor. It was that same guy! People were shouting, “Get help! Get help!” and so I started to make my way toward the stairs to try to find an MTA person. But before I got there, it seemed that the guy was already coming to. He was getting back up, helped by those around him, saying, “That was the strangest feeling.” He had simply passed out from standing for so long in the heat.
All of my theories about this guy had been wrong. As I had been watching him make his way through the crowd, he had probably been feeling his grip on consciousness slipping away and he had been trying to almost hold on to people as he passed by. The intimacy I had noticed was actually borne of vulnerability. And the people around him responded to his vulnerability with intimacy: somebody offered him a bottle of water, while somebody with a stethoscope offered to listen to his heart. He had been vulnerable and so his boundaries were down, his edges were soft and his heart was open.
I think many of us have had experiences like this—times when we’re sick or heartbroken or in pain or we’ve witnessed something awful. We feel like our channels are open for connection with others, even strangers. We become transparent. Paul Simon sings, “Losing love is like a window in your heart / everybody sees you’re blown apart / everybody sees the wind blow.”
These days our grief compartment is pretty full. It seems like a parade of tragedies has gone by this year, each one calling us to feel something and to do something, each calling us to vulnerability and intimacy. Shootings, storms, building collapses, wreckage after wreckage. Is this pile of debris Bangladesh or Oklahoma? Is this grieving mother from Newtown or Damascus? It’s like a “denial of service” attack on our hearts—we can get so overloaded that we shut down.
And how could we not? We didn’t evolve to be able to digest such a steady diet of tragedy. We didn’t evolve to be intimate with strangers far away. Before the information age, the 24-hour news cycle, instant online communication, tragedies would be few and far between, as far as anyone knew. And they would always be local and they would always be personal. They would get filtered through your local religious community, interpreted by your clergy person who would know everyone involved and frame the event for you out of a short playlist of possible theological explanations.
Usually some version of “God works in mysterious ways.”
Today, all of that is different. Unless we’re really unlucky, we usually don’t know the people involved in today’s tragedies, and neither do our clergy. Pat answers about everything happening for a reason simply don’t fly any more (if they ever did). We know about every major tragedy in the world within hours, if not minutes. We also know that in the backdrop of prime time are innumerable ongoing tragedies in distant places: atrocities, starvation, constant war. We know enough to be outraged that the media doesn’t place these “less newsworthy” tragedies in the foreground as well. And we also know that in the backdrop of those stories is yet another: the ominous creak of the suffering of the earth itself—icebergs melting, species going extinct, crops failing, beehives falling silent.
It all starts to blur together. Even the words start to lose their meaning: “tragedy,” “injustice,” “assault,” “devastation.” These words get worn thin through repetition. They have less and less impact each time we hear them, and I think for many of us they have virtually no impact at all anymore. We can’t possibly hold it all. We can’t possibly walk around all the time like that guy on the train platform, exposed, vulnerable, acutely aware of our dependence on others. And we can’t walk around all the time like the crowd who reached out to him, seeing vulnerability in our midst and extending ourselves intimately to help. We simply can’t sustain a level of emotion and action commensurate with the influx of horrors of our time.
And yet we don’t want to get inured to it all, either. We don’t want to go numb. We don’t want what is sometimes called “empathy fatigue.” As religious people, we want sustainable empathy—a supply that flows through us without depleting us. We want to plug into the Source of Compassion itself that some of us call God—compassion that flows evenly to all creatures and never gets used up. And I think this is the right metaphor: plugging into something larger than ourselves instead of trying to generate it all from within.
One of the best ways to plug in like this spiritually is actually to unplug a little from everything else. For instance, when we watch the unfolding of a new tragedy on TV we can learn the basic outline of what’s going on, but we don’t necessarily need to keep tuned in to know the exact death toll at every given minute. We don’t need to see endless interviews with parents, spouses, children, neighbors. We don’t need to hear the bystanders telling us over and over again what the explosion sounded like and what shook and what was going through their heads at the time. None of this is really information. Most of it is just filler that’s manufactured to draw the story out. It just puts another demand on our hearts. And it doesn’t accomplish anything. Give yourself some space from things that pull unnecessarily on your heartstrings.
And this goes for violence and destruction in fiction as well. Cut back on or cut out violent movies, TV shows, computer games. If you want to be able to sustain empathy, don’t take the onslaught of real violence and suffering that you witness and then pile on pretend violence and suffering. Studies show that media violence will inure you to the real thing. If we want sustainable empathy, we need to be a little protective of our capacity for empathy, shield it from unnecessary deployment, and be intentional about recharging it from the source of compassion in the universe. We all want our empathy to fuel a response to the suffering of our day that is powerful and effective, not overwhelmed and paralyzed.
Psychologist Wendy Mogel has an interesting take on this. She argues that our secular society doesn’t really equip us well to be able to respond with empathy and action. She talks about how as children, when a tragedy occurs we are often given nothing to do but nurse our own feelings. In her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, she writes:
An especially troubling aspect of modern childrearing is the way parents fetishize their children’s … feelings and neglect to help them develop a sense of duty to others. I saw an example of this when a child died at a secular high school where I lecture. The day after the tragedy adults were stationed around the campus so the children would have someone to talk to if they felt bad. There were no…sacred good deeds to be done on behalf of the dead child, no organized lessons in social obligation. In the religious community the students might help to prepare and deliver dinners to the family or escort the younger brother home from school. The emphasis in this secular community was to keep the children’s self-regard intact and their mood elevated.
Do we worry too much about what we’re feeling and not feeling, and too little about what we’re doing and not doing to make things better? The empathic impulse is only consummated in empathic action. If we frustrate the impulse too many times and give it nowhere to land, it will eventually just slink away.
On the other hand, with the sheer volume of tragedies in our world, you have to be selective. You can’t respond to everything, nor should you try. You need to pick a fight. Something that’s yours—close to your heart—something you care about so much that you feel vulnerable around it. Maybe that fight is big and global like climate change or labor in Bangladesh. Maybe it’s a little closer to home like LGBT rights or helping to make our streets safer for everyone. Maybe it’s even closer to home, working to keep your own family out of poverty and raise kids who are compassionate and kind. Don’t underestimate this last one: teaching the young people in your life how to respond to the suffering in their world is part of your sacred response to the suffering in yours. Whatever fight you pick, it should be something for which you can sustain your level of engagement over the long term.
As Universalists we have faith that there is a source of boundless compassion in the universe. We experience it in our vulnerability and our intimacy and we realize it in our action. We don’t know whether everything happens for a reason, but we do know that as human beings we have a stake in what happens. We have a responsibility to preserve our own capacity to care about it.
And though we may not always walk around like the guy in the subway station, aware of our vulnerability, and though we may not always behave like the crowd, rescuing the vulnerable in our midst, we know deep down that we are interconnected with all of existence. The fate of the world is the fate of each one of us.
- Noah’s Ark - February 1, 2018
- On the First Day - September 1, 2016
- Sustainable Empathy - October 1, 2013
