Empathy and the Heart of Christ

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

What stood out to me in these readings for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time was a line from the first reading: 

You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Ex 22, 20).

In order for this commandment to have any weight at all, it was necessary that Israel experience oppression, that is, taste what it is like to suffer as slaves without intrinsic value. Without that experience, the commandment not to oppress a resident alien would have been nothing more than an idea, and ideas are abstract. Israel would be a people without empathy. For the Greeks, knowledge was the product of reasoning on a rather high level of abstraction, and the emotions are to be governed by reason. But for the Jews, knowledge is union, that is, it is a matter of experience. We don’t know something until we are united to it in some way. I don’t know a country until I’ve been there, and the more time I spend there, the more complete is my knowledge; I really don’t know someone until I am united to that person in some sort of friendship that loves the person as another self, as another me–as opposed to merely utilitarian friendships. The Hebrews were aliens once; they tasted alienation, they felt the pain of oppression, so now they really understand why oppressing an alien is reprehensible. Without that experience, they would quickly become an oppressor, particularly in times of prosperity. 

Some people see empathy as a raw emotion that on its own will lead a person or a society to self-destruction, and so they see empathy as dangerous, a passion that needs to be reigned in by logic and reason. But empathy is fundamentally a movement of the heart that follows upon knowledge. In fact, it is a kind of knowledge, the fruit of an experience, a knowing that is a result of union. 

There is so much in our lives that we have no real knowledge of because we simply have not had the experience. That is why as we get older and acquire more experience, we come to understand things we simply did not get when we were younger and without experience–unforunately, there are some who, despite the passing of time, never seem to learn from experience. But typically, when a person becomes a parent of a child, and that child becomes an adolescent, the parent suddenly understands something about his own parents that he just could not understand before. Moreover, when a teacher becomes an administrator, he soon begins to understand something about the administrators that he, in his youth, condemned in his ignorance.

One of my first assignments shortly after ordination was the Queen Street Mental Health Center in Toronto. Not too long after that, I came down with a crippling illness which left me in bed for most of the day in great pain. In fact, the pain was like nothing I ever had to endure before. What made matters worse was that the doctors had no idea what it was–the emergency room doctor thought it might be Polymyalgia Rheumatica, which is a condition that can suddenly come upon men over 50, and there is no known cure. That was frightening, because I knew that I could not return to the classroom should this persist. The worst part of this suffering, however, was the feeling of profound despair. I was surrounded by a dark cloud that felt as if it would never lift. Every night I was on the phone with my spiritual director, who was content simply to listen. At one point I said to him: “I think I’m beginning to understand what my patients have to go through every day”, referring to those who have to live with clinical depression and who have to learn how to live not one week at a time, nor one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Eventually the illness began to subside and after some time I was weaned off the prednisone, but the experience was very important for me, because it gave me a much greater understanding of the patients I visit, a much deeper empathy. As a result, there are certain things I would never say to a person suffering from clinical depression precisely because I had gone through an experience that was really only a small taste of what they have gone through for most of their lives. People say all sorts of things that they believe are helpful but are in fact hurtful and alienating precisely because they don’t know any better, and they don’t know any better because they haven’t experienced certain aspects of human life. The result is a lack of empathy, at least with respect to certain situations.

For many years now I have maintained that human beings are at their worst in times of prosperity but at their best in times of suffering. We see this on a national level as well as an individual level. When a nation is enjoying great prosperity, the result is not necessarily gratitude and a willingness to share the fruits of that prosperity with others less fortunate, but an increase in greed, a fear of immigrants, and an increase in cruelty, racism, and incidents of racist violence. But when a nation suddenly experiences economic hardship, i.e. the Great Depression, or war, etc., we see an increase of moral heroism. And this is true on an individual level as well. Prosperity does not bring out the best in us, but often the worst, while suffering tends to make us much more humane. 

And that is why God permits suffering in this world. He does not will suffering upon us, but he does allow it. But more to the point, God has joined himself to human suffering in joining a human nature to himself in the Person of the Word, and in his passion and death on the cross. Because of that divine presence in the depths of our humanity, we don’t suffer alone. In fact, we acquire a certain dignity in our suffering, because we keep Christ company in his suffering, and he in ours. 

The life of Christ is a victory over the darkness of suffering and death, and it is only in him, in the Person of Christ, that we are given the strength to be victorious over the darkness of our sufferings and ultimately our death. Without any kind of suffering in our lives, human nature is such that we’d gradually become loveless, self-centered, focused only on our own comfort level. Suffering makes genuine empathy for others who suffer a real possibility. And that was how God described the change that the New Covenant would bring about: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ez 36, 26). 

In other words, he gives us the capacity of love. When our life is united to Christ’s, who was a man of sorrows, a man of suffering, we become like him. Our soul is beautified by that union with him. Without that and with a life of ease and constant pleasures, we can become relatively loveless and unable to empathize with those whose lives are difficult, and the result is we remain indifferent to them. But suffering can bring us a new heart, because in the depth of our suffering, we encounter the heart of Christ.