What's empathy about?

Empathy is the key to connection and the bridge to relationship. The lack of empathy..when one is lacking in the capacity to empathize, is at the root of so many mental health concerns and personality conflicts.

As John Donne famously put it, no man is an island...In his poem, he asks for whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee. No person is truly an island, and when we feel we are, part of it has to do with self-isolation, self-imposed loneliness, part of it has to do with fallenness, part of it has to do with pain we create for ourselves as a consequence of the slippery slope of fallenness that marks humanity (but does not define it). The cards we were dealt after the time of the first Adam. Hay tanta soledad en ese oro. (Borges).

So what is exactly is Empathy...? Empathy is the capacity to seek to understand another person. It is the space we hold for another person even if they are angry and yelling at us. It is the space we create by withholding our own response and our own presumption and defensiveness. We create the space by listening to what the person is feeling, seeking to understand their feelings rather than thinking of a comeback or sarcastic remark to neutralize them. Self-Empathy is doing exactly just that for our selves, allowing ourselves the space to feel what we got to feel by seeking to know our selves. 

Empathy allows for true communication. We cannot read each other's minds. Attempting to do so is what closes ourselves from hearing what someone else has to say, and to what they are feeling, and truly knowing them. For example: Something your little sister says about you, might pain you because you interpret it as confirming your own judgment and insecurity about yourself...yet when all along she could be telling you she is in pain, because of something you said.

Empathy requires courage. Courage because we expose ourselves to pain, shrapnel lodged in our hearts when someone deals their words like blades as Emily Dickinson might say. Yet, blessed are the meek. Blessed are we who turn the other cheek. Blessed is the person who does not make the situation worse by creating new problems. Blessed are we who seek to truly resolve problems.

To exercise empathy, we more often than not, need to learn to lower ourselves. To be on the same ground with someone else. To consider someone else an equal. Sometimes it involves understanding that we are equal in dignity, and not lower, than another person. A plaque in a pastoral counseling office I have visited reads,

When Moses came close to a burning bush which the fire did not consume, he encountered the presence of God and was told to take off his shoes. “Do not come near here; (שַׁל־נְעָלֶיךָ) remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is (אַדְמַת־קֹדֶשׁ) holy ground .” (Ex 3:5).

When we seek to connect (especially when we are coming from different places culturally, religiously or otherwise), As I have learned from those with experience in resolving interracial conflict, we must treat the ground that connects us as sacred. We must take special care to show humility. We must remove our presumption and seek to meet each other where we respectively are. To do that, we lower ourselves from the sandals on our feet, we lower ourselves from ourselves to really feel the sacred ground we share with each other. Seeking to really feel the same ground that connects us is Empathy. Through empathy, we understand one another, we connect, and we from this, we truly know that we are not islands upon ourselves. To be the one to take the first step towards empathy, we need to trust that we are supported when we step out into the unknown.