“Exercising Empathy”     October 21, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor                      

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From Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden,“It has been said that empathy is one of the most important attributes that evolved in humans. It is what makes us distinctive as humans and separates us from other animals. Human empathy is different than sympathy because it involves our ability for awareness and intuitive understanding. Whereas sympathy is an automatic resonance with the feelings of others, empathy is much more about insight and understanding. It is our ability to understand not just that someone suffers but also why, to see into the causes.”

I did my doctoral dissertation on aspects of monastic spirituality. What that substantively means is that I know more than almost anyone you will ever know about a very narrow topic which no sane person would ever want to know anything about. If you hang out around Catholics or mystics of other flavors you will hear names of books and people like the Desert Fathers, the Rule of St Benedict, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Imitation of Christ, and 

such people as St. Teresa of Avila, the Little Flower, and St. Bonaventure, and the guy whose work became seminal for me, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ingnatius of Loyola. 

I dare say that I am the only person you will ever know who actually studied, let alone read, all of these spiritual classics. I’ll be signing autographs at the end of the service today. There was obviously a great deal about this body of classic spiritual literature that drew me in or I wouldn’t have spent so much time with it but these works are not popular in the modern age for a very good reason. 

Almost all of them also promote a certain spiritual narcissism that borders on, if not expresses a full-blown case of, mental illness.

Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church, wrote his exercises as a manual to be used by a person over a 4 week long silent retreat. He writes in the introduction, “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” Ignatius describes an entirely self-centered spirituality in which he encourages his monastic brothers to be so afraid of going to hell that they will not consider committing even the most venial of sins. In one of the early exercises he tells them to come to see themselves as “a sore and an abscess from whence have come forth so many sins, so many evils, and the most vile poison.”

It is a paradox, Ignatius wants to destroy the ego but for a purely egotistical goal, which was to avoid the fires of hell and to attain to heaven. One gets the impression that if Ignatius had not been so concerned about the eternal disposition of his immortal soul that he might have been quite a cavalier, which, in fact, he was in his earlier life. 

Now, granted, Ignatius may represent the extreme but as such he serves as a good illustration of what I mean when I divide the religious would into two groups. There is the religion of Ignatius and his ilk, which may feel deeply and passionately, it is entirely self-serving, and there is the kind of spirituality of which the hallmark is empathy towards others. 

This really started to come together for me the first time that I had to teach a college class a course on the life and teachings of Jesus. One of our textbooks, back in the fall of 1994, was the newly published book by the late Marcus Borg, “Meeting Jesus, Again, For the first time.” It was there that I encountered the description of Jesus, not so much as the dying and rising savior or the exalted Son of God, but, Borg described him as being the “teacher of radical compassion.”

Looking behind the assumptions of the parables, the miracle accounts, the sermons, a historical Jesus emerged whose primary focus was an expression of empathy. Either I was too young to see it when I was in grad school, or the more scholarly text books hid this simple insight from me, but it wasn’t until I had been preaching for 15 years that it started to really make sense to me. 

The religion of Ignatius and, for that matter, most of what passes for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, is self-centered . . . piety, devotion, worship, prayer, sacraments, all as a kind of divine fire insurance, to keep a psychopathic God off our case long enough for us to slip through the Pearly Gates and then get to be as self-indulgent as we always wanted to be in our mortal existence. 

The historical Jesus wasn’t trying to save our souls; he was trying to open our eyes . . . not at all unlike the Buddha and possibly even Zoroaster. 

I find the common Christian nomenclature of being “saved” to be both intellectually and spiritually insulting but the self-description of the Buddha as one who is simply “awake,” that really resonates with me. Our spiritual practices, coming here every week whether you participate in sacraments, prayers, or rituals, is ultimately a concerted practice of trying to become our full and awake selves. 

The religion of these great spiritual classics and, sadly, of most main stream religions, promotes piety but not goodness. They teach people to avoid the sins of sexual immorality, gluttony, drunkenness, greed, and vanity but a person can be personally sinless and still be of no practical use whatsoever. Think of someone who never smokes, drinks, cusses, uses drugs, steals, hoards, or messes around… would you invite that person to dinner? Or more importantly, would you share your most painful and embarrassing personal challenges with them? Piety is a pursuit for the pious. It may leave them untarnished by the world, but they are also of little or no use to the world.

What Paul Gilbert is writing in Mindful Compassion is that the human is the one animal that is capable of feeling empathy. I don’t want to rile the dog and cat lovers in the audience:  Even a pet can feel sympathy. Your dog or your cat may not know why you are sad or sick but they can sense that you are in pain and they can show sympathy. Empathy is different not only because there is an element of understanding but because there can also be an element of anticipation. 

For example, recently, Sean needed to use the church to rehearse the Opera’s play about wine but recognizing that the AA group would be meeting in the building at the same time, he did not want to put them through hearing jokes and songs about drinking to excess. This is empathy, to anticipate what might cause pain in another and to take corrective action. 

This is was not the biggest deal in the world. Sean was under a time crunch, he needed rehearsal time and space, and our AA group is very small and if one of those guys heard funny songs about getting drunk and decided to leave the meeting and go get drunk, that would not have been Sean’s fault. And it wasn’t because Sean knows anyone in that AA group, or that Sean is in recovery, but because he was able to anticipate that rehearsing at that time might have created an issue for some stranger, even here in our building where he had every right to get his work done, but he decided to work around the A. A. meeting. 

Again, not the biggest deal in the world but it is an example of not only being able to sympathize with the plight of people trying to manage a potentially lethal addiction and being willing to inconvenience himself and the cast of an opera to avoid problems. I’m not saying that your dog doesn’t miss you when you are away or that your cat doesn’t stay by your side when you are sick, but empathy is a uniquely human potential, but it is a potential that is sadly realized. I think that it is the mark of real spirituality and it is what separates the spiritual from the merely religious.  

Let me give you a contrasting illustration. Yesterday there were thousands of Central Americans who are fleeing from gang and government violence, trying to make their way north to find work in the United States. Our president threatened to cut off millions of dollars of aid to Mexico if they allowed them to cross the river between Guatemala and Mexico so they are trapped on this bridge.

And I want to draw your attention to a part of this image: you see off to the side of the bridge, a number of little boats in the river. These guys are ferrying people across the river for 50 cents per person. All of these people trapped in the humidity and the heat of southern Mexico could just keep walking if they had 50 cents to get a boat ride across the river. That is how poor and desperate these people are. 

In defending his refusal to allow these refugees to seek safety in the USA, President Trump said, “These are not babies, these are hardened criminals.” 

The problem with that is, of course, they 

actually are babies, mothers, with children in their arms and on their backs, . . . mothers who don’t have 50 cents to get a boat ride across the river, mothers who have already walked for weeks and plan to walk for more weeks, in the hopes of saving their children from violence, rape, and starvation. Once she gets across the bridge from Guatemala into Mexico, she has 1400 more miles to carry those children to the border of the United States where it is most likely she will be apprehended, her children will be locked in cages and she will be put in detention. 

Folks, after a three-month march through the tropics, this woman will be put in detention and her children will be put in cages on your behalf, by your government, using your tax dollars. How do you feel about that?

Gilbert is arguing in his book that combination of the practices of mindfulness and compassion makes us able to be empathetic, we can literally anticipate what these people will feel in a few weeks when they reach the southern border of Texas. But in the world of psychology, there is a lot of professional conversation about people who are not capable of feeling empathy. It is a trait that we see in narcissists, in psychopaths, in sociopaths, and in some kinds of Autism. 

While it is a common professional practice to avoid diagnosing anyone we have not actually had in a counseling relationship with any of those disorders, we have heard enough from our President to see that he does not appear to feel empathy, that he certainly appears to be narcissistic, and I believe that I could build a pretty good case for psychopath. 

And I know that you know this is not just me being political.

Former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, has warned that Trump is taking us in the direction of fascism. Noam Chomsky has said that the Republican party has become the most dangerous organization in the history of the world. Berkley Professor and former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich is weekly producing videos warning the public about the tax scams and disastrous but self-serving economic policy of the Trump administration, and Michael Moore has warned that his policies could lead to human extinction. I would not use the pulpit for partisan purposes. I am talking about something that is far beyond politics.

But as it directly concerns empathy, let me mention this horrible story we learned of this week of the unspeakably cruel, torture, murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, Trump’s initial reaction was to observe that he wasn’t a US citizen and the Saudi government had pledged to buy more than 100 billion dollars of military hardware from us . . . a grossly inflated number but still, he was making it plain that in the choice between sincere empathy for a brutally murdered journalist and cash, he would choose the cash. And I know that no one here is shocked by that. 

And maybe no one here will be shocked by any stupid thing that televangelist, Pat Robertson says either, but a co-host on his TV show was trying to lead him into being shocked and offended by the murder of Khashoggi but he also took Trump’s position that you don’t want to lose the sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia even though they are using that hardware in an illegal war in Yemen. 

Religion without empathy does not, in my estimation, deserve to be considered a religion . . . it is just enlightened self-interest with rituals. I accept that it is impolite and probably unethical to criticize another person’s religion, but I would insist that they have to actually have a religion before it becomes something to be respected. People whose faith is not defined by empathy are not members of the religion club and I don’t feel any obligation to treat them with kid gloves. 

The ancient Greeks had a proverb, they said: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit” 

Ignatius was just wrong. The purpose of our lives is not to live in such a way that we avoid hell and manage to get into heaven. Come on, that’s not just self-centered and narcissistic, that’s pathetically stupid. The real purpose of life is to be a blessing to other people, to alleviate suffering, to make the world more safe, more just, more fair, and, dare I say it, more loving and more happy. 

 

I want churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques to raise generations of people whose faith is defined by a practice of empathy. So that you get people like Sean who can anticipate how he might avoid creating a problem for a recovering alcoholic…. And when you have done that for years and your boss at the border patrol tells you to take away the children of refugees and lock them up in cages, you just refuse to do it. Or when your boss, the prince of Saudi Arabia tells you to torture, kill and dismember a journalist, you just refuse to do it. 

 

There is a way to be a Muslim with integrity. There is a way to be Jewish, Buddhist, or Christian with integrity. You just can’t be any of those things without empathy. That’s my opinion and as it turns out, I also happen to be right. 

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