A Call to Christian Empathy

In 2001, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich published her acclaimed book “Nickel and Dimed (On NOT Getting by in America)”. From 1998 to 2000, the journalist went undercover as an unskilled laborer to take on minimum wage jobs and investigate first-hand the plight of the “working poor.” She worked long hours, faced difficult working conditions, and received minimal pay which barely met her living expenses. Ehrenreich’s social experiment was an effort to discover the realities that low-wage earners face.

Americans living in modest or even affluent comfort can certainly sympathize with the predicament of the poor. We do not wish for people to suffer, we are concerned about their well-being and living conditions, we wish there were something we could do. From a place of “sympathy” we donate money, food, clothing, and resources for assistance. Without these acts of mercy the working poor would find themselves in perhaps even more hopeless conditions.

Sympathy evokes a response for mercy through understanding and compassion. Empathy makes it real.

When we sympathize with someone’s distress, we can offer help, or at the very least, some words of encouragement, but to empathize with a person’s burden, comes from a place of personal understanding - a firsthand knowledge of its condition. In order for Ehrenreich to write a realistic account of the people living on minimum wage, she had to experience it from a personal standpoint. Granted, Ehrenreich had money in the bank and she had the ability to abandon the hardships of the working poor at any time she chose, but from the moment she entered the experiment until she left its taxing demands, she had internalized it. For two years, it was personal.

If we are Christians living in relative comfort we generally exercise mercy, quite often, through a level of sympathy and perhaps less often through one of empathy. If we are giving all that we can out of our excess and we are making a difference, why then, is it necessary to experience empathy?

During the first decade of the 13th century a man who later became known as Francis of Assisi underwent a period of spiritual transformation. He had grown up as the son of a wealthy merchant and had been accustomed to a life of enjoyment, luxury, and indulgence. Yet, one day, upon encountering a leper, Francis embraced him, kissed him, and felt that he had encountered Jesus Christ himself. Now from his affluent lifestyle, and his understanding of the poor, the sick, and the hopeless in medieval Assisi, Francis could well have continued as the son of a merchant, lived in comfort, and helped the poor abundantly from his family’s wealth. He did not choose this easier path. He relinquished all his worldly goods (including his clothing in the town piazza) and lived in the footsteps of the poor. He became one with the people he wished to serve. His act of total abandonment was ground-breaking and captured the notice of those around him and it was not long before he had a huge following - which he continues to have until this very day.

True empathy required that Francis become one with Lady Poverty. In this radical manner, Francis learned to love on a deeper, more Christ-like level.

Jesus Christ, who from the beginning “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1) became one with creation when he became incarnate and took on our humanity, our sufferings, our weaknesses, our sorrows and our joys, so that he could lead us to a deeper understanding of God’s love for us. Christ showed us the way to empathy, the way to love, and the way to God’s very own heart by becoming one of us. He didn’t have to, he chose to. Rather than having sympathy for us from the comfort of heaven, he came down and took on our human form; he felt our pain, he walked and wept beside us. He still does - he has not left us. That is the level of empathy. “... I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

As Christians, if we wish to understand the nature of God’s love, the deep and abiding commitment Christ made with us at Baptism, we can delve more deeply into the territory of empathetic understanding. We may not, like Francis, be in the position to give up everything: our lifestyle, our money, our responsibilities, our families, etc… in order to experience empathy, but there are measures we can take to bring us to a deeper understanding. We can work each day, a little at a time, to share in the conditions of those less fortunate.

Christians are familiar with the practice of fasting particularly when the church asks us to fast during Lent on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but adding days of fasting to our own regimen can help us to remember that not everyone can grab a bite at the first sign of hunger. Rather than keeping the air conditioner set at 70 degrees in the summer or 80 degrees in the winter - one can experience the unpleasant conditions of the homeless who lack the creature comforts we’ve grown accustomed to. These are small measures we can take by reducing our own comfort levels in order to empathize with the poor. Giving up the freedom to indulge our whims on demand can help us to understand, in a small way, the plight of those without freedom.

Make mercy personal. By experiencing the corporal works of mercy firsthand:

• Be hungry, thirsty, and uncomfortable with the temperature when you work to care for the poor
• Focus your own illnesses, powerlessness, and grief externally and pray for others when you are suffering through a personal crisis

Sitting from a place of comfort and helping others is sympathetic. Christ could have done the same, but he came to us, suffered, and died for us. Francis could have clothed the poor with his father’s fabrics and fed them from the scraps of his own table but he shared in their suffering first hand because he wanted to be joined with Christ more deeply.

In our own spiritual journey to understand the love of God, a call to Christian empathy is an invitation to live mercy by feeling its need; it is a call to love more intimately. Jesus came down from heaven to become one with us, we can come down from our place of comfort to become one with him. Become one with love by sharing in the conditions of love and mercy.