Empathy
“Empathy
is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to
understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone
else's pain is as meaningful as your own.”
Barbara
Kingsolver
Right now in the world,
there is a lot of anger toward immigrants. Fear about all the
accommodations that must be made to have so many foreign born people
flooding into countries that are different ethnically and
linguistically. Fear that they will take jobs away, fear that they
will deplete our resources. Fear that they will change
our cultures with their difference. The common denominator is fear.
Then, take a minute to think about what you would do in their
circumstances. If your homeland was being torn apart by war, if you
were watching your children starve and buildings and human beings blown up
around you every day—what would you do? Without brushing away the
possibility that it could ever happen to you—without saying, “Well,
I don't know, but they just need to go home,” give it some
thought—what would I do?
We do have our own
problems, no doubt. We have an infrastructure that is sixty years,
sometimes one hundred years, old; we have fires burning down entire
communities, and floods swamping towns, a heroin epidemic that is
killing our children every single day, and gun violence that is off the
charts in the so-called civilized world. Our pain is real—but so is
theirs. Sixty-five million people are living in refugee camps on
planet earth at this very moment. That's more people than are living
in the states of California, New York, and Florida combined. Try to
wrap your head around that. Try to imagine what it would be like for
you to live in a refugee camp without even the basic amenities of
clean water and bathroom facilities.
Empathy is the
opposite of spiritual meanness and, I would add, the opposite of
spiritual indifference. It means that we take another persons world
view, that we honestly try to imagine walking in their shoes. It
means that we think deeply about how we would cope if we were in
their circumstances. It means that we see their pain and fear as just
as real and legitimate as our own. We need more empathy in the world
right now. Let it begin with us.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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