Empathy for the Heart of God

Have you ever sat at the bedside of someone you love who was in pain, and felt the strange double sensation of being utterly present and utterly outside? You could see the suffering in the lines of their face. You could read it the way you read a familiar handwriting. And yet you could not, however much you wished it, climb inside the pain and bear it for them.

You wanted to. You would have, if you could. But the pain stayed theirs.

The most you could do was reach toward it, hold their hand, and stay.

That experience, so common it almost passes unnoticed, hides one of the deepest mysteries of being human. And it turns out to be one of the deepest mysteries of prayer.

There is a word for what happens in that hospital room, and it is a word that has become threadbare from overuse.

The word is empathy. 

We toss it around so casually now that it has come to mean something like "being nice" or "agreeing with someone's feelings." But once upon a time, in the early years of the twentieth century, a brilliant young woman wrote a doctoral dissertation that took the word apart and put it back together again, and what she discovered has everything to do with how we love God.

Her name was Edith Stein. She was Jewish, German, a philosopher of formidable gifts, and a student of Edmund Husserl. In 1916 she finished her dissertation on the problem of empathy. Years later, she read the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila straight through until dawn, closed the book, and said quietly, "This is the truth."

She was baptized. She entered the Carmelites. She took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. And in 1942 she was taken from her convent and murdered at Auschwitz, having offered her life, she said, for her people.

The philosopher who had spent her youth working out exactly how one human heart reaches the suffering of another ended by laying down her own heart inside the worst suffering of her century. Her life became the thing her philosophy had described.

 

What Empathy Actually Is

Stein saw, with a philosophical rigor that later led to her conversion to Christianity, that empathy is not the same as feeling what another feels.

That is a fiction we tell ourselves, and a dangerous one. When I grasp your grief, I do not grieve your grief. Your grief remains yours, lived by you, and I reach it from outside, as yours and not mine.

She had a careful pair of words for this. Your grief is "primordial" to you. You live it directly, from the inside, with the immediacy of someone who cannot step out of his own skin. To me, your grief is "non-primordial." I genuinely reach it. I really do touch it. But I touch it across the distance that keeps you you and me me.

Empathy is not absorption. It is not pretending your experience is mine.

It is the real act by which I cross over to where you are, grasp what you are living, and remain myself the whole time.

This is harder than it sounds, and more beautiful.

Most of us oscillate between two failures. Either we keep our distance and call it objectivity ("I'm sure she'll be fine"), or we collapse the distance entirely and call it compassion ("I know exactly what you're feeling").

Neither one is empathy.

The first refuses to cross over. The second pretends there is no distance to cross.

Real empathy keeps the distance and crosses it at the same time. It honors the otherness of the other even as it draws near.

Stein noticed, too, that this act has a shape, a kind of three-fold movement.

First the other's experience rises up before me, legible, meaningful, in their face, their posture, the catch in their voice.

Then I follow it, led by them, into the experience itself, filling it out from within as if I were there.

And finally I come back to myself, holding now a comprehension of what they bear that I did not have before, a comprehension that can answer, that can speak, that can console.

Rise. Enter. Return.

The motion of a heart reaching another heart.

 

The Face That Rises Up

Now turn this toward Christ.

There is a Face that rises up before the praying soul, and that Face is wounded. It is a Face we have learned to read since childhood, the crowned and bleeding Face of the Crucified, the Face Veronica wiped, the Face the centurion looked at and confessed God.

The prophet saw it long before us: "He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account" (Isaiah 53:2-3, NRSV).

This Face is what Stein would call the expressive given, the meaningful exterior through which an inner life becomes readable.

It is the first moment of empathy: the suffering of Christ rises up before us, asks to be read, asks to be seen as meaning and not just as image.

And how easily we look away. We say the words. We make the sign of the cross. We move on.

The terrible familiarity of the crucifix is one of the great dangers of being a Christian. We have seen it so many times that we no longer see it at all. The first act of empathy toward the Heart of God is simply to look, and to keep looking, until the Face becomes legible again.

 

Following Him Inward

The second moment is to follow. 

Stein says that in empathy I am led by the other into their experience, and I fill it out from within, as if I were there.

This is what contemplative prayer has always done in light of the Passion. It is what Ignatius asks of the retreatant. It is what the Stations of the Cross train the body to do. It is what Mary did at the foot of the Cross, and what John did.

We follow the Lord into the garden where he sweat blood, and we feel along the contours of that grief, not pretending it is ours, but letting Him show us what it was.

We follow Him into the courtyard where Peter denied Him, and we sit beside the brazier with Him, and we feel the cold and the betrayal not as ours but as His. We follow Him to the pillar, to the road, to the nails, to the hours when His mother stood below and He could not reach her with His hands.

We do not become Him. His suffering stays primordially His. The Cross is His Cross. But we reach it. We cross the room.

And here we discover something that breaks the heart. The suffering of Christ is not only physical. The deepest wound in that Heart is the wound of a love poured out and thrown back.

He loved His own to the end, and His own received Him not.

He loves still, and still He is refused.

The Heart that gave everything is shrugged at by a world too busy to look.

To follow Him inward is to see this. To see that the wound in His side is also a wound in His love. That He suffers not only from what was done to His body but from what is still done to His gift.

 

The Return That Can Answer

The third moment of empathy, Stein says, is the return. We come back to ourselves, carrying now a comprehension we did not have before. And this comprehension is not sterile. It is the kind of understanding that can answer.

This is where restorative love is born. It's what I called "reparation" in yesterday's message. Though, I realize that's a loaded word.

Restorative love, what I mean by reparation, is the answer that returns.

It is the heart that has crossed the room to where Christ suffers His refused love, and that comes back able to respond, able to console, able to love Him in the very place where He is refused.

It is not morbid. It is not a strange invention or a relic of an unhealthy spirituality. It is simply what love does when it has actually looked, actually followed, and actually returned.

Restorative love is empathy for the Heart of God.

Saint Paul writes, "I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church" (Colossians 1:24). Nothing is lacking in the merits of Christ. What is "lacking" is us — our crossing over, our reaching, our return that can answer.

Christ in His infinite Heart left room for our love to make a difference, not because He needed it, but because love does not work by domination. Love invites. Love opens a place. Love waits.

 

Living It This Week

How does a person actually practice this? A few suggestions, gently offered.

The next time you see a crucifix, or a depiction of the Passion, don't gloss past it. Look until it becomes a Face and not a decoration. Do not rush. Stein's first moment of empathy is the willingness to let the expressive Face rise up before you as meaningful.

Follow Him into one scene of the Passion this week. Not all of them. Just one. The Agony in the Garden, perhaps, or the moment His mother met Him on the road. Read it slowly in the Gospel. Then sit with Him there. Do not try to feel anything. Just be present, as you would be present at a friend's bedside, letting His experience fill itself in for you, as He shows you.

Return with an answer. When you come up from prayer, bring something back. A small act offered. A patience kept. A bit of work done well for love of Him. A consoling word said inside your heart: Lord, I saw You. I am with You. I love You here, in this place where so many do not. That is restorative love. It's not that Jesus needed restoring, but it is filling the empty space in his heart for those who refused empathy, for those who did not reciprocate His love.

Honor the distance. You will never be Christ. His suffering is His, primordially and forever. But that distance is not a wall. It is the very space across which love moves. Without the distance there would be no crossing, no reaching, no answer. Honor it.

Edith Stein gave the philosophical bones to what the saints have always known by instinct: that to love is to cross a distance without erasing it, to enter without absorbing, to return with an answer in your hands. She crossed that distance in her body at last, at Auschwitz, with her people many of whom had rejected the Christ she had embraced in her heart.

The Heart of God is waiting to be read. The Face rises up. He meets your eyes. Will you look?