Mary's Note Tool

In Defense of Empathy
Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz
July 5, 2009
Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington

READING:

Call Me By My True Names 
By Thich Nhat Hanh

Please call me by my true names
Don't say that I will depart tomorrow--even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.

I am a mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.

"In Defense of Empathy"

    A couple of summers ago I preached a sermon called, “the E-word,” in which I argued that Unitarian Universalists have an inappropriate aversion to evangelism, which merely means spreading the good news about our religious movement. Evangelism is distinct from prosetlyzing, trying to win converts, which assumes that “my faith is better than yours” and can be seen, legitimately, as inimical to our Principles -- the 1st Principle, which honors the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, and the 4th principle, which affirms everyone’s right to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  But evangelism – the e-word in that sermon – is one that we ought to feel more at home with. Summer is a good time to bring a friend to church – to share this open, friendly faith like a Fourth of July backyard barbecue – pass the tofu burgers please.

   Anyway, I thought about titling today’s sermon, “the other e-word,” but it had never occurred to me before recently that I might have to take to the pulpit to preach in defense of empathy.
In fact, until recent weeks, empathy had received nothing but good press. 

   A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of stories about new findings in neurobiology. Scientists had located empathy! -- reporting that the very same regions of the brain light up when you imagine someone else’s happy moment as when you remember your own. And, then there was the sex angle: when you do something nice for someone else – eureka! -- you get the same neural reward as you do when the brain is presented with food or sex.

           The conclusion of some neuroscientists was that empathy is foundational to the evolution of morality. Our ability to imagine the struggles of another is what enables us to practice compassion. It’s “the quality that makes us human,” according to the American Psychological Association, but it turns out that animals also experience something like empathy. If you put two rats in a cage and give one something to eat at the same time you give the other an electric shock, eventually the first rat will stop eating.

    Empathy also has gotten high marks from the President of this now 233-year-old nation. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama wrote this about empathy:  "It is at the heart of my moral code and it is how I understand the Golden Rule -- not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes." On the day Justice David Souter announced he would be stepping down from the Supreme Court, Obama told a news conference he would be looking to replace him with a jurist ”who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation, “ and he added,  “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”

   It wasn’t until Obama introduced Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and specifically referred to this quality as a particular strength of hers, that empathy became a dirty word in some circles. “Justice is not about empathy,” said commentators from Karl Rove to Washington Post Columnist Charles Krauthammer.

   Now empathy happens to be one of my favorite words, and it pains me to hear it spoken through lips curled in scorn. In fact, in my theology, empathy is the saving power – love plus imagination – that enables us to build community and create Heaven on Earth.

    Last weekend I went to sit in front of the White House for a while, in support of a vigil against torture. I’d been asked to speak at 9 pm, but I wasn’t able to be there then; still, I wanted to show up.  I found a shady spot on the grass and sat there for about an hour, listening to stories of people from Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Palestine. I was there as a person, not so much as a minister – no dog collar, no stole – nothing to distinguish me as a representative of our faith. Just a human being, listening to stories of other human beings, stories that hurt to hear. How much can the heart hold? I wondered. And at the same time, a voice in my head was wondering, is this a good use of my time?

   I’ll come back to that in a minute.

    But first I want to talk a little about Sonia Sotomayor, and I’m getting a little more topical here than usual, since the Senate hearings on her confirmation are scheduled to begin a week from tomorrow. It wasn’t an accident that it was a woman of color that inspired an attack on empathy, and I believe it is tied to a kind of coded racism that is still very strong in American public life.

    Sotomayor has spoken with pride about her Latina identity, and even said that she believes her life experiences as a Latina woman equip her particularly well to make good judicial decisions, perhaps better than a white man. There has been a lot of talk on shout radio about whether this makes her a racist.

    I don’t know much about how Sotomayor experiences her identity, but as a white woman I am not feeling threatened by that statement. In fact, I would say that in some cases a white woman is better equipped than a white man to make good decisions, because a woman of any race who has risen as far as Sotomayor has had to know the rules of engagement for more than two groups: women’s, men’s, and mixed, while sometimes white men can get by knowing only one.  True? Less true than in my mother’s generation, maybe, but still true.

   I am not saying here that women are better than men, so please hold your emails. I am saying that women, even white women, may grow up with a taste of what W.E.B.. DuBois called “double consciousness,” the need to think not only as the person you are, but as the person observing you. As DuBois wrote it, “double consciousness” was a necessity of survival for Black people – in order to survive, a Black person had to understand his own mind, and also get inside the head of the white man who holds power in society.

    Now this double consciousness is not the same as empathy. Still, a person of color in white America, it seems to me, may become more nimble than white people at the imagination necessary for empathy to arise.

    And it could be that this may be true in special ways for a Latina woman. In La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua writes of the dawning of her mestiza consciousness, the consciousness of a woman who lives on the borderlands: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out, yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover.” She continues, “As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.”

    Now I have no idea how much of that would be meaningful to Sonia Sotomayor in her identity as a Latina woman, but what I can imagine might resonate is the sense of holding within her several cultures: the Bronx of her birth, the Puerto Rican of her ancestry, the American system within which she rose on her own merit. Like Obama, who carries black and white, Hawaii and Chicago South Side, Africa and Indonesia in his identity, she is mestiza, mixed, and that very quality may afford her that nimbleness of imagination that informs empathy.

    And I think this is why it was Sotomayor who has become the focus of an anti-progressive attack on the quality of empathy, which is, as philosopher/linguist George Lakoff has said, the heart of the progressive worldview. The commentators say they are attacking racial prejudice and something they call “idiosyncratic emotion,” but what I believe is being attacked, in coded language, is this very cultural heterogeneity – multiculturalism, if you will -- that threatens a rigid, punitive, strict-constructionist view of the judiciary, a view that makes the old ways “normal” and masks its own cultural bias. This goes way beyond an attack on identity politics. It is an attack on identities themselves, and as Unitarian Universalists we are called to name it, and to stand against it – to stand on the side of love against this attack on identities that predispose a Latina, a woman, a mixed-race man to see the world from more than a single point of view.

If you were here in church last Sunday, you heard several of our leaders talking about their experiences building VOICE, Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement. You may have noticed Robert Buckman tearing up as he spoke of the conditions in which he’s seen people living, not two miles from this church. He now knows that unless he does this work, Robert told us, he will not be whole.

Now Robert and many of us in this congregation could have a comfortable life, meditating to music on our iPods. We can have our own vine and fig tree, as the hymn says; we can live in peace and unafraid.

Except that we can’t. As long as nations are going to war against nations, as long as people are tortured, as long as two miles from here people are living in deplorable conditions, and others are suffering months and months of a toothache because they can’t afford a root canal – our vine is withered; our fig tree cannot bear fruit.

Like the little girl in Rev. JD’s story, we may find we need to put away our crayolas and our glossy magazine pictures, in solidarity with those who don’t have access to such gifts.

How much can the heart hold? As I sat on the grass last week listening to stories of the most horrific kind of inhumanity visited by one human being upon another, I asked myself – I always ask myself -- whether this was a good use of my time. But as I listened, as I felt the pain of the people who were speaking, I felt my heart growing larger.

    “Nobody has ever measured,” said Zelda Fitzgerald, “Nobody has ever measured, not even the poets, how much a heart can hold.”

    This is why empathy is the saving power. The more we allow ourselves to pay attention, to hear the cries of suffering in the world, to let the various identities within each of us speak, the more we know, like Robert Buckman, that this is how we seek wholeness. The more we let in, the more room there is. Room enough to understand, with Thich Naht Hahn, that something of the mayfly is in each of us, and also its predator the bird; that there is within us a scared little girl, and also a violent abuser. Call me by my true names: I am that too.

    The heart can hold it all, said the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron: “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”

    May we hold one another, may we hold the suffering world, in the spaciousness of our hearts, and of a summer day. And may we always be making room for more.

BENEDICTION

How much can the heart hold? It is as limitless as a summer day. May yours be filled with peace, with love, and with the saving power that enables you to go out into the world and practice compassion. Amen.

Sources and Inspirations:

•Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
•Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
•George Lakoff, “Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy: The Conservative Stealth Strategy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/empathy-sotomayor-and-dem_b_209406.html