The Necessity of Empathy

If there is one growing deficit in the lives of people during the Internet age, it would be empathy.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes, and to see life and therefore feel what they feel from their own point of view.

It helps us understand how our words, choices, and actions would or wouldn’t be well-received…before we do them.

It serves as a check on our native selfishness, our natural thoughtlessness, and our default hurtfulness.

Empathy has never been easy to acquire.

Children and adolescents need to be taught the principle of empathy, and given plenteous opportunities to practice it.

Adulthood Requires Empathy

With adulthood we gain perspective through interacting with others over a longer time in a wider array of situations.

We begin to understand better our own life story by comparison–how our “family of origin” normal isn’t necessarily normative for most people, how our traumas and issues impact us on so many levels, how deeply we need compassion and grace from God and others.

We begin to more fully understand that we cannot use our own self–how we feel, how we think, or how we react–as a reliable guide to everyone else.

We begin to more fully understand it’s not about us, about getting what we want whenever we want it.

We begin to understand that adult roles in marriage and in parenting put us into a position where we’re in way over our heads and are left grappling with the mystery of the other gender and of how vastly different our own children always are from us, however like us in some ways they might be.

We begin to understand that our plans for our loved ones are not their own plans or God’s plans for their lives, and realize how destructive and terribly counter-productive our domineering will for them actually is.

The great quest of adulthood is to surrender our control over to God, and from that surrendered and humbled and grace-dependent place to serve others.

And for that, we must experience the empathy of God and the love of God in our most broken, unloved places where we are out-of-control sinners who need a Messiah.

It is why empathy is a hugely ego-expensive endeavor, and why we all fall so terribly short of attaining great empathy.

Credo of Empathy

It’s not about me.

It’s not about now.

It’s not about my need for control or about me being big and powerful.

It’s not about my cause winning at any cost or imposing my will on all others.

Other human beings are not put on planet Earth for my benefit, to gratify my need for control, to serve my self-chosen cause or party or ideology, or to be used and used up for my sake.

Adulthood’s duties and responsibilities to care for others requires empathy.

So does public service and so does Christian ministry if it’s truly Christian.

All this can be summed up in a principle called the Golden Rule that every child in the USA used to learn, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If we desire to be treated with mercy and with understanding, if we need someone to understand our life story and the profound brokenness behind our willfulness, and then to love us in spite of that sin, then doing that same thing towards others is how we treat them.

Instead, we are in a barbarous society full of harsh denunciation and an appalling lack of empathy across the political spectrum–fueled to a great degree by the Internet.

More on that the next time….

All the Way Down, Then Up

We Americans pursue control, love control, and think we always need to be in control.

Control is the chief idol of our society, of the times in which we live.

Control Obsession

We all have a toxic little controller, an insecure dictator that wrestles with inferiority and insignificance and which condemns us without mercy for failing it.

So it hungers insatiably and schemes incessantly to be famous, great, and big–needing all control.

And if we can’t be famous, above, and big, then we want to associate with or be a fan of those who are.

The celebrity, movement, or fantasy world serves as our vicarious surrogate, giving us the illusion of bigness and highness and aboveness and betterness.

We have this bloated picture of ourselves, and demand worship from everyone and everything else in the universe.

We redefine and redesign the universe to validate our ego, celebrate our ego-crafted identity, and applaud us and glorify us forever and ever.

Worse than the Stock Market

Then it all comes crashing down.

Our inflated ego world collapses.

Our grandiose plans are in ruins.

We lose all control to the things we look to for control–to our addictions.

And we are dragged all the way down on a greased slide.

The harder we grasp control, the more tightly we hang on, the more quickly we slip down and down.

Trying to live a high-altitude life, our fall is precipitous and our crash is brutally hard.

That’s why Americans are not only egotistical and narcissistic, but depressed and self-pitying and enraged at everything and everyone else.

Supreme Irony

Strangely, even counter-intuitively, the way back to sanity is all they way down at the bottom of the slide.

It is where all our illusions of greatness are in tatters.

It’s where our need for approval and our craving for recognition die.

It’s where our bargaining and scheming, our protests and our blaming, whimper and go out.

It’s where we finally see our pretensions to control for what they are–lies that disguise our powerlessness and our enslavement.

It is where we realize our body is not the problem, and suicide is not the answer.

Our soul is the real problem, the broken, corrupt inner person we take with us wherever we go.

Yet, in the irony of all ironies, where we are the least love-worthy and the most worthy of rejection by everything and everyone, is where our redemption happens.

The Voice of Redemptive Love

A voice whispers, “You don’t need to be big and in control for Me to love you!  In fact, I love the lowly and the broken and the sinful.  I have a special place in my heart for people just like you!”

It continues, “Entrust your failing self to Me.   Surrender all control, and place yourself entirely in My good hands.  Let go of everything else!”

It gently appeals, “Trust Me for what only I can do inside of you–to make you a new person.  Trust me to remove your sins on My cross and die in your place, and replace them with My perfect rightness and everlasting life!”

Then it asks, “Will you let Me deflate your ego and love you at the bottom of your life?  Will you surrender yourself to My redeeming love and everlasting care?”

“Will you withdraw your faith in your self, and place it all in Me instead?”

For people who have known only abandonment, abandoning our self in this way sounds like insanity.

If we don’t stand with and stand up for our self, who or what will?

But it is the cure.   It is where our true healing begins.

What we need most is a re-Goding of our lost lives, a re-Jesusing of our damaged souls, and a re-Fathering of our broken hearts.

There is a solution.

A Joyless Christmas?

Perhaps I’m imagining it, but it seems that an already-nasty society is getting even more vicious.

There is precious little “good will to men” or “peace on earth” happening right now.

As Nasty as We Wanna Be

Hearts are harder, disagreements are more vehement, refusals to accept difference of opinion are more strident, and reactions and counter-reactions are escalating.

Activists on the left and on the right are increasingly angry at each other, increasingly uncharitable and voicing ever more extreme positions, and “going after” anyone on the other side.

Both sides keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and monitoring and monitoring and monitoring, and condemning and condemning and condemning, and posting and posting and posting it for all the world to see.

Then they receive lots of congratulations and validation and applause from hard-core people in their own camp, who are quick to come to their champion’s defense.

But, like the Grinch, our hearts are shriveled.

We are becoming Scrooge-ified.

And it’s terribly, terribly sad.

Little of Christmas Cheer

We’re not having much of a Christmas, are we?

Oh, the shops are full and the lines are bigger.

Our advertisements are cleverer and cuter.

But there’s a sterility to it all.

Something’s missing.

And that something is repentant compassion.

Where Joy and Love Are Found

Paradoxically, nothing evokes care for others more than coming to God as a weakling failure and being loved as a rank sinner.

Self-righteousness loves to judge and label and monitor and call out and blast and rage and even crucify our opponent.

Those who are truly loved as sinners at the bottom of their lives find themselves saying, “That could be me” and “That used to be me!” in the presence of another’s sin.

They are compassionate and see the problem behind the problem and the person behind the issue.

They use gentle and patient words, and give the impression they are on our side against our evils instead of being against us.

They keep the main thing, the main thing, which is Christ.

They see their job not as a moral policeman, but as an unworthy escort who points to the One born in Bethlehem.

Getting Christmas

In other words, they really get Christmas in a way few others do.

They hear the triumph of God’s grace, join the angelic choir in celebration, and exclaim, “Glory to God in the Highest!”

Their dearest wish is for the peace of God to reign over troubled, tormented, conflicted hearts at war with God.

They are full of good will towards others and towards all mankind–part of the building crew not the wrecking crew.

They get no joy from pointing out the sins of others, but don’t mind publishing their own sins and how forgiven they now are.

They love Jesus–plainly, openly, and simply.

Others taste Him in them, and catch a glimpse of Him through their words, their attitudes, and their life.

Joy follows them and marks them out.

They know the source of all joy and return to the fountain of joy within them Christ put there.

My point is nobody needs to have a joyless Christmas.

Nobody needs to be sour and bitter despite the tragedies of a fallen world and the follies of fallen people and the wrongness of fallen society.

Time to Dump Our Control Worship

But we’ll have to lose something most of us find too precious to give up.

And that something is control.

Worshipping control is what makes us nasty, and what gets us into control battles with other groups, people, and events.

Voluntarily surrendering control to Christ, yielding up what we never had in the first place, and coming under His redemptive love, is what releases joy.

The people who need the least personal control, and who are the most under the control of Christ and His love, are the most joyful.

There is a solution!

Over or Under

In my long personal journey, and in my many interactions with many kinds of people, I believe almost every issue bedeviling our society boils down to a single, unspoken, underlying issue.

Is God, or is the individual, supreme?  

Is God, or is my self, in the position of ultimate control?

Do I unconsciously see myself as occupying the heights, looking out at all of life from a position of being over it?

Am I above all religions, moralities, philosophies, and perspectives, picking and choosing from among them to fit “ME”?

In other words, am I (or something I personally value) the standard?   Am I my sole and highest authority?

Or do I report to Another who is Ultimate Judge of all individuals in the end?

Am I the measure of all things?  Am I the center?  Am I the greatest?

Or is the Being we call God the Most High?  Does He possess all authority and every right to judge me, hold me accountable, and measure me according to His ways, His commands, and His rules?

Do I report to Him and live to fulfill His will?  Or does He report to me and exists to fulfill my will?

Am I self-created, or God created?

Over or under?

I believe our modern, high-tech society is permeated, immersed, and completely reinforces the “sovereign self” view of life.

It is setting the terms for all our societal moral debates.   It is undermining all institutions, sacred books, and all sources of authority beyond the SELF.

And I believe our very technologies and intelligent devices, all brought to us by the Internet, reinforce the unspoken view that we are the center of it all.

I scan the news, viewing all the events of the world in an instant, from a position of having all the arrows of information pointing to me.

This gives us the illusion of having all control and possessing real-time, everywhere-at-once, omnipresence.

I search all the images of the word, have at my fingertips all the articles and websites of the world on every subject–giving me the illusion of omniscience and, of course, all control.

We are each emperors and empresses of our virtual world, controlling what others see about us and projecting a vastly inflated picture of ego achievement and elevation.

Then we hit the real world and fall flat on our faces.

So it is a kind of pampered, overprotected narcissism run amok, where our own personal opinion on everything is the Final Word on all matters.

The problem is all the above is laughable.

We are that pathetic huckster behind the curtain, and not the booming, fiery projection of the Wizard of Oz.

We can’t even control our mouth, let alone our attitudes, let alone our secret self-destructive tendencies, can we?

And we certainly can’t control life’s events, let alone the doings of other people, can we?

We are all in need of a good ego deflation and a deep demotion into lowliness and vulnerability.

We are not in control, not in charge, don’t define ourselves or anything or anyone else, and are not above it all picking and choosing as a superior.

The truth is we are inferiors, little people, and, yes, even unrepentant selfish sinners who continuously provoke God to His face, defy His truth, mock His ways, etc.

We make lousy, pathetic, incompetent gods and goddesses.  

If we won’t resign, we ought to be fired at once and removed from the Throne.

We need a good come down so we might come to our senses and escape the cruelest, most boring imprisonment of them all:  slavery to self.

We are in desperate need of losing the illusions of control and those delusions of grandeur that torment us, and make everyone else around us miserable.

Our grandiosity will be the death of us.   Hubris is always followed by nemesis.

It comes down to this:   we have been living life, making decisions, and responding to the Most High from a totally false, completely undeserved position of aboveness.

It would be hilarious if this state of affairs wasn’t so tragic and utterly destructive to so much that is good.

Is it not a coincidence that the Twelve Steps begin with:   My life has become unmanageable and I powerless over…

Control therefore is not our friend, it is our enemy.

It is what drives all addictions, all idolatry, and all straight paths to Hell.  It is not to be coddled but eradicated.

Most people who call themselves Christians are actually practicing syncretism–a shell of Christianity surrounding a core of sovereign individualism (self-worship, the self controls and defines everything).

If we don’t teach our children and our churches to distinguish between these two diametrically opposed perspectives, and choose to be under God instead of over Him, we doom them to a spiritual death.

And, most frightening of all, we don’t see what’s happening or understand why it’s happening.

But this, my friends, is the great Apostasy of our times.  It is the acid that corrodes everything sacred and good.

It is what we need to be revived from.