“Thoughts and Prayers”: We Don’t Know Anything About Empathy!

The capacity to feel for others is worthless without action

Last week in Iowa

In the news coverage of last week’s shooting death of a 6th grader, the injury of other children and staff, and yes, the violent suicide of the shooter, we heard the “T and P” headline again and again.

Thoughts and prayers

Thoughts and prayers. The irony of the ravaged occurrence in a small community in the very state in which candidates are shouting their bona fides made it exquisitely painful.

In the televised Town Halls, you could almost see the tickertape of commentary the candidates had to add to their prepared remarks. Their words were disgraceful. There was the pro forma “T and P” from candidates.

Nikki Haley grabbed the focus by legitimizing her sorrow because she has so many specific people in her family she worries about.

Because of this, she knows how people feel at the frequency with which bullets explode through the smooth skin of young bodies that are just beginning to be.

But the carnage was not about her.

It was about the child whose life was stolen. About other children and a brave grown up, whose bodies were hijacked. And it was about the mystery of a preadolescent who was so divorced from their lives and his own, that he spun totally out of control.

Even he, was failed by systems that provide absolutely no guardrails. Without guns, many assaults would have left people with broken bones and bruises, rather than penetrating shards of fire.

Later, the most empathically challenged candidate (some days, “human being”) Donald Trump, uttered the word “horrible” about the event, almost implying that it occurred in a place that didn’t deserve it.

And then the worst. Not even an attempt to say he felt grief or sorrow or just the itch of an unfortunate blip on the screen. Just the exhortation to “keep on going.” Get over it. He and his cadre of old white politician males who jump into their self-proclaimed divine powers of knowing.

They know about babies and children and mothers. They “think.” “They pray.”

“Just get on with it.”

“We judge that, You matter.”

“You don’t.”

“We know what’s good for bleeding babies on classroom floors. We know what’s good for mothers and babies whose lives are careening away from them, whose bodies were used as trashcans for the depravity of men.

The only thing I’ll say about Trump, is that he was empty, but honest. Sometimes I’d rather hear that some asshole doesn’t give a damn about me, than the pitiful, certain, “I know how you feel, and you have my prayers” garbage.

There is nothing wrong with thoughts and prayers, but…

I am an angry, errant Catholic but I have the gift of certain, comforting memory of both parents. Asking for mercy, petitioning for wisdom, pleading for the ease of suffering.

While I have left the hierarchical church, I still believe in quiet reflection, in petitions of sorrow.

I have prayed at moments when I thought I was close to suicide. I have prayed for strength in a broken marriage, I have ached holding with my mother’s rosary beads as my body rejected dearly wanted babies.

I find myself in moments of something like prayer when I see the world going to shit around me and I don’t know what to do. But I know that if all of my good, holy wishes fight to preserve their safe, still places in my head, they’re worthless.

When people told me simply that they were thinking of me, I was touched. But when they told me they knew just how I felt, or when they told me how to pray, or to get on with it, I wanted to slap them. It was not empathy.

Empathy

Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone. It is feeling for them. It is not shading them with our wisdom. Empathy is the wince when we see someone fall.

It is the clutching chest when we see images of evil, inhumane attacks, or pictures of children dying the wretched end from starvation.

Empathy is a rollercoaster of joy when we see someone blessed with unexpected luck. It is an invisible ribbon that extends from one to another. It’s the feeling.

How we learn

We learn it as children when our suffering is recognized by our parents. We learn to model reactions that connect us to others. We don’t have to know what to do. We know to try to think, and then to reach for action that empathy demands.

I’m not one to quote scripture, but generally, Jesus tried to teach his puzzled followers the most basic lessons in empathy. “When you fed the hungry, you did it to me.” “When you made peace, you did it for me.”

It is a cognitive method of encouraging us to think about empathy and action in a way that transcends blind obedience to rules or the recitation of lines of words that lose their promise and shine.

Empathy is possible

To be empathic is to be humble. It is to be curious. It is to reach out to people with whom we don’t agree. It is to try to understand the chasms that separate us from each other. Empathy is impatient and active.

Without it, I fear that we are truly lost.