One night last year, when I was very tired, I fell as I carried some things in from the car. I fell hard, face down, on the asphalt. My nose and glasses hit first, followed by knees, hands, and the rest of me. As I fell, pain exploded everywhere. I lay there on the street, scared for a moment to try to move. After a few minutes, I dared to move enough to realize with relief that nothing was broken. But then I tried to get up.
I couldn’t. My legs had no strength. My knees had gravel in them. Turning over to crawl did not seem like a good idea, though that was what I eventually did.
Experiential Empathy and Being With
That fall turned out to be a great gift. I wasn’t significantly hurt. But, laying there, when I couldn’t get up, I thought of my group of communicants at an assisted living. In their 80s and 90s, falls are serious business for them. They have seen friends fall, break a hip…and die.
A few days later I talked with them about my fall. “As I lay there on the street, I thought of you,” I said. “I thought of what a change in your lives a fall can make. I thought of how fragile it feels to know that you can fall at any time—and that a fall can change your life forever. I came to appreciate your courage, your strength, your perseverance as you live with that.”
In that moment we all bonded in a deeper way. I was WITH them. I understood them with a deeper empathy because I had literally been on the ground where they have been with something close to the weakness and fragility they experience.
My fall gave me an experiential empathy for them. Empathy, a psychological term, is the ability to be with another person in a deep and special way. At one level, it is “walking in another’s shoes”—or in my case, falling in another’s shoes. It is seeing things from another’s perspective (on the ground, unable to move) and feeling another’s feelings (helpless, frightened, fragile).
But, at a deeper level, empathy is BEING WITH another, sharing in the moment and what that moment means. Empathy, at its depths, is a casting yourself on the waters of another’s life, meaning, and depths of soul. It is deliberately choosing, for at least a few moment, to be where another person is. Such moments educate the heart.
Ezekiel’s Experiential Empathy Task
Both of today’s readings can be seen as God’s invitations to have a deep, experiential empathy for others—and, perhaps, to see the empathy of God.
As Ezekiel writes, the fall of Jerusalem is only a few years away. God has warned the people through Ezekiel, and other prophets: trouble is coming. I, God, will not uphold you against a mighty foe—because of your continued refusal to obey my laws, respond to my love for you, or even understand that I am YOUR GOD, who wants to enter into your history.
So God has Ezekiel do some strange things in a very visible way. He tells Ezekiel to pack up his essential belongings, dig a hole through the city wall, and go out into the desert with his face covered. In spite of his frustration with the people, God can be seen here as having empathy with them—understanding their need for warning and the trauma for them that is coming. Perhaps God is also helping Ezekiel, who is a loyal prophet, for Ezekiel was sent to exile, too. Perhaps God is letting Ezekiel know that when these bad things happen, God knows of it, cares about Ezekiel and his people, and so Ezekiel will not be afraid or feel abandoned.
Educating Peter’s Heart
In the Gospel Jesus is trying to help Peter more fully understand forgiveness. The concept of forgiveness was not foreign to Peter or the Jewish people. From the days of the exodus, God had dialogued with them about both sin and forgiveness. It was part of Jewish culture to have “jubilee years” when social inequalities were forgiven and made new.
Jesus now expands Peter’s understanding. “Not seven times. Seventy times seven times.” That did not literally mean 490 times must you forgive. It meant, “Peter, you keep on forgiving, because anyone who injures you is a small debtor to you, compared to your injury and debt to God.”
Just as God created a visual for Ezekiel and the Hebrew people, to help them understand, Jesus created a visual for Peter to understand. Jesus told the story of a steward who owed the king a great debt. When the king wanted payment, the steward begged for mercy. The king forgave the whole debt!
But, perhaps because the steward was frightened at the close call, he called in the debt of another man who “owed him a fraction” of what the steward owed the king. The steward was unmerciful. Others saw his hard-heartedness, told the king, and the steward ended up in prison and cast out after all.
I imagine, if Jesus told me that story, I would naturally identify with the steward whose debt was forgiven. I would be glad with him in the first part of the story. But then, I’d get the point, in the second part of the story. Because I would see the truth that no one owes me as much as I owe God for forgiving me.
And, of course, Jesus and Mother Church do tell me that story today. I naturally think of an email chain about a controversy on Monday. In the emails I behaved with respect and patience. But in my heart….there was turmoil and unforgiveness. Like the unforgiving steward, my heart was in survival of the fittest mode. Yesterday, my mind jumped to an unforgiving conclusion in a family matter. That unforgiving conclusion turned out not to be true. Luckily, again, God’s prudence kept my mouth shut….and, today, shows me that my heart needs more education.
Prayer:
Lord, educate and purify my heart today. Whether I fall on the ground while walking or fall into temptation while taking care of the work of the day, give me the grace to use these events to educate my heart. Help me empathically be with each person I meet. Help me see things through their hearts, their minds, their perspectives. Help me see things through YOUR perspective, Lord. Help me remember I fall, I am fragile, the people around me are in need of my example, and I need you to keep my heart soft. Educate my heart today, Lord.
