Loving Well in a Broken World, Discover the Hidden Power of Empathy by Lauren Casper: A Review

Lauren Casper

In her book, Loving Well in a Broken World, Discover the Hidden Power of Empathy, Lauren Casper takes on the challenge of indifference.

She starts with the premise, as did Elie Wiesel, that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

Casper approaches the dilemma from a Christian perspective, but actually most major religions will work just as well.

She uses the example of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. She notes that the Samaritan in the story, himself branded as an outsider, was more willing to help a Jewish man who had been beaten and robbed, because, “[T]his man would have known what it felt like to be despised, tossed aside, and ignored. Instead of seeing only costly inconvenience in a heap of bloodied flesh, the Samaritan saw a physical representation of how he had been treated all his life. He saw more than what was readily visible. He saw a person… a neighbor.”

Wiesel was himself a victim of Nazi persecution and had spent time in a concentration camp. This experience caused him to devote his adult life to the issue of discrimination. He said of indifference: “The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.”

Casper suggests that “[I]f indifference is the disease, empathy is the antidote.”

Casper gives us the example of a trip to the emergency room with her infant adopted son. It was a life and death situation and she felt totally helpless. Ironically, just a few days before, she and her husband had come across a similar situation and walked by, for the most part, unemotionally unaffected.

“Our experiences over that twenty-four hours taught me two things: First, no one is immune to tragedy. And second, we actually have no what we’ll do when our turn comes.”

“The self-righteous idea that we’ve somehow set up our lives in ways that protect us from certain kinds of crises, implying that those who are experiencing said crises have not, is what keeps many of us from entering into the painful places in another person’s life… Our own pain might be the one thing that causes us to stop closing our eyes… It’s easy to ignore or judge suffering when we naively assume it will never be us… I may be a slow learner, but pain is an effective teacher.”

When we center on our own experiences, writes Casper, the experiences of others “seem far away, uncommon, and not part of our world.”

Casper continues, “We miss a lot when we center our experiences by assuming they are the norm.”

She writes about the experience of Daniel, one of the Lost Boys, displaced during the bloody civil war in Sudan. Daniel and three of his friends eventually make it to the United States. Two of them eventually adjust to the new culture. But not Daniel who points out that Americans don’t seem to look out for each other.

“’You’re born for others, and others are born for you,’ Daniel says, trying to make sense of a culture that makes no sense to him – and implying that maybe American culture doesn’t offer as much as we might think it does.”

For Casper, the ability to listen is an important ingredient in empathy. She gives the example of her autistic young son, who, during a church picnic, asked several times, to go home. His request went unheard and he simply walked to the family’s van to get some peace and quiet.

For a few panic-stricken minutes, Casper and some of the picnic attendees searched for her little boy before they found him.

“Are we willing to hear what our neighbors are trying to tell us, even when it makes us uncomfortable? Or are we determined to remain in the comfort of our echo chambers… that’s a choice we get to make every day. We can choose to listen and learn and ask rather than point and accuse.”

Casper uses her own life experience to offer hard-earned wisdom, which includes the importance of emotions. “If we are brave enough to honor our emotions, they can point us toward our hurting neighbors and help us to love them well. When we’re honest, our feelings can show us what’s missing in our neighborhood and where a need might be waiting that only we can fill. A world without emotions is a world without grace and compassion. A world without feelings is a world without understanding and care.”

Casper points out that there is a balance to the emotion equation. Being honest doesn’t include ripping open emotionally broken hearts to reveal the source of the pain publicly.

Another roadblock to empathy is fear.

“The challenge this poses in our current culture is that our affinity for similarity has led to polarization and, subsequently, fear. It’s the fear of others that causes us to act in ways that are apathetic or even hateful rather than loving. That fear is often because we simply don’t know each other. As a result, our social fabric – locally and globally – is unraveling… Research has shown that our empathy is diminished to the point of being virtually absent when the suffering person is a member of a different social, racial, or cultural group... If we want to love our neighbors, we have to break out of our bubbles.”

Midway through Loving Well in a Broken World, Casper gives an example of how to do this. She describes Project Connection, started by a teenager living in Charlotte, NC, who had a heart to connect acceptance between high schoolers and children with special needs. With some initial trepidation, Casper signed up her own two special needs kids to be part of a local PC network of teenagers in Lexington, VA.

Another way of gaining empathy is through developing friendships among people who don’t look, think or act like us.

For Casper, this happened when an Afghani woman who moved to the US became a close friend. Through her friend, Casper writes, “I learned what it was like to grow up under the Taliban and the challenges faced by girls seeking education in that environment… When the news reports that bombs have exploded in Kabul, I no longer change the channel but grieve that destruction of my friend’s hometown and the loss of her former neighbors. When refugees are vilified in the news or in conversation, I am resolute in my defense of them.”

Another motivating factor for Casper is her faith.

“I have been afraid of so many things: the mental and emotional toll that justice work would take, the discrimination and dangers that await my children, the attacks and judgment from peers, and the list goes on… My fear is nearly extinguished by the light of the gospel and Christ’s example of turning toward, rather than away from, the brokenness of the world.”

Casper advises, “Don’t turn away from whatever it is that makes your heart break and your eyes well up with tears. Sit with it a little longer and see where your heart might take you… Where is empathy leading you to love? You might be scared, I know I am, but the next right thing is simply showing up – and we can do it.”

At this point, Casper puts down a challenge, specifically to those of the Christian faith.

“It may seem uncomfortable, unnatural, and awkward to step out of comfort zones and challenge the status quo, but maybe that’s because we Christians have forgotten that’s what we’re made to do. We weren’t created to live up to society’s standards and remain comfortably in our bubbles; we were made to be misfits and rebels and to embrace the unexpected. If we claim to follow Jesus, there is no other way to live.”

Another part of the empathy equation is repentance.

“One of the most necessary and inevitable acts of love that empathy naturally leads us into is that of repentance… It’s the recognition of how our words, or lack thereof, and our actions, or lack thereof, have impacted our neighbors. It is the experience of true remorse for that impact and the decision to no longer behave in a way that brings pain to those around us… Repentance requires empathy because we cannot stop our harmful behavior and life differently without it… Repentance screams humility and empathy.”

Casper contends that empathy should lead us to consider people living on the margins. Bringing us to a much fuller understanding of life around us. “When tales of conquests of land and resources are only told from the colonizers’ perspectives… they become the hero of the story, and the voices of those who were oppressed and enslaved and stolen from are excluded from the narrative. We learn an incomplete history, which prevents us from understanding the struggles some nations and communities face today. So instead of understanding and even repentance, we offer judgment and ridicule.”

Crucial to the growth of empathy is the ability to receive criticism.

“When I am criticized or rebuked, pride can push me to believe I’m being persecuted, but humility and love usually reveal areas for growth, for being more considerate of others – and if I stay with the discomfort long enough, I’m thankful for it. This is how we allow criticism to increase our empathy.”

Casper concludes: “The in-between – the interval between where we came from and where we’re going – may be long, hard and painful, but we started from perfect love and to perfect love we will return. So, we press on, hopefully ever after.”

Loving Well in a Broken World offers a template for a way out of our divided, wounded and troubled world.