Fairly early on in your book, you quote Elie Wiesel, who said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” That’s quite a chillingly thoughtful statement. In your opinion, what does indifference look like at this moment in the 21st Century?
I think it looks
much like it has throughout history – ordinary people who are purposefully turning
a blind eye to the pain, suffering, and need around them.
I love your
interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan. You write that “[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.” Why is it so important to see ‘more than what
was readily visible.’?
Well, there’s
always more to the story than what we can see. We are more than our
circumstances – we’re all human beings with stories. Say there’s a kid on the
playground being really rough and aggressive with a smaller child. My first
instinct might be to go yell at the kid to knock it off, but maybe what I don’t
know (don’t see) is that his parents split up and his mom moved away and he’s
got all this hurt and anger pent up inside. He’s just a kid and doesn’t know
how to express it or work it out, so it comes out on the playground. If I knew
all that, my first instinct would be a lot gentler. I’d approach him with
compassion and choose my words more carefully. We can choose the gentler approach
the first time without knowing the backstory, can’t we? It isn’t always easy,
but we can retrain ourselves to pause, remember we don’t know everything, and
treat each person in our path with dignity, compassion, and care.
You go on to
quote Wiesel again, “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.” Why do you
think Wiesel drew a connection between the inability of being able to empathize
and being dead?
I think what he
was saying, in a much more eloquent way, is that those who can’t empathize are
dead inside. If you can watch your neighbor be beaten in the street and sent to
die in a concentration camp and do nothing… feel nothing? There’s an essential
part of humanity missing in someone when that happens. Not empathizing in those
moments chips away at what makes us human.
You write about the function of pain. “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.” I’d never thought of pain this way! Is there anything else you’d like to mention about the ability to feel pain as we go through life?
Lately, I’ve been
thinking a lot about toxic positivity and what that looks like, and how it
impacts relationships. I think that when we refuse to feel or acknowledge the
hard and painful parts of life in ourselves, it makes us more likely to fall
into a toxic positivity trap with others. If we aren’t able to deal with our
own pain and deny it or sweep it under the rug, we’ll probably do the same with
those around us. Eventually, that makes us untrustworthy friends. In my own
life, there are friends I will not go to with hard things because I know I
won’t be heard.
Your book also
touches upon 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.” Is it only in western culture that we’re
taught to suppress emotions, or is it more widespread? I wonder if, at one point
in history, humans began to suppress their emotions as a survival tactic, which,
ironically, over time, stopped working?
Those are great
questions! I’ve never lived outside of
western culture, so I can’t speak to how it is in other parts of the world. I
would guess that we aren’t unique in this. The idea of suppressing emotions
starting as a survival tactic is really interesting. I think that happens today
– especially for those who are experiencing trauma.
You point to
one solution to the lack of empathy, while including fear in the equation. “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.” You give a great example of breaking out of the
bubble, with high schoolers engaged in the Project Connection activity. Can you
briefly describe how Project Connection works, and the importance of focusing
on teens teamed with younger kids with special needs?
Project Connection
is an organization started by a local High Schooler. A group of teens volunteer
to be partnered with children with disabilities. Each child has at least one
teen “buddy.” Once a month there is an event hosted by the teens – last month
was a costume party at a local playground. For two hours, the kids get to play
with their teen buddy and the benefits to this are mutual. The kids feel important
and seen and get to have fun in a safe environment that is catered to their
needs and abilities (which is rare in day-to-day life) and the teens get to
build relationships with people who experience the world differently than they
do. So, whether they realize it or not, they are expanding their worldview.
Another example of reaching outside of the bubble is how we choose our friends. One of your best friends is from Afghanistan. Would you like to mention how you met and how you both maintain that friendship?
Zari’s husband and
mine went to the same college and knew each other from work. We lived on the
same street when we met and our kids were babies at the time. We were both stay-at-home moms and would get together so the kids could socialize and we could
have some grown-up conversation. Our husbands are close friends, so there are a
lot of family dinners shared together as well. They moved about an hour’s drive
away a couple years ago so we are really intentional about maintaining our
friendship. We get together about one Saturday a month and our families spend
the whole day together. Zari and I text and talk on the phone in-between visits
and our boys will have video chats sometimes as well. Our friendship is one of
my most treasured relationships.
You lay down a
challenge for Christians (actually the same challenge could hold true for anyone).
“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.” Do you ever wonder what our nation, our world,
would look like, if more of us stepped outside our bubbles and embraced the
unexpected?
I do and I don’t
know what it would look like. I hope it would look like a more inclusive, just,
and kind society. It might be messier at times. Restoration is hard work, but
it’s worthy work.
You also
include having an accurate sense of history as an important ingredient of
empathy. You wrote: “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.”
Do you think this skewed sense of history could be a contributing factor to not
being able to identify with those living on the margins and Jesus’ love for
them?
Absolutely. When
we are fed an incomplete or incorrect story we aren’t able to understand the
context of a person’s lived reality.
Is there
anything else you’d like to mention?
I think any hardship
has the potential to help us learn to empathize with those around us. My
struggles with anxiety have certainly helped with that, but it’s a double-edged
sword. Sometimes my anxiety makes me want to run away and hide from the world.
But, there’s a difference between taking breaks for the benefit of my own
mental health, and turning a blind eye and embracing indifference because it’s
the easier path. Taking breaks to prevent burnout is wise, embracing
indifference because it’s more comfortable is selfish.
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