Mercy, empathy, and genuine goodness

The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, delivered the sermon at the inaugural prayer service marking President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

At one point, Budde looked directly at Trump and asked him, in the name of God, to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” and “who fear for their lives.” Budde mentioned “gay, lesbian, and transgender children,” as well as migrant farm workers and laborers. She asked for compassion for those “fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands.”

To the call for mercy came a flood of hatred and death threats. Trump supporters argued that there was no place for politics in the pulpit. One writer said that mercy, and therefore, empathy, was a liability in matters of justice; another writer called empathy a sin.

Perhaps it would be wise to revisit what empathy and mercy are, seeing that the terms are tossed about so recklessly, and on this Jubilee Year of Mercy, no less.

Mercy is carelessly perceived as the act of letting everyone do as they please regardless of the law. This turns mercy, a virtue, into a mere emotion, the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen said. The virtue of mercy, however, is the perfection of justice. Justice comes first, followed by mercy.

Note that it is justice that is mentioned here. Not condemnation, arrogance, self-righteousness, or execution. Justice.

Mercy means seeing another person’s misery, and being “afflicted with sorrow” as though that misery were one’s own, as St. Thomas Aquinas put it. Aquinas continues, saying that we must seek ways to dispel another person’s suffering, to be generous within the bounds of righteousness, as God has been merciful with us in our sins. This does not mean unlimited forgiveness, but an acknowledgement of the inherent dignity of all human beings, so that those who suffer should not be rejected or attacked, but empathized with.

Empathy means recognizing each human being as complex, a product of their past and their environment, a person with agency who must first be understood.

Empathy and mercy are not the same as pity. Pity focuses on the here and now: an illness, a broken law, an anomaly. Pity does not seek to know a person’s past or environment. Pity looks at wrongs and imagines a dire future.

To educators, especially those of us who work with Jesuit institutions, empathy means treating students not as mere vessels to be filled with knowledge, but human beings with a history and background from which they can draw insight to further enrich their lessons.

To those who work in medicine, empathy means treating a patient as a person with a culture, concerns, and a history, not an organism with a collection of symptoms.

To those of us who work in creative fields, empathy means listening to people before assuming that we know what they want and need.

Sadly, empathy is becoming rare. I’ve heard of teachers who concentrate on the flow of their lectures without asking who their students are, or what their students already know. I’ve had conversations with doctors who bemoan how their students proceed immediately to diagnosing patients, without first having taken a patient’s history. I’ve had to deal with people who immediately assume that their audience is stupid, ignorant, or careless, and then expect creatives to mount whole campaigns or programs based on merely disseminating information.

Even as there are teachers who foster discussions, doctors who build patient histories through contextualizing symptoms against patients’ daily lives, and creatives who practice human-centered design and seek to understand people and their environment, there still seems to be a widespread lack of empathy.

It appears that it is no longer intuitive to ask why things happen; to engage people in actual conversations about their lives rather than filling in their experiences with our own expectations; to make lessons, treatments, and messages about someone else other than ourselves.

Now, it appears that in its most toxic form, this refusal to engage with people has also transformed into a disdain for empathy, a disregard of a world that is interconnected in space and time, a perception of people as mere anomalies or abominations. Not humans who suffer, whose lives are a wonderful mixture of the world without and within, whose lives we can never understand unless we first ask.

For that is what mercy and empathy are. They acknowledge and welcome human complexity and diversity. They make an effort to understand.

Where, then, is this so-called sin of empathy?

Recall the parable of the Good Samaritan: A man was beaten by robbers and left for dead on the road. Recall that two people passed, witnessed the man’s misery, saw it as an obstacle to their supposedly busy day, and chose to ignore it.

Recall the Samaritan, who saw suffering, and helped a person.

Empathy is a sin when one sees suffering, and yet does nothing about it. Empathy becomes a sin when one sees injustice, and yet justifies its existence.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu