ON  EMPATHY

Many of the tragedies of human suffering in today’s world are manmade and there is guilt enough to be worldwide.  In our frustration and sense of futility, about all that we can try to live by is what Rachel Naomi Remen says in GRANDFATHER’S BLESSING, “In the face of such suffering, all we can do is bear witness so no one need suffer alone.”

 Our deepest inner emotional need is to know that we are cared for by at least one other person.  Usually from life’s beginning our mother is our source of security and love.  Life experiences normally expand and our level of dependence expands. Early in life, we become more aware of our need for each other, especially when misfortune or death removes from us those we have come to love and depend upon.

In my retirement, I was privileged to work with various groups and individuals who had been emotionally deprived in their early lives and suffered from isolation and neglect in childhood.  No one can erase such pain, but occasionally it is possible to catch a fleeting glimpse of what the early world of these individuals was like.  I was briefly privileged to lend a listening ear to many stories, and I shall try to tell just a bit, in passing, that the reader may be aware that perhaps at least one person had momentarily caught a glimpse of someone who had experienced childhood loss. If momentarily only, I listened intently and felt some empathy.  Such a communication transaction, though brief, can perhaps relieve a bit of that terrible sense of aloneness that sometimes can seem to be too much.  Each of us has a need to know that at least someone has caught a glimpse of how desperate one’s life’s experience has been, and that someone communicated that they cared!

One bitterly cold winter, in the east, a Mennonite minister friend asked me if I could relieve him from being in charge of a Sunday night group of young people who met in the evenings in the basement of a local church for Bible study, donuts and coffee.  This was not an ordinary group. Most had served for some time in various forms of youth reform institutions.  The Biblical text that the minister had been using was not the usual, but it was the most practical for that group. It was from the Book of Proverbs.  The church basement provided a warm shelter from the cold and there would be coffee and perhaps two donuts each for the dozen or more who would attend.  My friend introduced me to the group and talked a bit about the practical value of this particular Scriptures and then left me on my own.

It was an interesting group and the verses of wisdom from Proverbs would create intense discussions, but often from an unusual point of view.  Then one evening there was a verse in our study chapter, a verse which I told the group that I strongly disagreed with.  It was “He that spareth the rod spoileth the child.” I was openly critical of the statement and, in the following competition for time to talk, I found it difficult to maintain any semblance of control, because everyone one there had a story to tell about child abuse.  But I did gain enough control to hear some stories.  There would have been more complete stories, could I have listened to everyone, but I shall never forget the bits and pieces of the stories of abuse, of neglect, accounts of their passing from foster home to foster home, of eventual confinement to institutions, and of how they now lived hand to mouth, day to day. I continued the Sunday evenings until spring and the warmer weather, and the Bible studies were needed no more.  But over that period of time, each one, -- I mean each one, -- had a story of early abuse and neglect and some told of crimes, then life in prison.

One middle aged man who had attended the class regularly had lived in a group home just a block from my house.  Since his very early youth he had been a farmer’s hired man.  Evidently he had come to live there when he was old enough to do sufficient work to earn his keep.  He had no known family.  And surely, no one had ever taught him very much about the manners of ordinary lifestyle. He would stay after the rest had left in the evenings, and would tell me his life’s story over and over, how he had lived part of his life by himself in a ramshackle old trailer, even in the winter, and how “respectable society would reject him.”  One of his earlier adult diversions had been going to town on a Saturday night to get drunk, and afterwards he had paid a severe price for a drunk- driving accident.  But now, since his mid-adulthood, he had been sober for a long time. 

We were moving from that part of town and I knew that I would not see him again, so one day, when I saw him, I asked him how he was doing. He said, “OK” “And you’re still sober?” I queried. “Yes,” he answered, “But I don’t know why.”  We shook hands.

For eight years, a group of us had been going regularly, as volunteers, to the local hard-time penitentiary for Mass.  We had come to know some of the prisoners who regularly attended.  One New Year’s Eve, we went to the prison with our priest and our regular associates. Holidays are especially difficult for some prisoners, so we sat and talked and exchanged stories, trying to do what we could to ease the pain of the prison environment.

I sat beside a chap with a guitar as he played and sang.  When he played the “Green, Green Grass of Home”, I could not help but be deeply touched by the pathos of the piece and I told him so.  He must have felt that I was a safe listener, for he began to tell me some of his story. 

He had a stepfather who would beat him up, so he left home in his early teens.  Soon he got into trouble with the law and landed in Juvenile Hall.  There, he told how the guards, would on occasion, assign the inmates to fight each other, just for the guards’ own amusement.  Often the boys would be required to fight almost to the bitter end. He found the conditions to be intolerable, so he managed to escape.  From there things went from bad to worse, and my friend didn’t go into detail any further, nor did I wish to ask him. It would have been inappropriate for me, after such a story, to have wished him a Happy New Year, but I did thank him for his sharing his story with me, and told him that it was a story that I would always remember. Mostly, he knew that I had listened intently and I had felt for him.

Vignettes, such as those I have just related, speak of strongly imprinted personal pain, held deep in early memories and felt at such a conscious level that they had been a major factor influencing, or perhaps controlling many of the responses to life of these individuals. They all experienced an emptiness from an absence of meaning.

I was the middle child in a family of nine. Four of us stayed at home to work on the farm after graduating from grade school in 1933. An older brother and sister had to board in the nearest town in order to attend high school. That was in the height of the Depression and life was tough.  Ours was a comparatively large dairy farm and the boys who stayed home were expected to work. There was no point in any complaint. That was a positive factor. But that repressive conditioning also inhibited us from adequately expressing all our feelings.   Then, as we grew up, such a conditioning was difficult to change. Bottled- up feelings cause problems. Through my own insulation, I too have caused grief, more than my share.  However, gradually through the years, life experiences have taught me to be more aware of my fellowman in his life and death experiences.  We find healing through understanding and sharing.  To summarize, again I quote Rachel Naomi Remen “My wounds have made me gentle with the wounds of other people.” My own suffering in silence eventually gave me the gift of empathy, of listening with my heart!

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