resolving for empathy
/Tis the season for resolutions. Rather than thinking about what we hope to accomplish in the New Year, I want to suggest we acknowledge what we will see in the year ahead. With presidential primaries beginning, we can expect pointing fingers, totalizing stereotypes, and nationwide eyerolling to increase. With our addiction to smart phones and social media, we can expect habitual distractedness, flaring insecurities and performed but disappointing experiences of belonging. With our refusal to have meaningful dialogue about society’s ethical commitment to nurture life, we will continue to put people to death, to have mass and accidental shootings, and to watch unplanned pregnancies lead to desperate abortions or devastating familial situations. With problem fatigue and rising apathy, we will continue to see widening achievement, opportunity and income gaps. With our limited capacity for authenticity or discomfort, we will continue to be saddened by broken relationships.
Forgive the negative tone as we put champagne on ice. These scenarios are coming for us, but we don’t have to surrender to them.
Hope is a wonderful thing, and resolutions stem from the idea that we are better than our past behavior suggests, that we are capable of change, that inertia is not stronger than our will power. In my observation, negativity can run high as the year closes out, but optimism abounds as the ball drops. How many times did you hear, “I am ready for 2019 to end” in the past month? We’ll forget these sentiments of defeat this week as we look to 2020 with hope that we are not victims of our own lives, doomed to repeat disappointing outcomes.
Our hope stems from the will to survive, an instinct placed in us by our Creator. We long for health, we resist injustice, and we need to belong because we were created to hope. Our lives are spent in the tension between acquiescing to the frustration of reality and our will to change, to improve, to reform. As 2020 dawns, I’d like to suggest we cannot find hope without a humble reckoning with our reality. The scenarios we know to expect in the New Year are nationwide; they are also extensions of our personal apathy, greed, cynicism and stubbornness. Our country didn’t find dysfunction without our help
In light of this, I’d like to suggest we collectively resolve to nurture empathy in the New Year.
The healing power of empathy cannot be overstated, primarily because of the way it positions us in relationships. Empathy requires us to acknowledge we belong to the ‘we,’ that we share humanity. So much of our American cultural framework rests on our individual desire and work. After all, the last 2 words in All American are the words I CAN, to quote a ridiculous song I learned as a kid. Empathy offers us a larger context in which to place our own stories of striving. Strive away! Work hard! But remember this year that you do so as one of many; each of us struggle between success and failure. If this is true then it becomes impossible for us to diminish or belittle the struggle of another. Empathy reminds us that we belong to each other.
The secret weapon of empathy is that it leads to frequent forgiveness. Full disclosure, I think forgiveness is the answer to all of it. Necessary to live well with others, relationships have hope when we first nurture a posture of forgiveness toward ourselves. In the last week, I’ve noticed the incredible power of forgiveness to heal people I love. I saw a woman racked with guilt as she reflected that she had “blown Christmas Eve” for her family. She lost sight of the moment, of who she was, of what her kids needed, and she regretted it. We shared a holy moment as she realized she was worthy of forgiveness and could be gentle with herself; indeed, she required self-forgiveness before she could heal and live differently with her family.
If we cultivate a posture of forgiveness within, it will soon flow into others. This week one of my nephews broke a bowl but did not clean it up. The next morning our daughter cut her foot on a broken piece. I watched as he apologized to his hurting cousin. Several of us freely forgave him, reminding him that we all make mistakes. But then, in a Christmas miracle kind of moment, I saw him approach my husband. He shared a memory that had just resurfaced: When the boy was a toddler, my husband had also left a mess where the boy had gotten hurt. As the boy’s actions had hurt his daughter, so my husband had hurt him a decade earlier. I watched my giant husband bend down to hold his face in his hands and say, “I have been exactly where you are, and you are forgiven. We belong together.”
What a gorgeous reminder of the power to forgive. All the adults nearby teared up as we realized this is the gift we have to offer one another. Transforming our lives is less about our lofty goals for 2020, less about the insufficiencies we need to bolster, less about our deficits. This year we have the chance to embrace and cultivate a skill we carry innately: the ability to access empathy in a way that leads to forgiveness of self and of others. Such free forgiveness, born out of empathy, will strengthen our connectedness to and interdependence on one another. Resolve to remember you are one of many as the New Year dawns, and watch hope rise.
Empathy makes us responsible for words uttered and actions completed in our presence. Next week, more on that.
