{"id":24071,"date":"2024-08-20T21:48:13","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T01:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=24071"},"modified":"2024-08-21T07:51:33","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T11:51:33","slug":"the-poetic-justice-of-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=24071","title":{"rendered":"The Poetic Justice of Empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"I Know Who Holds Tomorrow Lyrics\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dNN1Z342Iao?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Intergenerational Learning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>We\u2019re either going to flock and circle with older generations that are trying to hold on to what they have and defend what they\u2019ve done, or we\u2019re going to join with younger generations and with their desire to take these issues seriously because their entire future is going to unfold in a climate-changed world.<br>\u2014Brian McLaren&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>In a recent online gathering, CAC staff member Jennifer Tompos invited Living School affiliate faculty member Carmen Acevedo Butcher to reflect on <\/em><strong><em>the role of mentors in developing resilience:\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tompos<\/strong>: I think one of the things that is so important when we\u2019re \u2026 figuring out how to show up with courage and resilience is how do we talk about this with the younger generation?\u2026 I aspire to be somebody who is a part of the solution and giving willing handoffs to the next generation. Carmen, [as a teacher of undergraduates,] can you speak to what the conversation is like with younger generations? How are they exhibiting the courage to show up in the face of everything that we\u2019re facing, [particularly with] economic and ecological overshoot?\u202f&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Acevedo Butcher<\/strong>: I am so glad you\u2019re bringing up Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha because they feel grief \u2026 and I feel it with them. A few days ago, I was rereading \u201cAppendix Five: Talking to Children About Our Current Situation\u201d in Brian McLaren\u2019s book\u00a0<em>Life After Doom<\/em>. I began to cry because of the grief, and my students also feel it. I think it\u2019s so important to sit with this uncomfortable conversation [with them], because many come from very difficult backgrounds: first generation students, low socioeconomic status, various disabilities. They <strong>feel anger at the older generations for our platitudes and obtuseness, and I listen. I\u2019ve even heard myself in class say, \u201cI just want to apologize for how we were not on this, and y\u2019all have inherited\u202fsuch a mess, so many difficulties.\u201d Then there\u2019s this intergenerational dialogue that takes place.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things that I appreciate from my students is that they are not in denial, and they are not frozen. They are really inspirations to me. <strong>Greta Thunberg thundered, \u201cI don\u2019t want your hope. I don\u2019t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic &#8230; [and] act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.\u201d<\/strong> [1] My students have <strong>taken that reality in and moved past it. They\u2019re in the stage of asking, \u201cWhat can I do?\u201d This inspires me because they\u2019re not just asking \u201cWhat can I do\u202fin the long-term?\u201d but \u201cWhat can I do in my community right now?\u201d\u2026\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They\u2019re out there doing their best to contribute in whatever way they can\u2026. My students are very concerned about the linear economy that just sends everything to landfills as opposed to more sustainable circular recycling. They\u2019ve taught me a lot. I had never heard of \u201cfast fashion\u201d [2] until a student gave a speech on it. I just try to stay open to listening to my students and letting them know I\u2019m learning and that I\u2019m open to learning.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Poetic Justice of Empathy<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have been paying attention, you will notice that lately there has been a growing interest in certain circles about empathy. It has, thankfully, moved out of the privacy of the mental health consultation rooms and neuroscience research studies and into the classroom, the boardroom and the bedroom. In fact, there really is <strong>no human interaction that will not be better because the participants are attuned to empathy and its place in the engagement.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Empathy, at its best, involves several elements. First, and how it is most broadly understood, it is the notion that one person (the listener, in this case) is able to be receptive to and feel the (usually painful) emotion of another person (the speaker), simultaneously holding that emotion in such a way so as to move thoughtfully to reduce the speaker\u2019s suffering or distress. To <strong>experience empathy is, as Dan Siegel has put it, to feel felt<\/strong>. This is the first step toward moving out of painful emotion: to share it with an attuned, compassionate listener.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In real life, it amounts to the poetic cadences and language of a host of nonverbal and verbal attunements in which <strong>one person\u2019s body language, facial expression, tone of voice and eye contact (among other cues) align to match those of one who is afflicted and engage with his or her feeling not simply as an abstraction, but in an embodied moment in time and space<\/strong>. If you have had this experience, you know what I mean, and you won\u2019t ever forget it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another feature of empathy is that it is a practice <strong>we necessarily must\u00a0<em>learn<\/em>\u00a0as human beings; we do not simply come by it naturally in the same way that we come by breathing. <\/strong>We <strong>learn about it by witnessing it being practiced by others or receiving it ourselves.<\/strong> Moreover, empathy moves us beyond compassion to kindness and human flourishing. In this sense, it is not just something that is intended to reduce pain, but <strong>also to increase hope, energizing us toward justice: we move to change our behavior on behalf of the plight of others who cannot change things themselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hopefully, then, with empathy, we <strong>do not merely feel what someone else feels; we behave differently as a result<\/strong>. And most importantly, that behavior is more likely to be sustained on their behalf; it\u2019s not just a one-off moment, but a lifetime moment. I am far more likely to make sustainable changes as a husband on behalf of my wife if I am truly in touch with what she is feeling than if I am doing what she asks mostly because I feel ashamed or guilty for not having done so before. As I like to tell patients, it is impossible for us to maintain sustainable behavioral change on behalf of another person in the absence of empathy. <strong>We can white-knuckle it for a certain period of time, but ultimately, unless we have made contact with the emotional state of another in such a way that our felt sense of mercy is mobilized, we will eventually regress to the mean of our previous behavioral norms.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of this represents a posture in which <strong>one welcomes, says \u201cyes\u201d to the emotional state of another. <\/strong>So many of us have only experienced the dismissing \u201cNo!\u201d to our afflicting emotional states, that when we encounter empathy it can feel like nothing short of a cold drink of water for a parched throat. In fact, <strong>one of our greatest problems, not least for people of faith, is our well-practiced manner of ignoring what we feel<\/strong>. And we\u2019re so accomplished at this that eventually <strong>we not only are unaware of what we feel, by extension we become unable to sense what others feel<\/strong>. Naturally, it is virtually impossible, with this much neuroplastic reinforcement, to imagine a God who could actually feel what we feel. Don\u2019t get me wrong. We might buy the theological idea that God can do that. But I am talking about the\u00a0<strong><em>actual experience of feeling God feel what we feel<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Hebrews wrote about this. They put down in words\u2014to be kept, remembered and be re-experienced by those who followed\u2014their encounters with a God who they believed could take it. They threw everything at him that they had. There is not one human emotional experience they refused to offer to him, be those experiences of joy or affliction. The Psalms are replete with the poetic rhythm and hum of a people who approached a God of empathy. A<strong> God who could welcome, receive, hold, and through sheer force of His own perseverance of remaining with the deepest of agonies of his people\u2014transform their hearts, their minds, their souls.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But many of us have never met this God. <strong>Our imaginations are paltry and afraid, atrophied as they are from so much time spent waiting for the microsecond-to-microsecond distraction of the shifting of the Internet as we peer soullessly into our screens. <\/strong>For our imaginations to be fired into life, <strong>we must first acquaint them with embodied experiences with other embodied people to which they can further appeal in memory and in reading the stories and poetry of the scriptures and of the best literature; engage the depth and beauty of nature; receive all that art and music has to offer<\/strong>\u2014and so open the portals of our souls through which we may enter into the depths of our rawest terrain to <strong>join the God who has been awaiting us all along. <\/strong>To whom do you run to be found? To be known? To offer your fragile, terrified self in order to have the cataracts of empathy cascade over you? If it\u2019s not a real human, then it\u2019s even less likely that it will be God, for <strong>we have a hard time imagining what our bone and blood do not know in real time and space.<\/strong> But the good news of the Gospel is that a Real human has come to find each one of us, and is looking for us still. <strong>His gaze is waiting for you to see him seeing you. Hearing you. Feeling you. The One whose empathy \u00a0can take it because he has already taken everything else.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At a time when our minds are becoming in many respects as disintegrated as ever, even as we swallow the illusion of greater connection through technology; as our social and political fabric feel like they are fraying apart at the seams,<strong> empathy that begins and ends with God\u2019s good creation of our minds is just what we need.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>God can hardly wait, and he is already feeling how good you\u2019re going to feel in the process.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Intergenerational Learning We\u2019re either going to flock and circle with older generations that are trying to hold on to what they have and defend what they\u2019ve done, or we\u2019re going to join with younger generations and with their desire to take these issues seriously because their entire future is going to unfold in a climate-changed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24071"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24074,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions\/24074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}