Episode 229 (Transcript): What About Empathy?
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Zinah Burke for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
CW: Have you ever heard in a scripture story, though, with Jesus healing someone - have you ever heard that a person was healed because of the faith of their friends?
Empathy. Right? If that isn’t empathy - tearing out the roof! And I just think, what a visual that is of empathy, of having friends mourn with those who mourn and had compassion, right?
Because the empathy moved them to compassion to do something.
SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is “What About Empathy?”
CW: What about empathy? Susan, are you ready?
SH: I wonder why we're having a conversation about empathy right now, Cynthia.
CW: Gee, I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine. But we're gonna get there, and hopefully our listeners come along with us as we dissect it.
SH: Yeah, it's, it feels like a complicated topic in new ways, I guess to me.
CW: Yeah. New ways.
SH: Empathy has suddenly become a hot button issue, and I never really knew that it could be or would be, I guess.
CW: Right? How could you take something that is so Jesus-y and make it controversial? I don't know, but we've managed to do that. So yeah, let's go ahead and talk about it, because, like you, I've been perplexed, but mostly I've been super sad to hear all the talk in our culture. And maybe it's just American culture, apologies to our friends who are outside the United States, but there's been a lot of talk here in the United States.
Is it, is the talk mostly coming from like, Christian nationalists? Like they're writing books, I'm not even gonna say the title of their books, but they're poo-pooing empathy.
SH: Right.
CW: There are podcasts from, you know, the dude bros talking about how it's a sin. And I'm really sad also to say that I see it in our own church community as well.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't really heard our leaders use, like that phrase, “the sin of empathy”, but the sentiments are there. And we'll get into some of the ouchie things I've heard leaders say in a minute, but I think it's really common when navigating big changes with the organization of the church to have to decide to break away from maybe what church leaders are telling us to instead, prioritizing what our heart tells us, what our spirit is telling us, our conscience, however we wanna describe that. I think that's really just what Christlike compassion is. Christlike empathy is.
So we're gonna talk about some of that today and I wanted to start us out with a quote from Reverend Dana Colley Corsello. And she is one of the clergy at the Washington Cathedral. And she says this, “I would argue that if Jesus is anything, he is empathic. If compassion is being willing to suffer alongside another, empathy is understanding how they feel. Jesus, as God, embodied empathy by coming to earth as a man and enduring the human experience. This is what we mean when we refer to the doctrine of the incarnation.
“When our Bishop, Mariann Budde, preached at the Interfaith Service of Prayer for the Nation in January, she beseeched President Trump to have mercy on the most vulnerable among us. Her words triggered an avalanche of Christian Nationalist condemnation. Much of it highlighted what her critics literally called ‘the sin of empathy’. Their argument was that ‘empathy’ amounts to a false gospel of ‘kindness’ that enables a culture of ‘coddling’ and ‘weakness.’”
CW: So, it's all around us right now in our country. We can't escape it.
SH: Well, and it's so interesting to me because I remember when I heard that sermon from Bishop Mariann Budde, and then all of the fallout from it, I was shocked, honestly. I was shocked that there was fallout because it seemed like such innocuous Christian messages to me, that she was delivering that day. And so it tells me that we're navigating something really, really tricky in our culture right now, when it's hard for me to even see or understand where the lines are being drawn and where those are coming from.
And I say this as someone who has spent my entire life, you know, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, being a Democrat among Republicans, feeling like a progressive among conservatives. And so I'm really used to those lines and I'm used to head scratcher moments sometimes where I say, wow, this just doesn't fit at all with the way that I think about things.
But this was something new to me. This was a reading of empathy as a sin that was something I really couldn't even get my head around. So I think it's a really great time to have this conversation because I personally just wanna even talk through it and understand a little bit about my own experience with that.
CW: Me too. Well, let's jump in then. Can we have a conversation for a few minutes, just, what even is empathy? I mean, duh! But also, you know, I think it would be helpful. It's been helpful to you and me, I think, as we've been preparing these notes. We've kind of had our own conversation offline, but let's go ahead and have that conversation online now, shall we?
SH: I can never have that conversation too often, Cynthia. I think I told you on an episode once before that if you were to search my Google history for, like the past 10 years, you would be astonished at how often questions like “what is empathy, what is compassion?”
How often questions like that, I mean, yeah. I've admitted so many times that I'm a real dunce and my search history would bear that out on some things. But like, I get confused about some of these things. So like for me, I can't have the conversation often enough where I'm reminded, okay, here's what we're talking about when we're talking about empathy.
CW: Well, Susan, I mean, let's be fair to our dunciness, whatever it is. Because I totally relate to what you're saying. Like, I mean, of course in preparation for this I Googled like “sympathy versus empathy versus compassion versus” like all these words, right? Just trying to parse out what the meanings are.
And so let's just go straight to Brene Brown because her book “Atlas of the Heart”, we're gonna quote heavily from it for probably the next five minutes. But she tackles exactly that, like all these definitions and what these different words mean. So, she starts out by saying “In simple terms, the empathy I'm talking about is understanding what someone is feeling, not feeling it for them. If someone is feeling lonely, empathy doesn't require us to feel lonely too, only to reach back into our own experience with loneliness so we can understand and connect.”
And I really like those two words there, to understand and connect, and how that is part of empathy. But maybe being followers of Jesus, there's something else on top of that?
SH: Well, it already starts to get a little bit muddy for me because I was thinking about when I read that definition, then I was thinking about our baptismal covenant, right? Which actually does instruct us to “mourn with those who mourn.” And so I'm not sure where that, for instance, would fall on the scale of feeling it ourselves versus understanding and connecting.
You know, it's clear to me that it does require really feeling from us, so I'm wondering if maybe being willing to go there with someone is enough, like being willing to try to venture into their feelings and understand what they are? I don't know. It also made me think of that Richard Rohr line that I love so much and I've relied on heavily through the years. “Jesus' loyalty is to human suffering.”
CW: Nice.
SH: To me, that makes it so clear, because we all understand what it is to suffer, right? And when I put everything that Jesus was doing and everything about the Jesus message into that context, then it just, it's like the muddiness sort of falls away from me.
I think that it just means that we have to privilege human suffering over all the other considerations. Right? And in the case of the condemnation that we saw coming down from Christian nationalists and others after the Mariann Budde sermon, I think you're looking at a case of where they're privileging sin over suffering.
They're saying, you know, rightness and fairness and justice, and, you know, all of those things, are the important consideration always. You have to satisfy those things first before you can even look at suffering. And so to me, clearly, they're getting it wrong because I feel like Richard Rohr puts the pin right on it when he says Jesus' loyalty is to human suffering.
That makes it really easy for me to understand. So I can't go to a place, I can't even figure out how to go to a place when I'm coming at it through the Christian context where all of those other things get privileged first.
CW: Well, can I be really wishy-washy for a minute and say I agree with what you're saying and what Richard Rohr is saying, and I agree with Brene Brown? I don't know where the line is as Latter Day Saints, if we're called to mourn with those who mourn, I totally agree with that, I'm on board with that. And also, when does that crossover into codependency? I mean, maybe it's all situational, right? Like in this context it could be codependent and like being totally enmeshed with someone when you're literally taking their suffering on yourself, versus like what Brene Brown was talking about, which was like understanding and connecting to them just as another human being.
I'm sure we could talk about that for hours and hours. And if we had a mental health professional here, they would probably set us straight. But let's press forward.
SH: I was gonna say, yeah, we can talk about it for hours and I'll have no answers.
CW: Exactly! We would have a great time!
SH: Soon as we finish recording this, I may go back and Google again. “What is empathy versus compassion versus sympathy?” I'm gonna be right back in the question. 'Cause I'm just never totally sure how to draw clear lines between these things.
CW: Right. Well, we can discuss them and hopefully we inch forward just a little bit. But Brene Brown also says, “Empathy is a tool of compassion. We can respond empathically only if we are willing to be present to someone's pain. If we're not willing to do that, it's not real empathy.”
SH: Okay. I like that.
CW: I do too!
SH: Let's talk about that for a minute. Well, the reason I like it is because I feel like it's something we can talk about. So like, what does it mean to be present to someone's pain? Because I think it can help clarify something like, what does it mean to mourn with someone who mourns?
Do I have to mourn myself or not? Well, what does it mean to be present to someone's pain? I mean, do you have ideas about that? The only thing I can think of - I guess help the person feel seen and heard. Which is validating, but even more simply than that, even just listening to them, like being willing to hear what they're saying, right? And not respond, not meet it with judgment, right? And then to show up and be there for someone. I can show up and be there with someone who's mourning and not necessarily be mourning myself. Is that right? I don't know.
CW: I don't know, Susan, I don't know if any of this is right! We're just two friends showing up and having a conversation about this.
But what I loved, especially in that Brene Brown quote, was being present. And I think that's exactly what you're discussing. We may not always show up and be present exactly the way we should, but since when is discipleship ever showing up perfectly?
SH: Ah, yes.
CW: I'm okay with being a clumsy disciple, and I'm okay with my friends showing up and being clumsy disciples with me, and we'll just all muddle along together and be present, (to use her word present, to understand and to connect.) That's what I'm looking for. At least when I'm in a dark place
SH: And it requires something of me. Like it's uncomfortable to be present with people sometimes. Maybe it's not for everybody. It for sure is for me. Maybe that's the total introvert in me, but that’s hard.
CW: No, it is hard because you're always sitting there thinking, “I don't have the right words to say” when really, it's not about that, you know? “I don't know if I can actually change the situation.” Well, guess what? You're not Jesus. You don't get to take everyone's pain away, so I really resonate with the word of being present. I can do that.
SH: That's a good one. I can do that too. Or it's something I at least know how to work on.
CW: Yeah. Yeah. You can Google the definition and from there you can take step one or something.
SH: Yeah. What does it mean to be present? I think we've just added a new question to my Google search history. What does it mean to be present?
CW: What does it mean for Susan Hinkley to be present in someone else's life? That's good.
(Musical Interlude)
CW: Okay, well then let's get really basic for just like one sentence here. Sympathy is “I feel sorry for you” rather than like, empathy is, “I get it. I feel with you and I've been there,” and I'm pretty sure those words are from Brene Brown as well. But I also like that distinction. To me, empathy feels like it requires a bit more of us than sympathy.
SH: Okay. But this reminds me of the thing that I always get wrong about this, because when I see it described as “I've been there”, sometimes it's hard for me to respond with, “I've been there” without shifting and making it about me, if you know what I'm saying. It's like I'm inclined to share my own experience with something, and what I'm trying to do is demonstrate solidarity with the person and give them validation, but I don't even know when, I'm not sure when that's appropriate to do. I think I get most of this wrong most of the time, Cynthia, if I'm honest. And it's not that I'm not trying to do it and it's not that my intentions aren't good, I just have a really hard time discerning the lines around some of this stuff and what my part in it is really supposed to be.
So, already, I think I've established that I'm gonna solve nothing through this conversation, but thank you for having it with me because I'm not sure I'm getting any better at this. I don't know.
CW: Well, there's no way people aren't resonating and nodding their head right now along with you, Susan. So thank you for being vulnerable and saying, “wait, what? I don't even know if I'm getting any of this right!” because I'm with you! I don't think I would say that to someone unless I had maybe mirrored exactly what they were going through in that moment. But I do think we can - I mean, there are things we can say. So I mean, I hope that doesn't throw off too many people, that phrase, “I've been there.” There are different ways to say that. The few words before that, where it's, “I get it” or “I feel with you”, or just “I'm sorry,” or “my gosh, this sucks right now! This is not okay!” I think there are lots of ways to voice it.
SH: And I think there might be a space in the conversation too. If you're present with someone over a period of time, then maybe there is a time where they would benefit from hearing your experience, but maybe just not meeting them with your experience before you even fully have heard and understood their experience, maybe that's a place to draw the distinction.
CW: Well, and maybe this next quote by “Sister Brene” will clear up a little bit of where you and I are scratching our heads right now. She said, “The number one question I get when I'm teaching empathy is, ‘How can I be empathic with someone if I haven't had their experience?’ It's a great question because it exposes a dangerous myth about empathy. Empathy is not relating to an experience, it's connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience. When I'm working with groups, I often ask participants to raise their hands if they know joy, hurt, heartbreak, shame, grief, love, etc. At the end, after all the hands have been raised to every emotion, I say, ‘You're qualified.’ You don't need to be the expert or experience what they've experienced.”
SH: Okay. That makes it a little bit easier. Yeah, that makes it easier. She makes it sound like, “are you a human being? Then you're qualified!” I think we've all experienced all this stuff, but this is why it's confusing to me then, when people are talking about empathy as being a sin.
Because I feel like if you're a mother and you see another mother with a starving child, you know, unless you're a sociopath, Cynthia, you feel something, right? Like you just naturally feel something. So it seems to me that you have to actually actively turn off your feelings in order to feel no connection to the emotions of other people.
CW: Yes!
SH: And that is the scary and completely bewildering part for me of our current political climate. I don't understand how people can see the things that I see in our culture right now that are causing me, like, literal pain to see them - I don't understand how they're seeing them and not feeling those things.
And so, like, that's really hard. I don't know. I was having a conversation with my three daughters the other day and they were talking about some of the news footage about the children in Gaza who are starving. Right? And I think we've all seen it, and suddenly, I mean, they're all mothers of young children themselves. And suddenly everyone's crying, like, I couldn't even really get the sentence out of describing starving children in Gaza. It's like, it just rose up so naturally. So I'm having a really hard time right now, I guess, not just necessarily that I consider myself a Christian or a follower of Jesus and I should be having feelings about these things, but that as a human being, I'm experiencing feelings about certain things that I feel disconnected from a whole lot of people in our community to whom those things don't seem to be mattering.
Does that make sense?
CW: Right. It totally makes sense.
SH: I know, we're getting scarily political here, but I don't really know what else to do because for me it's been really hard to attend church among a group of people who I know are not having the same feelings about some of these things that I'm having.
CW: I really like that you used that phrase a minute ago, like actively turning off your feelings. And I think that's what we're seeing right now, and that's why it is so difficult. I think our default, I could be wrong about this, but I think our default as human beings, is to see another person suffering and to have our heart go out to them.
And so I feel like we're in this climate right now where it's like, “no, you need to turn that off because this is more important!” and we'll get into more of that. But that's just not adding up. Like if my brain is a little computer - and it is a little, little tiny miniature computer - you know, it's like, does not compute. Does not compute. Like there's something about that that isn't adding up right now.
SH: Okay. But then a light bulb just came on from you as you're saying that, because it occurs to me that as a Latter-Day Saint, actually I've been asked to turn off my natural feelings about things many times across my lifetime.
For instance, I'm just thinking about the LGBTQ question, and I'm thinking about, I don't even know how long ago - it's before any of this was really that front and center on my radar, but where they were saying, you know, if your gay child brings their partner to your home, you know, you should be nice to them, but you should never allow them to stay there.
It was something, it was like that kind of thing. And I thought, well, now wait a minute. What are you even talking about and what are you asking me to do with my feelings for my own child and family? Right? So, to me that's like the same kind of thing. I'm kind of used to being asked to privilege other people's perceptions and other people's judgments about things over my own natural response to them in my church life.
So that might be a key here. That might be operating here somewhere. I think it is for some people.
CW: Well, and what you're describing can be applied to a whole lot more than just empathy, right? We're being asked all the time to turn off maybe how we feel, like I was saying in my intro to this topic, to turn off our conscience or what the spirit is telling us, our inner knowing, or whatever. And to privilege what leaders, whether that's church leaders or government leaders or whoever, are telling us, is the better choice.
That's why I think this belongs in a conversation about navigating change because you get to that sticky point where you have to decide, I'm going to privilege my own knowing, instead of somebody else's.
(Musical Interlude)
CW: All right, let's have a section then. I feel like we already jumped into this, but this section is called “Warning People about Empathy and Love is About Control and Fear.” Susan, do you have your bingo card out?
SH: Bingo!
CW: Do you have some jelly beans? Go ahead and put a jelly bean over control. And then one over fear, because we're gonna go there like we do with so many topics.
Why does it always come back to control and fear? I don't know. 'Cause we're humans and this is what we do. But I wanna talk about something called the contact hypothesis, which is that people are afraid of the unknown, right? So here's our fear.
The underlying reasoning of the contact hypothesis is that if people are exposed to members of other groups in a variety of ways, they will become more positive toward members of those groups and less likely to display prejudicial behavior.
To that, I would say, “Duh!”
SH: Right. Well, it's been true in my own life, I have to say.
CW: Exactly!
SH: Getting out in the world is good for you.
CW: Yes. Yeah. It goes on to say that exposure can't be the exposure to these other people that maybe you are slightly afraid of, 'cause you don't know them. It can't be short and infrequent. It needs to be frequent, long and significant rather than occasional, short and irrelevant. So that makes sense too. But you gotta start somewhere, so. You know, if it's just a little baby exposure at first, then I can see how that can lead to more understanding of different groups.
Let's go to Brene Brown again. She said, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.”
SH: Such a good quote.
CW: That's probably the most common Brene Brown quote I keep in my pocket. That reminds me of, and I've talked about this before on the podcast so I don't need to go into it, but when I was volunteering at Encircle many years ago, which, Encircle is an LGBTQ family Resource Center for LGBTQ kiddos, and it was volunteering there that helped me shed stereotypes - different things I had been taught that turned out to not be true - about this beloved community. So. Contact hypothesis - that just makes sense to me.
SH: Well, and I love how that's worked in your life as the observer who's just kind of watched you have this experience at Encircle.
I've loved seeing the way that it sort of moved you beyond just basic empathy. I don't know. When I saw that you had that in the notes about Encircle, it made me start thinking about a previous episode that we did which was episode 131, “Following Jesus' Example of Compassion.”
And so I went back and looked at the notes for that, and that is when I said, wait a minute, all this stuff sounds really familiar, because we've had a similar conversation before and it was in that episode. But the thing that I draw attention to here is for - do you remember in that episode where you were envisioning a little graph in your mind?
It was sort of like a little circle that it started with sympathy and then went to empathy, and then moved to compassion?
CW: I do.
SH: And you described having that visual. And so compassion is, it's like related to empathy, but slightly different because more than just feeling the emotions of the other person, compassion motivates us to take action.
And sometimes when people are discussing empathy, I see them describing empathy the same way as sort of spurring us to action. But I think once you do that, then you're crossing over into compassion. And so just to have a quick recap of that here - Compassion includes four components basically.
It's bringing attention, or recognizing that there is suffering. It's feeling emotionally moved by that suffering, which to me that's feeling empathy. You can relate to the emotion that the person's having. And then you move to wishing there to be relief from that suffering.
And that's where you show up and you are actually volunteering at Encircle. And you're moved by it to this readiness to take action, to relieve the suffering. Contrary to what many people might believe, compassion is considered to be a muscle. In the same way that we've talked about hope being a muscle before on this podcast, compassion is a muscle.
And it makes me think that empathy probably is also a muscle and that we can strengthen it with relevant exercises. I think that because you just hearken back to the experience you had with Encircle, that's been doing empathy and compassion exercises for you. I think that's strengthened your muscle for that kind of work because you had the idea, you did it, and then, you know, it's reaped not just benefits for the people who have received your service there, but also for you. Don't you feel like you have grown through that experience?
CW: Oh, of course! Right. That's the funny part, I think of all this. The ironic part is it's like how often do I get more out of something than the person I'm helping?
SH: I mean, always in my experience.
CW: Always! Duh! Again.
SH: I pretty much always get more out of it. Even when I'm doing it wrong, even when I don't quite get it right, just my willingness and desire to try it, I feel like I'm growing my muscle for it.
Right? And I always love that idea that something's a muscle 'cause it means I can get better at it. So even when I don't feel like I'm doing it right or I'm not that good at it, it's worth acting on those impulses that come to me to try to strengthen it.
CW: Thank you for bringing up willingness. Maybe people put a jelly bean on your bingo card over willingness because I'm glad that came up in this conversation about empathy as well. So good.
Here's another quote from Reverend Dana Colley Corsello of the Washington National Cathedral, and we're gonna link to her, if you need a 15 minute devotional on empathy. Oh my gosh.
She's so good. She said this in that sermon, “Empathy is not toxic, nor is it a sin. It moves us from understanding to action. And this is why the ability to empathize is a threat to those with a need to control.”
So there's the control element.
“The arguments about toxic empathy are finding open ears, because far right-wing, white evangelicals are looking for a moral framework around which they can justify President Trump's executive orders and policies, and decrying empathy helps them do that.”
There it is.
SH: There it is. And the thing about it is, the thing that gave me the big “aha” was that they're not worried that we're feeling these things. They're worried that we're gonna want to do things or correct things as a result.
CW: As a result.
SH: Uhhuh.
CW: Yeah. I mean, I really loved her whole sermon because it kind of helped me understand, “Aha! This current administration in the United States has goals that are absolutely the opposite of a life of discipleship in Jesus Christ.” I don't know how that can be argued otherwise. So the people who are poo-pooing empathy, they seem to need to create ways to ease that cognitive dissonance, right?
Enter in the talk of “sin” language,
SH: Right.
CW: And I think it's their desperate desire. They wanna keep wearing their crosses. They wanna keep saying, “I'm a Christian” while doing the exact opposite. Like, I feel like we're living in backwards world. When people act outside of their value system, they either have to change it to ease that dissonance or they have to justify it.
And I feel like we're in this justifying phase right now and it's heartbreaking.
SH: I totally agree, and I guess this is where it's been frustrating for me that our church leaders are just sitting this one out, somehow.
CW: Yes!
SH: I feel like we could really use some moral clarity from anyone who is going to take upon themselves the title “prophet.” You know, I just feel like our leaders need to take some ownership of these kinds of words and give some really specific direction here. Because justification is a super powerful thing. I think every human being knows that, we all know how to use it. We all do use it.
And dang, we're so good at it. We're so good at it we hardly even know we're doing it sometimes. And so this is where I feel like in a living church, this is exactly the kind of place where I would expect leaders to step up and take a stand. I've seen leaders of other churches doing that.
CW: Yeah. Holy envy.
SH: Holy envy.
CW: In my notes here, Susan, I said, “Susan, are we gonna address anything about kind of going political?” Because we are. And yet I feel like our allegiance first and foremost should always be to being followers of Jesus. Everything else, if it doesn't coincide with that, then that's how we know it's a bad fruit.
And we shouldn't be talking about the sin of empathy! Like, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. That's basically what I'm trying to say. I don't know. I feel like there's a difference between being political and being partisan. Speaking of things to Google, I Googled that and a Pew research article came up, which we'll link to, and this is the thing I wanted to read from that.
It said, “Partisanship continues to be the dividing line in the American public's political attitudes, far surpassing differences by age, race, ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, religious affiliation” - ding, ding ding! - “or other factors.” And I feel like that's what we're seeing right now, is we're seeing this extreme partisanship where - and this is data. This is data from Pew Research studies - that is more powerful, it is more important to people - their political party - than that whole list, including religious affiliation. And to me, that's the only way I can understand in my puny little brain what is going on right now. Why I feel like I'm living in backwards world, because our partisanship is stronger than even our religious affiliation.
And if that isn't heartbreaking, as a religious person, I don't know what is. That Jesus is actually second, his teachings are second too. Whoever happens to be in charge right now is where people have their stronger allegiance. To that.
SH: Agreed. And as you were reading that - that definition about partisanship, or that quote about partisanship, I was thinking about Jesus, because Jesus was inherently political.
CW: Exactly!
SH: I mean, you could say that his politics got him killed, really. Jesus was political. But as you read that definition there - “far surpassing differences by age, race, and ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, religious affiliation.” Jesus was not partisan. I feel like most of the things that we see Jesus doing actually are erasing partisan lines. But he's doing that within the context of still behaving politically
CW: Nice, Susan. I like that.
SH: And so I feel like it's okay for us to talk politically without necessarily being partisan, if that makes sense.
CW: Right. I agree. I've been a member of both political parties.
I know I don't need to say that to our listeners, but I feel like I kind of want to say that, because that's what's made me feel like I'm living in backwards world, is I feel like, wait a minute, my allegiance has always been on living a Christlike life. It didn't matter what political party I was in, but now we're in this era where human lives are at stake.
Like, I cry all the time, like I'm gonna try not to cry right now. But I cry so much when I see how we're treating people right now in this country and seeing good members of our church stand and say “The law is more important.” And I'm like, what are we talking about here? Where is your empathy? Where is your compassion?
Where is your Christlike teachings? How are they not coming in right now? It's painful.
SH: Yeah, it's painful. And I think that what you're hearing from people then is partisanship actually.
CW: That's exactly what we're hearing. And it's helped me make sense of it in my brain. It doesn't feel any better to my heart.
SH: Right, right.
CW: But it's helped me make sense of it in my brain to understand, oh, this is just another part of human behavior 101, is our inclination is to Team Whatever. Whatever team we're on.
SH: Yeah. We're tribal people.
CW: Yeah. Totally! We're totally tribal people.
(Musical Interlude)
CW: Let's talk about stories and how stories enhance our empathy. They actually untether the mind. That was my favorite thing in this research I found, is understanding people's lives, people's experiences, marginalized groups. That really can kind of untether your mind to understanding situations that are completely different than yours.
And one thing I've learned, and I've tried to take advantage of it in this political climate, is that facts don't change minds, but personal stories do.
SH: We quoted that right in our very first episode of this season.
CW: You're right. We did! You've probably noticed Susan, because you're my friend, that I have been sharing a lot of immigration stories on social media.
And I don't share statistics. I share personal stories one person at a time. If I see a story, an Instagram story or whatever, I google that person's name and I learn everything I can about them. And then I just kind of sum it up in one little paragraph saying, this is what we're doing to this person right now today and it's not okay. So personally, that's how I am trying to help other people untether the mind, is by sharing personal stories.
SH: I think it's one of the only things that can help in a climate like this. I absolutely have learned the truth in my own life of that idea, that stories are the way that we change people's minds about things.
You could say, Cynthia, that we built the whole At Last She Said It project around this principle, sort of without knowing that we were doing it. But, you know, in a way I feel lucky that my own changiness around my faith manifested as a silence crisis, because what I felt compelled to do as a result of that was to finally tell my own stories and my own experience, right?
I was gonna die if I didn't start saying these things out loud. And I'm not really sure that our podcast would have reached as many women as it has if it had been based on anything other than our personal experiences. And now also, you know, those of the many women in our community. I think that's what gives it its power to have an impact on people.
CW: I think there are a lot of information to be gained by sharing facts and statistics, but I think you're right that it's sharing personal human stories that really can change hearts and minds.
SH: Maybe it's because that's where empathy lives actually. That's like the trigger. It's like the gateway to empathy is being able to see and understand someone else's experience.
So of course that's where the power that might eventually motivate change comes from. That totally makes sense when I think about it in that context.
(Musical Interlude)
CW: Well, Susan, we're nearing the end of summer. But I think I've been telling you - the summer of Cynthia has included novels, like I have lost track of how many novels I have read.
It's been a great way to escape, but at the same time, reading fiction allows us to transcend the limitations of our own experiences, obviously. I'm reading about people whose lives are different than mine. It's transported me into the lives of others, real or imagined. So yeah it's just more of that untethering of the mind that is such a crucial component of empathy. And it provides like, a safe and accessible way to practice empathy. Like there's something about reading a story that you know, isn't “real” that says, okay this didn't really happen, but you kind of learn the same lesson anyway.
If that makes sense.
SH: Absolutely. Because real does not have to be true. It makes me think of the famous Camus quote, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” That's one of the very first things that my very first creative writing teacher ever tried to convince us of, and it landed immediately with a ring of truth for me.
I knew that's why I loved fiction so much, because although it was not literally true, it revealed to me, you know, deep truths about human nature. Fiction tells truths about the cultures we navigate and the world that we live in. So you can always know good fiction because you know it's true.
And when you read a book that isn't that great and you can't really put your finger on anything, I would posit that probably it's just not quite ringing true to you in the way that good fiction does.
CW: Well, our listeners know I've been on a Jamil Zhaki kick. I know we just, we quoted him on a previous episode. He's the neuroscientist who studies empathy. I'm reading his book right now, “Hope for Cynics", but his older book is called “The War for Kindness", and he says, “Fiction is empathy's gateway drug. It helps us feel for others when-real world caring is too difficult, complicated, or painful. Because of this, it can restore bonds between people even when that seems impossible.”
SH: Oh, I love that.
CW: Yeah, it's a gateway drug. So, in my summer of Cynthia reading, I read Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie’s book “Dream Count.” And I listened to a Trevor Noah podcast episode. I'm gonna link to the clip because it's just a one minute clip and it's so beautiful, but I'm gonna cut it down just for time reasons here.
And she said this, “I think [fiction] is our last frontier. It's only in literature that we can learn things that we cannot learn anywhere else. Journalism cannot tell us about human motivation. Journalism cannot go deep into the terrain of the human heart, which is really key for almost everything in the world.”
She's so good.
SH: She's so good.
CW: In our own faith tradition, I think when we hear the stories of, say, LGBTQ folks, or when others have heard our own stories of women and the harms of patriarchy, others have changed their minds.
SH: Right.
CW: You and I have seen that. Up close and personal these last five years.
I was just at the Gather Conference here in Provo, and one woman, she was like walking in between classes, and she walked by, I was signing books. I was at the Signature Books table, just signing books for people. And she walked by and kind of put her hands around her mouth and said, “I need you to know I love you! I love your show, and also, you make me so mad!”
SH: Is there any better compliment?
CW: And I was like, come back and tell me a little bit more! And she just kind of came back and said, “You know, I found your podcast because I was in this complicated space of having a queer child. But then you started talking about women's issues and I had never thought about those things before. And now I'm so mad, you know?”
And I thought, oh, sorry, not sorry. But love and empathy, they just, I think naturally increase when we hear the stories of other people, of particularly marginalized groups. But because I think - and this is where I'm gonna get LDS specific - because I think our leaders are trying to maintain control of the narrative that, for example, being queer is a sin, or I guess they would say “acting on it,” right? It's not a sin to be gay, but to act on it is. And you know, if we're gonna talk about equality, they just, they keep telling us, “men and women just have different responsibilities in the church. So, sorry that you feel second class, but that's a bummer! That's not how we intend it to feel. But sorry, it feels that way.”
And it's like, “Oh, okay. But it's also a fact.” Anyway, I just feel like that's what that woman was trying to say to me that day was, “Oh, I came to your podcast for this reason, but now I realize there's a whole bunch of other things that are ouchie, and now they're ouchie to me too.”
SH: I cannot love that story enough, Cynthia.
CW: I think I went home and texted you that night, “Susan! Someone told me she's mad!”
SH: I cannot love it enough.
CW: Can I get really specific here and just throw out a couple quotes from our leaders? Speaking of ouchie, this isn't probably any surprise, but there are a lot of hard things that Dallin Oaks says when it comes to this topic.
There's a talk called “Law and Love" from April, 2009, and he said, “God's anger and his wrath are not a contradiction of His love, but an evidence of His love.” SH: Okay.
CW: That's really interesting. Anything you wanna say about that, Susan?
SH: I'm thinking, Cynthia. Continue.
CW: Thinking, okay. He also had a talk in 2018 where he said, “Love is not the answer to every question. It must be accompanied by and shaped by law and truth.” That's hard. More recently, there was a talk in 2024, in the April, 2024 Conference by Jack Gerard and he said, “Christian kindness is not a substitute for integrity.” That was kind of ouchie.
SH: Okay, “say more” is what I wanna say about that.
CW: And I promise I'm not taking that out of context.
Like, I read the entire talk and that's pretty much what the talk is about. People can go read it if they want to. But one more quote, this one by Jeffrey Holland and he said, “So-called ‘love’” - he puts love in air quotes. Those aren't even my quotes. He said “So-called ‘love’ that looks the other way when behavior endangers the very souls of the people it claims to serve is not love at all. It is merely hypocrisy or self-interest disguised as caring.”
SH: Okay. I'm looking at all those quotes together 'cause you wrote them all in our notes here. So I'm taking all of those together and it's sort of like Exhibit A for privileging things over human suffering.
CW: Yes.
SH: It's making me think of - I've been reading this morning about the prodigal son, so I was just thinking about all of this in context of the prodigal son. I'm like, okay, well I know what that parable would say about this quote. And what it says about this quote is that the suffering of the son who returns is the thing that the father privileges in that story. Right?
CW: Right?
SH: It's the other son over here standing here with his arms folded, saying, “Yeah, but I've been keeping all the rules all this time.” Right? “I'm the one with integrity. I'm the one who's acted in accordance with the law.” So, it's interesting to me how often Latter-Day Saints - well, it's the old “We all know love is important, but -”
Right?
CW: Yes.
SH: And then we focus on all these things after the, “but,” and it's really interesting to me. But, you know, I think where it comes from is that we're this whole hustle culture. We're this hustle culture, and so we're the people who are all about all the things we're doing and keeping the law and all of that.
So it's really hard for us to put any of those things aside and privilege anything else over that. And maybe that's part also of what's going on in our political culture, political climate right now, and also in our church culture, right? Is that the hard workers of the world - the ants in our culture - are pretty pissed off by the grasshoppers at this point, I think.
CW: Yeah. Good point.
SH: And I don't know, it tells me that there is this age old friction between these two camps. This is hardly a new thing that we're seeing manifesting right now. And that probably, empathy has probably always been the cure for this, actually.
CW: Exactly.
SH: But you have to be willing to set aside your own hard work in order to get to that place. I'm wondering if we were to go looking, like, could we find quotes that balanced out among General Conference messages? Could we find quotes to balance out those quotes? I don't know. I honestly don't know.
CW: Yes. I think we could.
SH: Do you?
CW: I think, I mean, I'm thinking of specific people in my head right now. I think we could find them by Elder Kearon and Elder Uchtdorf, by Chieko Okazaki, by Sharon Eubank, you know?
SH: Then, why are these the messages that have always spoken the loudest to me as a Latter-Day Saint?
CW: I don't know!
SH: Okay.
CW: That's a great question. But I feel like, yes, like you said a minute ago, this is kind of the human question.
Like, this isn't really anything new, but it does feel ramped up to me right now. Maybe only because we're Americans in this political climate right now? I don't know, I'd be interested to have this conversation with a friend in Australia or in England, you know, do they feel like our rhetoric of law over love is amped up right now?
(Musical interlude)
CW: Well, can we talk about, I think one of the most beautiful stories of Jesus, of empathy? Can we talk about the healing of the paralytic man?
SH: Yes!
CW: Do you wanna tell that story?
SH: Sure. I'm happy to. This version comes from the NRSV and is found in Mark 2, beginning with verse 3 and says this,
“Then some people came bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’
“Now, some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, ‘Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins, but God alone?’ At once, Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves, and he said to them, ‘Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven?” Or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk?”’ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, stand up. Take your mat and go to your home.’ And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them so that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’”
CW: Sorry, I didn't mean to giggle in there, but when you you read the line, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It's blasphemy!” I thought, oh, okay. There we are! There's the human 101. Right? This is what we always do.
SH: Yes! None of these problems are new.
CW: None of these problems are new. We're so predictable! Have you ever heard in a scripture story, though, with Jesus healing someone - have you ever heard that a person was healed because of the faith of their friends?
Empathy, right? If that isn’t empathy - tearing out the roof. And I just think what a visual that is of empathy, of having friends mourn with those who mourn and had compassion, right? Because the empathy moved them to compassion to do something.
And there's this great quote by the author Bob Goff, in his book, “Live in Grace, Walk in Love”, and he said, “We need friends who will hope things for us we’re too discouraged to dream for ourselves. We need people who will lower us down through the roof rather than waiting for permission.”
SH: So good. I love that. One of the things I love, since you point that out in this story, when I put it in the context of the other Jesus stories of healing, you know, in those stories we so often hear him say that healing has happened through the person's own faith. Right? Your faith has saved you. And here, through this shift to where it's like, the faith of your friends, I feel like he's trying to empower us spiritually to move us to empathy, right? To empower us in our empathy, because in this case, seeing him call out the faith of the friends in addition to personal spiritual empowerment, He is teaching empathy, is teaching the power of it, like it worked! They wanted it for the person. They acted on it, and they were healed. And so it's a yet another example of where he is overtly privileging healing and grace over sin.
Because they ask questions about sin. He is like, “Why? Why are you even asking this? Stop going there!”
CW: This is like the perfect story of law versus love because the people are like, “Wait a minute! You can't forgive sins! There is a systematic way you forgive sins and that is - you go to the temple and you pay money and you buy this and the priests will forgive sins and here's this crazy man here, privileging law over that love saying, “I don't think so.”
SH: Yeah. This is where Jesus is saying, “I'll show you what I think about sin. I'm gonna show you how much I care about that right now.”
CW: Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of, he's metaphorically flipping the tables here. Right? “I’ll show you.”
SH: Yeah, he is.
CW: “I'll show you what I think.”
Oh, one of my favorite books is by Ashley Mae Hoiland, and it's called “100 Birds Taught Me To Fly: The Art of Seeking God.” It's published by the BYU Maxwell Institute, and it's been out about 10 years, but she talks about in here this very story of the man being lowered through the roof. And you know how we've said before on the podcast, like to read scripture correctly, you have to picture yourself as like the least likable person in the story?
SH: Right. Right.
CW: Well, she tells it from every angle - from the friends on the roof, from the people in the crowd, from the naysayers. Anyway, and here's what she says. And it's so beautiful in a conversation about empathy, she said,
“There I am in the group on the roof. I see myself hoping to come to the feet of Christ and sometimes doing it in ways that are not prescribed or by the book. Or there again, I am among the people pressed into that home to hear Christ. I wonder so much about those people. How did they react when the man was lowered? Were they upset at the interruption? Did they feel like the paralytic man did not deserve to come right to the feet of Jesus when they had waited a long time and endured the cramped surroundings to see him, to hear him? How do I think of people who are coming to Christ in ways that differ from my own? How do I treat them? It is possible those people were harsh, but also—and I hope more likely—the crowd was nothing but kind and patient. What if everyone in that small room, gathered around Christ as he taught and healed the man, what if they celebrated in unison at the miracle they were a part of? What if their spirit contributed to the miracle? What if they marveled at the diverse paths that lead each person to Christ? What if they made that room—ceiling hole and all—a holy place of acceptance and kindness and celebration where one of their brothers was healed, where because he was, they too might be?”
SH: Mmm.
CW: I know. She's such a beautiful writer.
SH: I absolutely love that last line where she says, “A holy place of acceptance and kindness and celebration where one of their brothers was healed. Where because he was, they too might be.” To me it's like empathy belongs in the long list of things that I put in the world because I need it so desperately myself.
This is one of my main survival tactics in life. You know, I'm so hungry for empathy, and if I am, then I assume that other people must be too. I'm not that unique, right? So to me, you know, this is the magic of loving our neighbor as ourselves. It feels natural to me to privilege human suffering because I long for my own suffering to be privileged.
I feel like it so often has not been. You know, that's something that goes way back for me. It's a deep longing for me, and I just have to believe that I'm not alone in that. But I can see how law, and striving, and earning, and qualifying, and all those Mormon words from the quotes that you were reading above - I can see how all those words work on the ego, but I really don't see how they work on healing people, on healing broken hearts.
I don't see how they ease personal suffering. And I have really come to believe that the relief of suffering is the Good News of Jesus Christ. Once I began to see the Good News, I saw it as Good because it was a thing that healed my suffering when I so often had felt that my suffering had gone unseen and unnoticed.
And so this assurance that our human suffering will be met with grace and love makes us safe to meet others with grace and love also.
CW: Yes.
SH: We don't have any need to meet others with all those defensive tools, with the weapons of our ego, when we ourselves are loved.
CW: Mmm.
Well, Susan, thank you so much for showing up today and having a conversation about empathy. I feel fed now. I wasn't sure, going into this conversation if we were just - I felt like maybe we were just gonna be throwing, playing - I'm not a sports person, so I could be wrong, but I felt like I was just gonna be playing defense, just throwing things like “No, I don't like this.” You know, trying to combat these ideas out there of “the sin of empathy.”
But I really feel like I was fed.
SH: Me too. And it's because of that last quote that you chose. It really is, because it brought it around to this place where I could see where love is functioning in this. And as often as I can bring something back around to love, then it's like I can feel my place in it again.
As long as I'm acting out of love, I'm not sure it matters if I'm not getting empathy and compassion and sympathy quite right. You know, if I'm stumbling over my big clumsy feet when I'm trying to do those things. If the person that I'm interacting with is feeling my love and feeling Christ's love through what I'm trying to do, then that's a value for both of us. There's gonna be growth there for me and there's gonna be healing for them.
CW: I am so glad we ended with a conversation about love. Thank you, Susan.
SH: Thank you, Cynthia.
(Musical Interlude)
Voicemail 1: I was at Girls’ Camp recently as a leader, and it was my first time at one of the official church camps. All the signs, and all the missionaries, everyone kept talking about the Priesthood leaders, the Priesthood leaders, and I was thinking, “You know, one of these times I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna go down the little steps in the auditorium and I'm gonna stand in the front and say, “Well, I'm an endowed woman, so don't I have the priesthood?”
Well, I made comments and of course that infuriated everyone and it started a discussion. It reminds me of Episode 39 and what is the church up to? Because no one can define what it means. Is it the spirit? And then, okay, if it is the spirit, then you can use it in your callings. Okay. But not if a man has the Priesthood, because that overrides women having the spirit of the Priesthood.
Okay. Okay. So it's ordinances! But no! But then it's, “Your ministering,” then it's that! Okay, so if it's ministering, then can't anyone around the world, male, female, child, adult, member, not, - can't they all do that? They all can do good in the name of our Savior. So it has me thinking, if this is what we say sets apart our church from every other church in the world, that we have the Priesthood, we have ordinances, surely you'd think we should be able to define what we say is our biggest thing. I'm so confused by this. It's so frustrating, but it doesn't seem to bother everyone else.
Voicemail 2: Hello, ladies. The church asks, in the most recent Plural Marriage essay, “Will there be unwanted marriage arrangements in the next life?”
Side note, this is of course to assuage everyone, mostly women who continue to be plagued on every level by the coercive and human trafficking practice of polygamy, past, present, and future. And they answer, “No! No unwanted marriage arrangements,” as if they know. Then I ask, “Why bother to be sealed at all? If people don't want to be together anyway, and it can be changed around easily and everyone can spouse swap, bringing on the celestial swinging, baby! And then why bother to be obsessed about getting sealed at all? It seems people are sealed not with cosmically powered spiritual cement like we were taught, but more with dollar store Scotch tape. So this begs the question, what is the point? Why insist that a temple ceiling is so much better than our regular marriage?
Why make people, especially young people, jump through so many hoops and hold this thing up as the ultimate prize when it actually doesn't mean what you say it means? So the essay has just outlined it all in squishy statements of nothingness. And now for all the couples who are in messy sealing Hell, the answer is - it doesn't really matter! We will all figure it out later as the can is rolling down the road yet again. And the answer to my essay question, “Why keep this sealing thing alive at all? What's the point?” Well, here it is. It's always been about power and control. Maintaining control with conditional family togetherness. The end. Hashtag: polygamy lives.
CW: I'm gonna say that all over again. It'd be better if I wrote in complete sentences, Susan. Sorry.
Okay. This next section is, or this sympathy. I feel sorry for you. Did I write that or did you?
SH: You did.
CW: I did. Okay, sorry. Let me get there.
SH: Can you hear that the generator is running now?
CW: Nope.
SH: Okay, good. All right. Continue.
CW: We are rolling!
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