January 11, 2005

Voyeurs Leering at the Pain of Others

I really wish that I had something to say…

When I was a pastor that thought rushed through my head with startling regularity. I saw horrible things, mundane things, joyful and depressing things: all of the stuff of life. I suppose it was in the face of things that we cannot know or understand that I felt most inadequate. I remember wishing that I had something to say that could make sense of the pain or the sorrow that the person in front of me was facing. Words failed me often, and there were times I sat, quietly and empathically. Detachment was my friend. It kept me alive.

Empathy and sympathy are similar but different ideas: sympathy means that I feel the pain with another, their pain becomes mine; empathy means that I enter into the feelings and understand them but remain separate from the pain. One makes me suffer for that which I am not properly responsible and makes me into something of an addict (sympathy) the other makes me available, responsible, and able to respond without falling into platitudes. Sympathy can be somewhat parentalistic and defensive: I seek to dull my pain by denial. This is the stuff of addiction.

We have had unseasonably harsh rains here in Ventura, CA. I’ve always joked that we have four seasons in California: fire, flood, earthquake and drought. The fires of the summer stripped the vegetation from the ground. The rains have turned to mud. The mud turned to death flowing down from the hills. Two people that I know have lost their homes (One in La Conchita, another in Castitas Springs). Just what does one say to somebody that escaped with their life and the clothes on their back? What words can bring comfort in the face of that which cannot be rationally understood?


Voyeurs Leering at the Pain of Others

On the bus today I overheard a conversation between some of my fellows on the trip. One asked about the destruction and said that she wanted to go to look at the devastation. Another responded that he had no need to go to see how much other people lost. I responded that we have become voyeurs leering at the pain of others. The guy sitting next to me was at La Conchita with the military, digging for survivors. They found a dog. He looked beaten down and battered himself: a young man that seemed to want to have found somebody alive. Just mud and debris: Sympathy or empathy?

My detachment allowed me to be present in the face of suffering. Being empathetic allowed me to enter into pain and offer comfort and compassion to the people whose suffering I had been invited to share. This is the key: invited to share. My concern about the leering is that it is an act of the voyeur: a passive intrusion into something that is intimate. Leering, gazing upon what happened to another tends to trivialize the loss; it becomes less powerful as it is gazed upon because it is removed from our reality rather than becoming part of said reality. There is a dark magic in that.

Simply because we see something does not make it real. We have become a culture casual imagery. The tsunami hits and we are momentarily aghast at what happened, but go on with our lives unaffected. Mud slides in California. The nation jokes about how stupid we are for living here, but we go on disinterring our dead that we may properly grieve and bury them again. Life goes on. This is true enough, but must it be in resplendent isolation, complete with walls to filter out the perceptions that we do not wish to color our reality?

Cause and Affect

Do we dare to live a life that is affected by the lives of others? What happens to others involves me because I am involved in humanity. This is what it means, I think, to live in community. I wonder what a bit of empathy would have cost the people that were wanting to look at the devastation: it’s a bit like staring at an auto accident, darkly hoping that there are victims as if their pain became an intangible talisman that protects us from ours. It is not apathy, but a sort of inverse sympathy that seeks to turn the force of a shared fear around rather than squarely facing that fear and asserting a common humanity.

So what do I say? Words continue to fail me. Maybe the best solution is to continue to treat the people directly affected not as compassion objects, but as friends and companions on this brief and bumpy sojourn on our small planet.

And sometimes silence is best…