Jonah Lehrer. Justine Sacco. Brian Williams. Rachel Dolezal.
What do these four people have in common? They screwed up, publicly, and with questionable intent. Lehrer fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. Sacco sent an unfortunate tweet about white privilege in Africa. Williams misrepresented his activities with the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. And Dolezal — well, we are all familiar with her story as it has been front-page news for the past week. Lehrer and Williams were famous before their respective scandals, Sacco and Dolezal because of them. All of them received swift punishment and suffered for their actions.
Our society loves the downfall of an upstanding citizen. Use of the word schadenfreude, a German word meaning the joy one experiences at the misfortune of another, has sharply increased over the past 20 years. It is no doubt that our ability to communicate information at increasing speed and the competition to be first to break a story have promoted this phenomenon. Often one’s story is told without all the facts or is reported independent of appropriate context. Social media lends itself to public shaming.
Use of the word compassion has also increased since the 1960s. (If you want to know the trend of a word’s usage, just enter it into Google’s ngram viewer.) Victims of natural disasters, starving children in Africa, and war refugees are the types of people for whom we feel sympathy. Their suffering is serious, unjust, and easily imagined. According to the Handbook of Positive Psychology, these three components together are what invoke the emotion of compassion.
But faith calls us to to act beyond the description of everyday human behavior. First, it calls us to experience more than just sympathy for the downtrodden. In a book by the same name, Henri Nouwen and his colleagues define compassion from its Latin roots, pati and cum, which together mean “to suffer with.” They write, “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears” (pp. 3-4). Thus, compassion is not only feeling bad for someone, but also feeling bad with that person.
So why schadenfreude for some and compassion for others? To paraphrase Romans 3:23, we have all screwed up and left God in the dust; thus we all know the isolation of sin. This is where I take issue with the second requirement to experience compassion – that suffering not be self-inflicted but the result of an unjust fate. While some characters are more sympathetic than others, as Christians we should be able to identify with all those involved in hurt and pain; not only those transgressed against but also the transgressors. Both are desperate for compassion.
Courage is required by both the giver and receiver of compassion. Nouwen writes, “Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human” (p. 4). It is not our natural inclination to suffer, but compassion requires this of us. And in the case of experiencing compassion for the sinner, we must often go against a culture that insists the person is undeserving of compassion. At times we may even feel pressured by an authority figure to not reach out to the transgressor. Or we may be the transgressed, in which case the temptation to turn our backs on compassion increases tenfold.
Compassion also requires courage by the person who is suffering. We are quite skilled at putting on a façade of normalcy when we are feeling anything but normal inside. Sometimes even the most empathic person cannot see the warning signs of the internal distress of another until it is too late. Thus, in order for the giver of compassion to reach out to the sufferer, the sufferer must indicate his or her pain. This relates to the first requirement of compassion. And this takes courage, because it requires us to show our weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a culture that does not encourage us to do so, and in fact often punishes us for them.
It is difficult to crawl out of the pit of despair without God and those through whom he shares his compassion. Most of us have experienced a time when things felt so hopeless, and the smallest act of kindness made a future without that pain seem possible. Compassion ignites the emotion of hope, allowing us to see a better tomorrow, filled with the glory of God’s promise.
New information about Rachel Dolezal keeps coming, the latest of which gives us glimpses of childhood trauma. Childhood trauma leads to shame, which is arguably the most destructive of all the emotions. If this is the case, then Rachel’s desire to create a new persona suddenly becomes more understandable. And if it isn’t, she still deserves compassion as much as we all do.
Thanks so much for not piling on and flinging more harsh invective that won’t move anything forward. I’ve encountered so much self-righteousness surrounding this case. People act as if they’ve never personally deceived anyone, and I have trouble figuring out where so many white people’s white-hot rage is actually coming from. Search your feelings, people. Use it as an opportunity for self-growth.