We are all familiar with Christmas charity appeals, the annual financial tug told in Christian terms of neighborly love and kindness extended to those less fortunate than us. They are sobering and hopefully effective in reminding us that Christmas is not just about excessive eating, drinking and shopping. But why are they effective and therefore so prolific? At their best, they move us from sympathy - that removed sense of pity and pain we feel when we see suffering at a distance, somewhere beyond our experience or understanding - to empathy. Christmas is an emotional time, for good and/or bad, a time when we may just connect with others and their experience and situation more profoundly and compassionately than usual. We may smile and wish strangers Merry Christmas when we’d ordinarily pass them by; we may also stop and buy a magazine from a Big Issue seller on the street. Most of us cannot know what it is to be homeless but, through the power of imagination and curiosity, we can get closer to understanding and this allows us to see people, to meet them where they are. And, for most of us, engaging with the idea of Christmas without a home/food/presents/safety/love scares and pains and moves us into giving so that in some way we can feel better and help, as well as ward off the chance that it could happen to us. We gain a glow from donating, the so-called Helper's High, and it strengthens our sense of humanity, connection and feeling.
But just as we must look after puppies beyond Christmas, so should we continually feed and exercise our ability to empathise - and therefore care - beyond a finite season of goodwill. We need to continually engage with the responsibility of being a human in connection with those in our world/community/families. We need to feel horror at inequality, injustice and suffering and allow that horror to move us to action. We need to lead with empathy and we need to live with empathy and this requires us to listen with empathy. The philosopher Cornell West urges us to be empathy warriors who look unflinchingly at what's needed in the world.
So let’s shift from the spectator sport of sympathy to powerful engagement born from empathy and recognition of different perspectives and experiences. Do this through observing, asking, and hearing with curiosity, not judgment.
As George Eliot asks in Middlemarch ‘What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for others?’
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