Posts
“Do you feel me?” I’ve always had some strange attraction towards words – especially the hidden meaning behind them. It’s rarely been enough for me to just let them hang in the air without reflection or analysis. Do you feel me? is no exception. Why do people say that? Why do I say that? Why not just ask, “Do you understand what I mean?”
Today’s blog has been inspired by some new friends I made today: Terri, Di, Christianne, and Chloe. That’s four, count ‘em 4!, friends in twenty-four hours. That’s gotta be some kind of record. Uncovering these new friends has helped me better understand that question about Do you feel me? in a way that I don’t think could’ve been done otherwise. [By the way, Hi guys. (Hope I can call you ‘guys’ cause it’s kosher where I grew up). Thanks for all of the kind words; they helped.]
People want to be more than understood; they want to be felt. There is some legitimate nuance of meaning here. It might be best understood by contrasting the subtle differences between sympathy and empathy. For me, sympathy means you can visualize with great intensity the feelings and experiences of another; empathy means you have actually experienced and shared the feelings and experiences of another. It’s the difference between watching on television an exhausted Olympic marathoner desperately throw herself across the finish line, completely exsanguinated of energy, and actually running one yourself and having to care for your blistered feet and tattered carcass afterwards. On paper the definitions seem subtle, but in real life, they are painfully palpable.
A person who really feels you literally shares your pathos, those intensely deep feelings that encompass our joys and pains; our losses and gains; our ups and downs; our smiles and frowns. A person who feels you is also one who shares your passions – whether that be reading, writing, music or teaching. It could be the passion you feel when you warmly embrace your child or the passion you feel when you are tightly held by your significant other. If it is shared, it’s called compassion. Compassion literally means to share passion!
I think we all desire this kind of shared intimacy: empathy and compassion. We unconsciously seek it out, and we do so desperately when we feel alone and disheartened. Maybe that’s how I met my new friends? I wanted someone to feel me. And from what I read on their blogs, I felt that they might just have that capacity.
Can I get Biblical for a minute? I don’t do it much anymore because I feel so distant from God, but I’d like to give it a whirl for just a minute. Do you know why I’m a Christian (albeit backslidden)? I know there are a number of reasons I could give, but at the top of the list would be that God can feel me and I can touch Him. And that is only possible because of the Person of Jesus Christ.
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tested in every way as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). Jesus is that High Priest. The Greek word sumpatheo is translated sympathize but carries the force of empathize. It is a shared, fellow feeling. It is because Jesus can genuinely feel my pains and temptations that I am a Christian. A God that is so ethereal that He cannot touch me, nor be touched by me, offers little practical help or hope to me. I could find a deity like that in a number of other religions. Yes, an ethereal, impassible God like that might look good on theological/philosophical paper, but when life is painfully palpable, that “perfection” (if it could be construed that way) is utterly alienating, completely irrelevant, and almost certainly unconcerned with my needs. Doesn’t sound very loving, does it?
But God’s not like that. We know this because Jesus, God in flesh, is as palpable as the pain we experience. He, Himself, experienced this pain. He ran the marathon, and He felt the agonies of temptations and rejections, yet without sinning. Why do we create such an artificial ceiling between us and God? To be sure, God is holy and transcendent, and we have to be careful that we don’t, in self-deceptive pride, diminish His greatness, perfection and holiness in our minds (I think this is what Barth feared and reacted to accordingly). But if God was ever impassible, then Jesus Christ punctured holes into His floor/our ceiling of impassibility by becoming human. God can now be touched! In fact, it is the man, Christ Jesus who is continually making intercession on our behalf, precisely because He is so intimately acquainted with our pathos and shares our pains and passions. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, a man, Christ Jesus . . . Therefore He is always able to save those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to intercede for them” (1 Tim 2:5; Heb 7:25).
And did I mention He is full compassion? And because He shares our passions, it moves Him to do many things – intercession and healing to name just a couple. Somehow we have created this rigid, emotionless God completely devoid of compassion. He never really responds to anything. He is just pure action; a self-absorbed unmoved mover. And if per chance He does respond, it is only because of faith or some other manipulative “blessing lever” we can pull. But that is not how the Bible depicts God, certainly not in the Person of Jesus. “Moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes. Immediately they could see, and they followed Him” (Matt
There’s something to this empathy and compassion thing. Old Testament prophets were able to tap into the pathos of the people through poetry, orations and other writings. They even illustrated these things by acting them out in dramatic ways at times. They did this because they wanted to correct social injustices and inequities, and because they knew that things like poetry and music can connect with people in a way that mere speech making cannot. The arts are many times subversive (literally, below the word). It is a way of injecting deep feeling into the hearts of people who otherwise would not receive anything. Today, music is a good example of this. It taps into our pathos. It moves our passions. And our passions move us. And when we share those passions – have compassion – a dynamic, potent force is generated that brings transformation. On a vertical dimension, we have that in Jesus. We have it in the Holy Spirit as He comes along side us and shares our burdens as the Parakletos. And on a horizontal plane, we have that in each other, as members of the same Body and through our shared experiences as humans. We can empathize and we can be compassionate. And through our passionate, subversive words – our poetry and stories – we can convey that life to people who desperately need it, and yet consciously are not willing to hear it. We can move beyond understanding someone’s needs and actually feel those needs.
Let me step away from the cyber-pulpit. Sorry, I feel a lot of passion about this subject. What I am trying to say is that I am grateful for a God who shares my passions, and I am grateful that He brought four new friends into my life to share those passions with me. Do you feel me?
