“A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (John 13:34) This commandment was thus seared into the minds of Christians worldwide through the ages from Christ’s time to the present day. It graces our music and our sermons, informs our Bible studies and steers our public discourse (at least, it should). It is similar to the second great commandment. As the Savior answered the Pharisee who asked him “which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:37-38) In the very next verse, He explains the gravity of what He had just said. “On these two commandments,” He implores us, “hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:39)
So began a reframing of how we should treat our fellow man that has revolutionized society for the past 2000 years. More has been written and preached and sung about this topic than could possibly fit in a blog post. But much of modern society still struggles with this concept. Our difficulty rests in a misconception that in order to love our neighbors, we must feel what our neighbors feel. This is not only incorrect; it drives us away from experiencing the love our Savior prayed that we would achieve when he poured out His heart to His Father. “That they may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.” (John 17:21)
Empathy, feeling what someone else feels, is largely regarded as the superior form of connection. And on the surface, this seems logical, even obvious. After all, when Christ suffered for our sins and imperfections, it was empathy and not sympathy that He experienced. He personally suffered every heartbreak, struggle, disappointment, depression, and transgression. He doesn’t just imagine how we feel when we plead with the Father in His name for help and healing. He knows on a level equivalent and even surpassing ours. Empathy is, by definition, superior to sympathy in this way. However, we are incapable of the Atonement – if we were able to suffer for each other in that way, then Christ would not have needed to do so, and we would be able to save ourselves. Undeniably, we do feel empathy for each other, but it is always in the context of our own limited experiences and never in that of the Savior’s infinite experiences. How then do people experience empathy for those who have different experiences than their own? I would argue that this is not empathy at all, but sympathy.
Sympathy comes from imagination. It is fundamentally different than empathy because it requires us to look outside of our own experiences and find emotion that allows us to connect with our fellow man. It is much easier to sympathize with people who have had similar experiences to ours than those whose lives are extremely dissimilar. It is not abnormal to feel more deeply for the plight of people who belong to our own communities–who attend church with us, who belong to the same socioeconomic class, who look like us, who share the same interests and beliefs. That is because it takes very little work to imagine their situation.
Here are two pictures to illustrate the point. Consider a family who loses everything in a house fire due to a careless mistake. Imagine they are people you know personally–you work with the dad, you’re friends with the mom, the kids play with your kids. Maybe they live in your neighborhood, attend your church. They look like you. You’ve had them over for dinner many times. You would automatically feel their loss on a personal level, without any effort at all. You can see yourself in them, replace their faces with the faces of your family. You have never personally lost everything in a house fire, so it is not empathy you are truly feeling. Instead, it is sympathy, and it came easily to you. Now imagine that it isn’t a family but a man you’ve never met who made a similar careless mistake. He loses everything in a fire of his own doing several states away. His story somehow reaches your ears. Again, the circumstances are similar, but it is much harder to feel sympathy for this man. You may even callously say, “Well, he brought upon himself his own misery.”
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland reminds us of this key principle in his 2014 talk “Are We Not All Beggars?” In it, he references Book of Mormon prophet-leader King Benjamin’s commandment that we “cease withholding our means because we see the poor as having brought their misery upon themselves…”For behold, are we not all beggars?”” (Mosiah 4:17-19) Elder Holland rather mirrored King Benjamin in this talk, because he also said, “Now, lest I be accused of proposing quixotic global social programs or of endorsing panhandling as a growth industry, I reassure you that my reverence for principles of industry, thrift, self-reliance, and ambition is as strong as that of any man or woman alive. We are always expected to help ourselves before we seek help from others.” Similarly, King Benjamin implored his people, “And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength.” (Mosiah 4:27) Therefore, we are called by ancient and modern prophets to have compassion for those unlike us–which by definition is sympathy, not empathy. But we are also called to care for ourselves before others. Therein lies the difference between “toxic empathy” and Christlike love.
Thomas Aquinas, celebrated Catholic thinker and theologian of the 13th century, discussed “ordered loves” in his famous Summa Theologica. Simply put, we are called as Christians to order our loves by placing God above all, then projecting love outward. We love ourselves next, then our families, then our communities, then our country, and so forth. “Toxic empathy” is a modern phrase that refers to flipping this time-tested narrative on its head and prioritizing the needs and desires of those farthest from us, to the detriment of our own needs and desires. For instance, if I advocate for giving all my wealth (or, more commonly, all my neighbor’s wealth) to someone I’ve never met to right some perceived past wrongdoing by mine or my neighbor’s ancestors, then I have certainly run faster than I (or my neighbor) have strength. Similarly, if I care more about sea turtles in Australia than I do about my own family and community, then my family and community suffers a great loss. We cannot expect to save ourselves and our children if we don’t first place our oxygen mask on before helping the child, as flight attendants habitually instruct passengers. So it seems we are being pulled in two separate directions. Have love, but not too much love? The answer is to choose sympathy over empathy.
Sympathy is a process instead of a feeling. Like most things worth doing, it is not easy and requires significant personal growth. We are called by Christ and by the countless prophets, apostles, leaders, preachers, and teachers who follow Him, to love our neighbors through the act of sympathy. While empathy is what Christ Himself feels for us when we struggle, empathy for us is either quite easy and automatic or nearly impossible and detrimental to obtain. If we feel empathy for another, we either do so effortlessly because we have already experienced something similar, or we do so unnaturally, through flipping the ordered loves on their head. When we topple the order, we find ourselves experiencing more intense compassion for someone outside our own community than for those within, which hurts the strength of the community. How could this be? Because we know that emotion is a zero-sum game.
Cognitive load theory is the concept that we only have so much working memory at any given time. Like our personal wealth is finite, so is our emotional wealth. When King Benjamin warns that we should not run faster than we have strength, and when Thomas Aquinas wisely pointed out the order of loves, these great thinkers of their times, centuries apart, were tapping into the reality of the limitations of the mortal world. Instead of being literally Christlike here in this life, experiencing the Atonement for our fellow men, we, instead, are relegated to slog through the trenches of sympathy. We cannot play God, or we will get hurt. At times we may be forced to plead with the Savior for His help when we cannot find a drop of compassion for our fellow man, when sympathy is dried up entirely. This is often the case when we are personally wronged by the sufferer in question. At times, we may have to consciously tone down our righteous behavior or even our thoughts and emotions because we find ourselves caring too much, to the detriment of our mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual resources. And when we are drained due to overly caring about something outside of ourselves, it hurts our families, our communities, and maybe even our country. But finding the balance, like most other struggles, will bring us closer to Christ and result in massive transformational change.
As we step closer to self-awareness in our interactions with our fellow men, we will also become more aware of the gap between Heaven and Earth. Christ’s Atonement made it possible for us to be at one with Heavenly Father. The Savior’s aforementioned prayer for our unity was not meant to be an automatic, effortless transformation that occurs with the snap of divine fingers. Rather, He prayed for us knowing the context of our mortal mission, which is as much a mission for the human race as it is for individuals. We are here to learn and grow, and we will by definition fall short of perfection in our mortal state. Therefore, we needed a Savior to Atone for us, so that we might close the gap between us and be at one with Him again. As we struggle to find sympathy for one another, we come closer together. As we reach across political, social, cultural, and religious chasms, searching not for common ground but instead for compassion that transcends similarities, we will find the sort of oneness that Christ spoke of. We will find love for love’s sake. That is the sort of deep, infinite love that the Father has for us. That is the sort of love the Savior had for us, that He prayed we would have for each other. We will find it possible to grow incrementally as we turn outward in the order Aquinas suggested. First, we must love God. Then we must love ourselves. After we do this we must love our neighbors as we love ourselves, as the Savior commanded. And so forth. As we make transformational changes within these small circles, they will ripple outward and result in mountain waves further than the eye can see. The hard work of sympathy results in the sort of seismic change that empathy hopes for, but cannot sustain. As we run, walk, or crawl along the Savior’s path, we will take the steps necessary to make our own communities a Heaven on Earth, and we will build upon foundations of emotional and spiritual strength.
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