Apathy vs. Empathy (Part 1)
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. ––1 Corinthians 13:12-13
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. ––Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. His riveting book, Night, chronicles his stark experiences in Auschwitz and the Buchenwald concentration camps. Beyond his famous quote about indifference being the opposite of love, he also said:
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
This from a man who saw the worst possible horrors during the Holocaust. Why indifference rather than hate, for a man who saw evil up close and personal. He’d explain in interviews that what he saw in the eyes of his Nazi captors was not hate, but emptiness and disconnection. The attitude of a Nazi prison guard corralling people into the gas chambers, group after group, day after day. The indifference of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge fighters murdering hundreds of thousands in the killing fields of Cambodia. The indifference of Rwanda’s Hutu militias hacking to death as many as 800,00 Tutsi minority civilians.
Evil, most definitely. But also indifference.
But let’s take this down for a moment, focus the lens to the street level. Your street and mine. What have we become indifferent to in this jaded world where tragedy streams across our screens so fast we’ve barely absorbed one catastrophe when another gets right up in our face? It’s like calcification in pipes, where the capacity to hold water shrinks as the calcium builds up over the years.
What have you become apathetic to? Human suffering? Tragedy? Yes, “doing something” can seem overwhelming, but God’s man is compelled by Christ—and His many tangible examples of empathy during His ministry on earth—to act. To be the one in the room to walk across and comfort the person who just received tragic news. To call the friend whose child just ran away from home. To drive across town to visit the church acquaintance who was just admitted to the hospital.
Do you know why the garden-variety Nazi soldier could take part in such horrors during the Holocaust? Indifference. Day after day, month after month, year after year. Spiritual blindness, deception of the enemy, the human propensity to act the animal in a mob/group situation. All, yes. Like the sleeping poppies in the Wizard of Oz, evil descends, and when good men do nothing, evil spreads. It brings a spiritual slumber and puts right, moral action to sleep.
God’s man: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to ask the Father to give you the eyes of empathy. To care about the suffering; to help the poor; to minister to the foreigner and the prisoner. The specifics and how tos? God will show you. Believe me, He’s forever recruiting into His holy army of caring, empathetic stretcher bearers.
Father, “doing something” feels overwhelming when I don’t feel like I have a lot of emotional energy in my tank. Do a supernatural work within me to give me the capacity to care and act.