ARTICLES
Q TALKS
DISCOVER Q
EVENTS
All Q Events
Q Nashville 2014
Q Session | Innovate
Q Cast
RESOURCES
Books
Studies
Bible
Church Leaders
Speaking
PARTICIPATE
Praxis Accelerator
Host Conversations
Church
Business
Education
Social Sector
Arts + Entertainment
Science + Tech
Government
Media
Cities
Gospel
Restorers
Tweet
Gospel
Empathy in an Age of Terrorism
by
Johnnie Moore
I was in the northern corner of India, where the tip of the nation collides with Nepal and China in the Himalayan mountains. Imposing snowcapped peaks glare down at the cities squeezed into the valleys. These are the world’s tallest mountains, and they are as intimidating as you might imagine them to be. They make man’s largest creations look like children’s toys. They are the quintessential images of imposing authority.
Just on the western edge of some of these snowcapped towers rests the village of McLeod Ganj. The village teeters on the peak of a small mountain with the Himalayas on one side and a precipitous drop down into a valley on the other side. Its buildings seem nearly ready to topple over and roll down into the valley below. It appears to be perched on a pinpoint.
…
The Muslims held the rickety village of McLeod Ganj together. They operated most of the shops, many of the restaurants, and some of the hotels. India boasts the world’s second-largest Muslim population, so this was not surprising. Every major city has dozens of mosques, and predawn calls to prayer frequently pierce the quiet of the night.
Muslims happen to have a lot of business savvy. Amrit was among the least faithful Muslims of McLeod Ganj, but he was one of the most entrepreneurial. He was a kind of MTV Muslim who was culturally connected to Islam but who also enjoyed dancing with the devil. He prayed hard on Friday after partying hard on Thursday, and he enjoyed the Imam’s sermon as much as making love with Europeans tourists.
When I met him, I think he was about 22 and very jaded. I think that’s why we immediately connected.
I had rushed into Amrit’s store for a little refuge when a torrential rainstorm unexpectedly rolled over the nearby mountains. He politely invited me to dry off inside and offered me a cup of piping hot mint tea. We sat together and talked for more than an hour. Our conversation was accompanied by the sound of a monsoon swarming just out- side the hanging cloth that served as a makeshift door to his roadside business.
At first, Amrit was very guarded. He had been well indoctrinated with a caricatured image of Americans and their caricatured opinions of Muslims, but eventually he realized I wasn’t like the Americans he had heard about. I have always enjoyed speaking with Muslims and especially admire their zealous attention to hospitality. I have genuinely liked most of the Muslims I’ve met around the world. Perhaps that’s why they have looked past their own prejudices and risked trusting me. This is what happened with Amrit. I liked him, and he started to trust me.
We drank more tea, the rain fell, and friendship sprouted. Soon he had really opened up his life to me. I learned that Amrit had grown up in the gorgeous but war-torn region of Kashmir. He told me that more than 50,000 people had been killed there in skirmishes between Muslims and Hindus, so his family moved their shop from Kashmir to McLeod Ganj. The once-lucrative tourism industry of Kashmir had been decimated by the bomb blasts and gunfights in the streets, and they hoped to rebuild their business in a new city.
I was surprised by Amrit’s openness and honesty. He treated me like a lifelong friend. Eventually, with some trepidation, I felt safe to ask my new Muslim buddy a risky question. “Amrit, I’ve heard about bombs blowing up in Kashmir and gun fights breaking out in the streets. Have you ever personally witnessed any of this?”
Immediately, Amrit’s face changed. I had triggered something in his psyche, something long suppressed and rarely revealed. The blood drained from his dark Indian skin. He wasn’t angry; he was deeply, deeply distressed.
Amrit began to tell me about family members who had been killed in the violence, about childhood horrors of hearing gunshots in the streets, and about two close relatives who had died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Suddenly, I realized I was sitting with a civilian survivor of war. My gentle-hearted, hospitable friend had grown up in hell. His childhood was horrifying. All the pain I had personally experienced seemed so small as I listened to him, and I slowly felt myself wondering what it would have been like to have lived his life. Almost accidentally, I was embracing empathy.
The sound of the storm outside was sometimes difficult to talk over. The clouds were pelting the earth with arrows of rain, and each drop created a splash six inches tall. The scene seemed almost apocalyptic. Raising his hand and pointing at the downpour, Amrit said something that was branded onto my heart and haunts me to this day. “Johnnie, only when the rain fell like this was the blood washed off my streets.”
He rolled his right hand into a fist and beat his chest just above his heart three times. “It makes you so hard, so hard...it just makes you so hard.”
We finished our tea. The rain stopped. I went back to my hotel room and wept.
The next day Amrit told me that he wasn’t very religious anymore. He spent nearly every evening getting drunk at a local pub or sleep- ing with a tourist (except on Friday, when he went to the mosque). Amrit dulled his childhood pain by separating himself from God and embracing pleasure.
Later, I began to think more about Amrit’s decision to become a liberal Muslim. I realized that he could have just as easily gone the other way. Rather than losing his devotion to his faith after being left so emotionally mangled, he could have become a radical. Rather than running from his pain and suppressing his hurt with pleasure, his pain might have fueled a lust for revenge and a willingness to fight to the death for vengeance. Amrit could have become a terrorist just easily as he had become a hedonist.
Islamic terrorism is often a cocktail of extremist propaganda mixed with festering, personal pain. Seasoning this mix with a touch of vengeance creates a dangerously volatile brew. This is how sensible people are persuaded to engage in a jihad. In a slightly different situation, Amrit might have responded to his hopelessness by becoming a suicide bomber. Life sometimes makes decisions for you, and if a few scenarios in Amrit’s life had played out differently, who knows what he could have become?
My conversation with Amrit deeply affected me in a number of ways. It drew me into his experience and helped me understand and feel what life must have been like for him as a child. As we talked, empathy sprouted in my heart. I liked Amrit. He was my age. He was intelligent. He was a hard worker who had been hurt by life and who had plenty of hang-ups but who was trying his hardest to make the best of his situation.
When he revealed to me his masked pain, I started wondering how I would have reacted had I experienced the same childhood. How would I have responded if I had repeatedly been startled out of a deep sleep by bullets ricocheting off the streets outside my home? What would I have thought about God or the world or my enemies had I attended the unnecessary funerals of people I loved?
I was somehow able to take Amrit’s feelings upon my own shoulders. My imagination made a bridge from my world to his reality and sparked deep and penetrating questions. The more questions I asked myself, the more I was humbled by my own weaknesses, and the more I was burdened to help people like Amrit who had been dealt a hard lot in life.
Had I endured such suffering and horror, would I have become a hedonist, trying desperately to bury my pain with pleasure? Would I have become a hardened and angry man, haunted by bloodlust and determined to avenge the honor of my family? Who knows what could have happened? Who would I be today had I been an eyewitness of a real-life horror movie? Could I have been a murderer? Would I have had the resilience to live on with these weights on my own shoulders?
How do you best understand the role of empathy?
What is the proper relationship between righteous anger and merciful forgiveness?
Editor’s Note: This piece is an excerpt from Johnnie Moore’s new book,
Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe
. The image was found
here
.
Tweet
Comments
Byron Borger
Those of us who are followers of Jesus simply must be more attentive to His command to be peace-makers, and to work for reconciliation, justice, shalom. And a good first step is to listen. This author has done this well, and has written a marvelous piece putting us there in the mountains with his Muslim friend. I'll look forward to reading more of this in the full book. Thanks for this helpful reminder about empathy.
A quick bit of other feedback, though: coming this week I wonder if there is some suggestion that this has something to do with 9-11? The Hindu/Muslim fighting in India that he describes goes way back, and may or may not have anything to do with the horrible attack on the WTC. I guess my point is that empathy is always helpful and understanding the victims of war is vital. But the religious fanatics who attacked the US on 9-11 were guided more by ideology about issues playing out in the Middle East, so this piece may or may not have much immediate relevance. Not all Muslims are the same, not all have the same grievances, and not all victims of violence blame the West. Still, again, the beautiful and urgent point is great, that we should always seek to understand others and their experiences which have shaped them.
Thanks again!
Martha Bergin
Thank you for sharing this encounter with us. I'll look for your book, but sometimes a shorter piece can be used very effectively. I plan to share your blog with my intercultural communication class. You ask about understanding the role of empathy. I think empathy has a central role in intercultural communication. The approach I encourage my students to try out is a "narrative approach" to intercultural understanding. One thing all cultures have is stories, and each of us has our own stories. To be willing to tell our story to others, as Amrit was, allows for profound understanding and learning, if we listen to the story with our mind and our hearts.
Although our experiences are so very different, we do have events and emotions we can use to relate to a story someone shares with us. This is the basic process of understanding the story. Do we just "identify" meaning mentally, or do we allow meanings to touch us? Asking "How would it feel if that happened to me?" as Johnnie does, allows empathy to grow. Empathy gives us a chance to understand the story deeply, past the surface information.
You ask the proper relationship between righteous anger and merciful forgiveness. My understanding is that for a relationship to be right, God needs to be in it. When I feel anger toward someone, I need to, with my last strength, pray and let God share that with me, and start a process of working on it, transmuting it, redeeming it, through what God wants me to do now. That would be where I would try to connect with Amrit on any "doctrinal" level, --just talking about how God can help us transmute pain.
I think the desperate poverty in Afghanistan has a great deal to do with what happened to the WTC. Osama Bin Laden may have had any number of (basically crazy) ideas, but they were taken up by people from the local area who were utterly desperate for a story that puts their suffering into a context where it has a higher meaning. In an area of the world where many people aren't literate and education is hard to get, word-of-mouth and the meanings that are agreed upon about those words are crucial to the development of culture. In my view, we need more missionaries that are humble travelers and story tellers/story listeners, such as Johnnie, who can share a narrative that offers an eternal context for bearing and transmuting suffering, and a real alternative.
TC Epperson
Empathy strikes me as very near the core of what it means to live out gospel. Many of us grow into ideas of "us" and "them," which are foolish and inaccurate. We imagine ourselves as the righteous and others as the unrighteous deserving of our wrath and God's wrath, or we imagine ourselves as the unrighteous unlike those in churches. Empathy begins the process of breaking down this divide, so that we can see ourselves as identical to the other: both evil, both with redemption available through Jesus' work.
When it comes to mercy and righteous indignation, we may fall into the same us/them error. It is more constructive, I think, to see all humans as having the same set of needs: rescue from their own evil, rescue from exterior evil, a relationship with God, and the meaning that comes from him. From this perspective, we are able to rush toward repentance instead of condemnation. Full-on, on-going, admission of our own culpability and acceptance of God's perfect goodness on our behalf drives us to a more and more accurate perception of evil. We come to be nauseated by it as God is, while embracing with real mercy the people who are held hostage by it.
Montgomery
Empathy is a lot like tolerance in that it is a vastly misunderstood topic by our generation. Justifying others actions or letting others develop their own definition for truth is not empathy; empathy is taking on the pain and circumstances of another and feeling it for yourself. It is exactly what you did in this situation --- weeping for another person, or as often is the case for me during this crazy election cycle, weeping for your country or culture.
The role of empathy is an important one for anyone who wants to change the world for Jesus Christ. How can you fight for a person's heart if you have not felt if for yourself? It allows you to feel what another feels and therefore have a conversation with them based upon a more complete understanding of their circumstance. It's what allows us to feel the pain of a Muslim's childhood without agreeing with their choices or ideology. Love and concern develop for that person causing us act in accordance.
Righteous anger is anger that is justified by God. We can, and SHOULD!, be angry about the things that occur in this world that break the heart of God. Righteous anger allows to be angry at the circumstances and surroundings of Amrit, but to feel merciful forgiveness toward Amrit himself. We are called to love him as Christ loves him. I'm not necessarily sure, however, that rightous anger and merciful forgiveness are opposites or enemies. They coexist, as they should, when we feel that righteous anger toward a situation, but have a merciful forgiveness toward the people admist it so that we can love them and show them Christ's love. Because at the end of it all, isn't it all about showing God's light?
Comments are now closed
ALSO IN GOSPEL
Radical Integrity
by Mike Foster
Putting Anger in its Place
by Jeff Cook
Who is my Neighbor?
by Gideon Tsang