The Talk That Never Was

Several weeks ago, the bishop literally chased me out of the church building after sacrament meeting and stopped me at my car. "I know this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out," he said while catching his breath. "As I was sitting in sacrament today, I got the impression that I should at least ask you if you would give a talk before you leave." I just stood there dumbly, not sure how to respond. I had never given a talk in sacrament, ever. "You can pretty much talk about whatever you want," he assured me. "In the words of Ella Fitzgerald, just 'accentuate the positive'." I told him that my schedule before moving was pretty full and my available Sundays were very few. He said that he would make sure it could be worked out on whichever day I could do it, as early as the following Sunday.

I went home and thought a lot about it. If I gave a talk, what would I want to say? How could I give a talk and make it relevant to everyone? Would people even listen to what I had to say even though I would not be able to fill it with Book of Mormon references and spiritual parallels?

I sat at my computer and started typing. I ended up writing a talk that I really liked and told the bishop that I would do it, but I could only do it the following Sunday because of an already-planned trip to Minneapolis the Sunday after that and my high school's graduation ceremony the Sunday after that. A couple days later he sent me a text message that asked me if I could be the first speaker. He asked if I could talk for about seven minutes and include references to the BoM, as everyone else that day would be talking about their experiences reading the BoM in 60 days, which the bishop had challenged the ward to do.

This felt wrong to me on many levels. First of all, my talk, when I timed it, took about twenty minutes to do. It was highly personal and contained much of what I felt like I wanted to say not only to my ward here, but to the church as a whole. Cutting it down to seven minutes would require diluting it to the point of meaninglessness. It would mean almost belittling the struggles I've had and the deeply personal experiences I would be talking about. On top of that, I would be the first speaker on a day when everyone else was going to be talking about reading the Book of Mormon. My talk would be completely out of place. Moreover, I was being asked to use quotations from a book I don't necessarily believe in. I ended up telling the bishop that I felt it was best to keep the program as it currently was. It would have been nice to speak, but I didn't want to compromise the message I had prepared.

What follows is the talk I would have given:

Good morning, brothers and sisters. etc…

I feel like I kind of need to warn you: this talk isn’t going to be your typical scripture-based talk, but I will do my to get a few in there. This is for a couple reasons. First, in order to be authentic, I need to give this talk from where I am at in my life and in my faith at this point. And second, I wanted the things I say to you today to come straight from my heart and from my own experiences.

I haven’t really had a chance to get to know many of you in my short time here. And I apologize if you’ve been wondering who the dude with earrings is playing the piano. I think, though, that after I talk a bit, you’ll all know me pretty well. The basics anyway. As someone who has lived a life filled struggles that are pretty specific to me and to those like me, I found myself, while trying to decide what to speak on, returning over and over to the concept of empathy.

We hear this term a lot; it’s almost become ubiquitous in modern philosophy and religion. It seems obvious to us all on a surface level, especially to Christians, that we should “love our neighbors as ourselves,” that we should “judge not, lest we be judged,” and that we should, according to a Native American proverb, “never criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.” In Hebrews chapter 13, verse 3, we read, “Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body.”  We know these things. We know in the abstract that these statements are true and that we should live our lives by them. But in practice, in real life, when that person at the stop sign takes too long to accelerate, when the person in front of us at the grocery store takes out his binder full of coupons when all we have to buy is some eggs, Bisquick, and syrup, these ideas become a little more difficult not only to put into practice, but almost impossible for us to even remember or think about. Let’s face it. In the real world, we are all the world’s best drivers on roads full of imbeciles, and all of us would have never gone to the grocery store during the busiest time of day with 50 coupons, and if we did, we naturally would have had those things out and in order, ready to be scanned. We always know exactly what we would do if we were that other person. We always assume we know exactly what that other person’s motives are. But this isn’t empathy; this isn’t putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. This is putting someone else into our shoes.

So what exactly is empathy? What does it mean to empathize with another person?

To start, I’d like to frame my definition of empathy by first talking about something called “the single story.” The single story is, I believe, the biggest wall that keeps us separated from empathy. I was first introduced to this term while watching a TED talk that I now show to all my students. It was given by a novelist from Nigeria, Chimamanda Adichie. The "single story," as Adichie puts it, is the ideas and perceptions we have, whether from books, our family, our religion, or media, about a person, a place, or a group of people. We tend to have a single story for illegal immigrants. We have a single story for the way movie stars live their lives. Straight people have a single story of gay people. Democrats have a single story of Republicans. Conservatives have a single story of liberals. We have a single story about people who drive big, huge F250 trucks. We have a single story of Muslims. We have, as Adichie points out, a single story of people who come from Africa. We, as Mormons, might have a single story about people who drink alcohol or those who choose to leave the church.

Adichie says that "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." Seeing others through lenses of various stereotypes prevents us from seeing them for who they really are. It prevents us from having empathy because the single story makes us feel like we already know what we need to know about nearly everyone we encounter, and why would we bother walking a mile in someone’s shoes when we already feel like we know exactly what that journey would entail?

Empathy, by definition, is the ability to understand and share feelings with another person. It says in Galatians chapter 6, verse 2 that we should “Bear one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ.” Bearing another’s burdens: this is what it means to have empathy. So it seems obvious that perpetuating single stories prevents us from understanding others and sharing their feelings and keeps us from bearing their burdens alongside them. According to Dr. Brené Brown, one of my biggest heroes, empathy “fuels connection.” What an interesting word, fuel. It implies that one doesn’t simply “get some empathy” that he can use indefinitely. In order to fuel something, it means that one constantly needs to work at it, to refuel, as it were.

Dr. Brown goes on to say that empathy needs four things to work: First, there is “perspective taking,” meaning that you are able to recognize the perspective of someone else as their truth. This is difficult for many of us, myself included. This is really hard because perspective taking forces us to acknowledge that there are multiple truths, truths that are based on an individual’s own experiences. It requires you to accept that your truth is not my truth, and furthermore, it requires you to embrace the fact that we have different truths. Second, empathy cannot exist where judgment exists. This is also hard because, as I’ve pointed out with all the idiotic drivers out there, we are pretty good at making judgments. Third, empathy needs us to recognize emotion in other people. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when we’re used to having a story about every “type” of person we meet, and when we tend to see the world through the goggles of our own experiences and interpret others’ emotions through those experiences. And finally, we have to be able to communicate those emotions: we have to feel with people. And when we feel with people, we will find that we have a lot more in common with people, even those with whom we were convinced that we could have nothing in common, than we ever thought possible.

I’ve talked about empathy kind of on a large scale. And it’s great and honorable to empathize with immigrants, or with people from Alabama, or with Muslims in Afghanistan. But more often, it is our most immediate, most intimate relationships that could use more empathy.

As an English teacher, I pretty much blame the Romantic Era for our lack of empathy. The romantics, if you’ll allow me to geek out for a moment, were all about the individual. They praised the things in each of us that made us different and special. They put great emphasis on our own personal inner experiences. This is great in theory, especially as these philosophies came after a period of time during which it was necessary to put our own selves and our own needs aside in order for the group, the clan, the village to survive. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class, people didn’t need to recognize emotions in others as much. People could venture out on their own, travel away from the country to the city and get a job, and a house, and start their own independent lives. For us, the American Dream has nothing to do with others, right? It is about our own success, achieving our own goals, often at the sacrificing of the dreams and goals of others. Our current era, and the ideals of Romanticism, create lots of sympathy but don’t do so well with empathy. Sympathy is feeling pity or sadness at someone else’s misfortune. Sympathy is saying, “I’m really sorry that you lost your job.” Sympathy is telling someone, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Sympathy is saying, “Well, at least you still have your health.” I’m going to quote Brené Brown again here because she says this so beautifully: “If I share something with you that is difficult, I’d rather you say, ‘I don’t even know what to say right now. I’m just so glad you told me.’ Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.”

Connection.

When I came back to church last September (?), I had been absent from all things church related for about 18 years. As a child, I felt nothing but rejection both at school and at church. I felt not only that no one could empathize with me, but that no one even wanted to to try. I was very different from the vast majority of my peers. I was never the least bit interested in sports of any kind. I wasn’t rough and tumble like other boys. I didn’t play with GI Joe guys or trucks and tanks. I listened to classical music; I enjoyed ballet; I liked to cook and draw and create; I liked to sing and play the piano. I left the church when I was 18 feeling like I had nothing in common with it or its members.

Almost exactly a year ago my older brother John passed away from a variety of health issues, diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver among the primary ones. It wasn’t until after he died that I realized that I had treated him exactly the same way that others had treated me. For my brother and me, it took his dying to establish true empathy. It wasn’t until I was writing a letter to him that would be put in his casket and cremated with him that I saw past my single story of death metal singers and all out other differences and realized just how similar we were on the inside and how similar our struggles had been.

When I returned to sacrament meetings, in search of some sort of spirituality after my brother’s death, I was terrified of the reception I would get, knowing only how I had been treated as a child and as a teenager. But what I felt here, what I found here, were a few people who exhibited nothing less than the pure, Christ-like love of empathy. Although everyone was kind and welcoming, and I thank you all so much for that, there were people who showed me that I was guilty of having a few single stories of my own. There were people here who reached out to me and sought a connection that went beyond a “how are you?” and a handshake every Sunday. Those people made all the difference to me.

[Here, there were a few brief paragraphs about three specific families that opened their arms and hearts and homes to me. Among them was the woman I wrote about in a previous post who had a dream about me and then, after telling her my story, told me that her son had recently come out to her. I also was going to talk about the choir director, who also has a gay son, and her family. My talk ended talking about the bishop and his family.]

In Matthew chapter 11, verse 29 we are told that it is only through taking another’s yoke upon us that we can truly learn of that person. Christ goes on to say that through doing this, through living with empathy, we will “find rest unto [our] souls.” Taking another’s yoke upon us is not easy; it isn’t comfortable; it might even be painful. But doing just that, I can promise you, enriches your life in ways you can’t even conceive of until you do it. It is my sincere hope, brothers and sisters, that we learn to practice empathy both in a general sense and in our personal relationships. It is my hope that we will learn that there is no single story for anyone. I hope we will not just accept or tolerate those who seem different than us, but to embrace everyone and empathize with everyone, to walk alongside them, to put our arms around them and put into action the words of Elder Uchtdorf: “There is room for you here.” There is room for you here [indicate the church], and, more importantly, there is room for you here [indicate the heart].