Have you ever put a book on a shelf and forgot about? This is exactly what I did with 20 Teachable Virtues: Practical Ways to Pass on Lessons of Virtue and Character to Your Children by Barbara C. Unell and Jerry L. Wyckoff. I was given the book when I was at Sacred Heart by the Dad’s Prayer Group. Once a month a group of dads both young and old would gather to pray and talk about the blessings and challenges of being a dad in the world today. In addition to their prayer and reflection a member would present one of the virtues found in this book. When I moved from Sacred Heart to St. Norbert, I packed it away and forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago when I opened a box and found it. I thought to myself since the month of November in the Church makes us thinks about saints and the life we want to live that this would be a good book to reflect on this month. I pray that you will find some of my reflections helpful in your daily journey toward heaven.
Empathy
The first virtue that Unell and Wyckoff choose to write about is Empathy. What is Empathy? Empathy is more than just listening even though listening plays a major role in being empathetic. Here is their definition:
Em-pa-thyn.1. The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2. The capacity for participating in another’s feelings or ideas.
Empathy to me is the ability to stop and try to understand how someone else is feeling. I am practicing empathy when someone comes to me and tells me a story about how someone has hurt them and I imagine what it must have been like to be the person being hurt. When I am using empathy, I can be more caring and compassionate toward others because I can imagine myself in the role of the other person.
Empathy requires active listening skills which means that I have to focus on the person talking to me and not be thinking of the next thing I am going to say and I must also be aware of that person’s body language. If a person tells me they are doing fine and they are on the verge of tears and I believe them then most likely I have just failed a test of empathy.
One of the best ways to be empathetic is to ask open ended questions (questions that cannot simply be answered with a “yes” or “no” answer) and allow the person to express their feelings. Another good way to practice empathy is try to remember a similar experience that you may have had and what emotions accompanied that experience. We must be careful though not to assume that these experiences are equal but rather our past experiences help us get into the ballpark of what someone else is feeling.
It is important to teach children (and ourselves) empathy because “they (us) need to learn behaviors that show empathy in order to help them live in peace with their neighbors, get along with their coworkers on the job, and enjoy relationships with friends and family. In fact, empathy is the rock-solid foundation for almost every brick used in building solid citizens of today and tomorrow. Empathy is the cement that holds together the secret formula for constructing caring and compassionate human beings, and it is as essential for survival as air and water.”
10 Steps: To Help One Develop the Virtue of Empathy
1. I can practice listening. Listening is more than just hearing sounds and noises. Listening involves hearing the ideas that are being expressed through both words and body language. Too often we can find ourselves instead of not listening focusing on what we are going to say next.
2. I can pay better attention to body language. Most of what we communicate to people is not through spoken words but rather through our facial expressions and body movements. If I tell people that I am “fine” and I am ready to cry then I am obviously not fine.
3. When listening to the person, try to imagine yourself in that persons place and how you would feel if the events that he or she is describing happened to you.
4. Ask yourself why do you think the person is telling this story to you and what would you want someone to do for you if it you were in that situation.
5. Rephrase what the person is saying and repeat it back to them so that they can clarify their thoughts: “What I hear you saying is…?
6. Acknowledge their emotions in a way that allows them to know that emotions are not good or bad but what we do with them can be. “I understand that you are angry Johnny but you still have no right to hit your sister,” is a good example of a statement that acknowledges the person’s emotions but also lets the person know that the following action was not appropriate.
7. Do be quick to give advice. Sometimes we can be so quick to give advice that we do not listen to what the person is saying.
8. Be careful of story matching. You may have a great story that “tops” the story the person just told you but sometimes the other person is just looking for someone to listen to them.
9. When you have hurt someone try to play things over in your head and ask yourself what is that you did to hurt the person or how would you have felt if things were reversed.
10. Lastly pray with the person. Allow the person know that you are with them and that you want to offer their
I have been working hard to come up with a topic for the month of December and while many different ideas have come to my mind none of them seem to be what I really wanted to write about. Instead, I found myself wanting to write about many different things that just did not seem very connected at all. So I have cleverly titled this month’s spiritual ponderings “Spiritual Randomness” and now I can write about anything I want.
I wish to begin this month’s randomness with a short passage from the Book of Genesis. Before I get to the passage though, let me set the scene. Abraham’s son Isaac (the one who Abraham almost sacrificed) has two sons. The oldest of which is Esau and the youngest one was Jacob. Esau and Jacob from the day that they were born (twins) were literally rivals with Jacob normally getting the better of his slightly older brother. Jacob at the point of the upcoming passage has stolen Esau’s birthright and tricked his father into giving him Esau’s special blessing. Jacob flees his homeland in order to prevent his brother killing him.
While Jacob is on the run from his old brother, God mysteriously guides Jacob to a distant relative’s house named Laban. Laban has two daughters the oldest being Leah and the youngest being Rachel. Jacob makes a deal with Laban that he would work for him for seven years in exchange for the right to marry Rachel. Laban though tricks Jacob and marries him off to his oldest daughter Leah instead. Jacob then works another seven years and is eventually allowed to marry Rachel also. Jacob ends up with a huge family that includes twelve sons.
Jacob begins to fear that his father-in-law would never let him return to his homeland so he uplifts his family secretly and runs toward his homeland. As he approaches his family land he learns that Esau is waiting for him. So now he has an angry father-in-law behind him and a brother who he has not seen in fourteen years ahead of him. Remembering that the reason why he fled his homeland in the first place was because Esau wanted to kill him, Jacob bows down and prays.
After he is done praying he sends his family over the river in front of him and he stays behind. I guess he might be thinking that if Esau does kill him he does not want his family to see him die. And now here is the passage:
Genesis 32:25-33
Jacob was left there alone. Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob's hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled. The man then said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go until you bless me." "What is your name?" the man asked. He answered, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed." Jacob then asked him, "Do tell me your name, please." He answered, "Why should you want to know my name?" With that, he bade him farewell. Jacob named the place Peniel, "Because I have seen God face to face," he said, "yet my life has been spared." At sunrise, as he left Penuel, Jacob limped along because of his hip. That is why, to this day, the Israelites do not eat the sciatic muscle that is on the hip socket, inasmuch as Jacob's hip socket was struck at the sciatic muscle.
Jacob literally wrestles with a divine being. In the Old Testament any manifestation of God is confusing because it could be God or one of His angels. This is a way in which the Old Testament authors protect God’s glory and majesty. As the sun is rises Jacob demands a blessing from the divine being. The divine being then changes Jacob’s name from “Jacob” to “Israel”. The name “Israel” literally means “he who wrestles or struggles with God.”
As I read and pray over this passage, a couple of things come to mind. The first is that the divine creature must have allowed Jacob to win. I mean if I was to wrestle with a divine being that all he had to do was stop thinking of me and I would disappear , or knew my every move because he knew the future, I would get my rear-end kicked. This divine being though allows Jacob to win. Why? He does so out of love. Have you ever seen a child between the ages of 3 to 7 years old play a sport like soccer for example against an older more talented adult? If so you know that the only way the child wins is because the adult lets them win and the adult allows them to win because he or she knows that there is something better than the winning- the love that the child feels and the smile on the child’s face.
God allows Jacob to win in much the same way He allowed us to kill His first born Son Jesus. He does so out of love for us.
The second thing that strikes me is the idea of “wrestling or struggling” God and I do not mean in some sort of professional wrestling match but rather the idea of “wrestling with being in a relationship with a divine being.” Just as human relationships are never easy because you never truly know what the other person is capable of or is thinking at any given moment, one’s relationship with God is an immense struggle for the same reasons. What does it mean to be in a relationship with a God who is pure justice and pure mercy? What does it mean to be in relationship with a God who seems to have almost two different personalities (the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament)? What does it mean to be in a relationship with a God who is all loving but yet allows evil in the world? This is what I mean by the idea of wrestling with God.
Jacob becomes Israel the person who wrestles with God, his descendants after they follow Moses through the Red Sea become the nation of Israel, a nation who wrestles with the idea of being in a relationship with God, and finally the Church is the new Israel founded on the twelve Apostles. What does it mean for us to struggle with being in a relationship with a God who loves us so much that He sent his only Son not to condemn us but rather so that we might have eternal life if we would only follow Jesus who is the Truth, the Way, and the Life.