Choices for Troubled Times – 5. Encouraging Empathy

Teachers who understand that learning is a life-long process will often have opportunities to influence their students in meaningful ways even after graduation.  Brett Hiner, an English/Language Arts teacher at Wooster High School, pursued just such an opportunity to impact a former student, an African American female.  Mr. Hiner spotted his former student’s Facebook post expressing her deep concern over what appeared to be preferential treatment by police when they apprehend White crime suspects compared to apprehension of Black suspects.  The former student’s call for someone to “help me make sense of this” in her Facebook post inspired Hiner to empathize with her, leading to an article entitled, “'Mockingbird' Remains Must-Read for Students” in his weekly column, A Work in Progress (in Wooster Weekly News).

Mr. Hiner summarizes his empathetic response to this Black former student’s concern over the violence and deaths during the recent racial unrest:

Setting aside the current political unrest between various groups, my heart was broken by the comment accompanying the video posted by my former student, an African American female: “Someone, please help me make sense of this.” She posted the video alongside various examples of African American suspects being treated very differently than this white murderer by police.

“Help. Me. Make. Sense. Of. This,” she pleads.

Educating for Empathy
Mr. Hiner believes that all of us have the responsibility to respond according to our abilities in ways that convey understanding and empathy to those who are hurting.  Hiner writes (emphasis mine):

Teachers, clergy, poets, medical professionals, scientists and, most importantly, parents ultimately have one unifying job:  to help people make sense of a too often terrifying world.

In this statement, Hiner beautifully expresses the fundamental purpose and benefit of learning, and what ought to be the “mission statement” for all of us as teachers; namely, to help our students “make sense” of their world.  While teachers and administrators in our schools and universities may disagree on philosophy, content, and pedagogy, every educator has a role in shaping the worldview of his or her students. 

Each of our students, like Brett Hiner’s former student, is attempting to “make sense of the world” as they view it.  Indeed, all of us are seeking answers to the basic “worldview-shaping questions:”
Who am I? 
What is wrong with the world? 
What is the remedy? 
What is my duty and purpose?

It is clear that Mr. Hiner understands his worldview-shaping mission as a language arts teacher when he writes: “Sometimes, the power of literature can guide our conversations, helping us shine a light on answers we often cannot find ourselves.”  Readers of Brett Hiner’s article, “'Mockingbird' Remains Must-Read for Students,” will find an example of how a committed teacher uses a classic selection from American literature to teach an important character quality-- empathy.

Learning to Empathize from Literature
Interestingly, as Hiner notes, Lee Harper’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960, J. B. Lippincott & Co.) celebrates its 60^th anniversary this year.  He summarizes Mockingbird as “the story of young Jean Louise Finch, aka Scout, growing up in Maycomb, Alabama with an aging lawyer for a father, an annoying brother, and an African American housekeeper…”  Scout’s lawyer father, Atticus Finch chooses to defend Tom Robinson, an innocent young black man who was accused of raping a White woman.  According to Sparknotes, “In this story of innocents destroyed by evil, the “mockingbird” comes to represent the idea of innocence.  Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence.”

As Scout tries to make sense of the people and circumstances surrounding her life in the midst of the realities of racial injustice, her father takes time to teach her important lessons.  One lesson from Mockingbird that stood out to Mr. Hiner features Atticus explaining the value of empathy in wonderful descriptive prose (emphasis mine):

First of all, if you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

The young Scout begins to apply her father’s wise teaching to empathize with Tom Robinson,  her reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, and eventually a lynch mob that threatens Tom’s innocent life.  As Scout attempts to “climb into the skin” of these innocents, her growing empathy is symbolized by the life of the mockingbird, an innocent songbird with a lovely musical repertoire.  Here, Mockingbird may convince some readers to assign the same moral standing to the mockingbird as to innocent people and to each living creature in its own right, based on empathy.  But this biocentrism is found wanting both as a legal defense of life and as an environmental ethic.  While attempting to elevate nonhuman creatures, biocentrism tends to diminish the moral standing of humankind.  For example, the great missionary Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s biocentrism seems to have been motivated as much by his European guilt and desire to make retribution over past colonial injustices to Asia and Africa than by his empathy for existing humans and other creatures.  Clearly, we need a more objective ethic upon which to assign moral standing to humankind and to all of life than either biocentrism or contemporary “critical theory.”

Christian Gospel in Mockingbird
Thanks to the biographical information on Harper Lee by Southern historian, J. Wayne Flynt, her long-time friend, we now know that To Kill a Mockingbird was based on her experiences growing up in 1930’s-1950’s Alabama.  According to Flynt, she was also marked both by the Christian testimony of her father (her pattern for Scout’s father, Atticus Finch) and by the influence of Christianity on Southern literature.   Notably, Flynt considers Lee’s masterpiece “. . . an allegorical tale of the Gospel” (See “The Gospel:  Power that Saves, Heals, Assures”).

The Gospel of Christ revealed in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures is divine revelation of objective answers to each of the “worldview-shaping questions” noted above.  Sin entered God’s perfect creation and led to corruption and death.  Christ, the “second Adam” (1 Corinthians 15: 45) was the incarnate God in human form, perfect and without sin, who gave up His life as a sacrificial lamb to take away our sin.

Harper Lee, being heavily influenced by the Bible, expresses this influence through her counterpart, Scout, in a dialog with Miss Maudie:

"'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
'Your father's right,' she said.
 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

This conversation between Scout and Maudie moves the narrative into a more objective moral framework.  To kill an innocent mockingbird or an innocent human being without moral justification is sin.  This claim suggests that true empathy must have an objective, moral foundation, not a subjective sense of guilt or desire to be woke by making reparations.  

But how can imperfect humans with limited knowledge of people and situations make perfect moral judgments and rule with perfect justice?  Our judicial system attempts to make just verdicts but everyone knows that our court system is not perfect. Only a holy, omniscient, and perfectly just God can make perfect judgments.  

The Gospel:  God in Human Skin
And what does God say about human sin?  There is none righteous.  All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3: 10, 23).  The Apostle Paul wrote (Romans 7: 9), I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died.  According to the Gospel, the law was given by Moses to show us our need of God’s redemption, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1: 17). 

The Gospel answers the worldview question, “What’s wrong?”  Answer:  Creation is corrupted by sin.  The Gospel answers, “What is the remedy?  Answer:  Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.  Finally, “What is my duty?”  Answer:  To repent of my sin and receive by faith God’s forgiveness.   

But, how can a holy God understand my pathetic situation?  First, remember the words of Mr. Hiner’s former student-- “Someone, please help me make sense of this.”  Second, let’s combine the student’s plea with Gospel-grounded empathy-- “Does anyone have enough empathy to come and help me make sense of this?”  Answer:  According to the Gospel, ‘God does care, and He came as Jesus Christ.”

Jesus Christ is the perfect expression of God’s perfect love and perfect empathy.  Because God loved us so much, He gave His Son to demonstrate His love in the way that meets Atticus’s lesson in empathy to Scout:  You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.  Jesus did just that!  A holy God “climbed into human skin” through the incarnation and virgin birth!  The Apostle John explained, …the Word (God) was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth (John 1: 14). 

After Jesus had given His life to atone for our sin and rose again, John wrote as a much older man, What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— (1 John 1: 1-2).

Both the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Bible and the “Gospel according to Harper Lee” imperfectly revealed in To Kill a Mockingbird point to the same answer to “making sense” of events when innocence is killed and injustice cries out for our empathy. The answer is to realize that the most innocent Man who ever lived, Jesus Christ, was killed by crucifixion because God’s love expressed through His empathy moved Him to the compassion that led Him to the Cross where He died in our place.  Our response is to accept God’s love gift of salvation and Eternal Life.  Then, the Life of Christ in us can transform us to express God’s love, empathy, and compassion toward our neighbor regardless of ethnicity, gender, gender preference, or social class.

In conclusion, Mr. Hiner recommends Mockingbird and several other books which I have not read.  However, I want to add an additional book based on what I have shared above; namely, the Bible.  With this greatest and most printed book in the world, I would conclude with Mr. Hiner, “These books provide a glimpse of worlds I will never inhabit but help me, with every flip of a page, to understand someone else’s “skin” just a bit more.”

What Do You Think?
Thank you for reading.  I welcome your “Comments” (see below or contact me at silviusj@gmail.com).