We don’t have to go far to find suffering. In fact, with so much violence and division confronting us from every media-saturated angle, sometimes it can feel difficult to focus on anything else. We know by faith that vitriol and darkness will not have the last word – that Love alone endures. But it can still seem overwhelming to face the immediate reality of our fallen world. It’s made me look again at the Cross. And in a way, it’s made me wonder anew about sympathy.
By one definition, sympathy is a kind of kinship, a fellow-feeling that arises from likeness. In this sense we might talk about sympathetic minds, or people being in sympathy with each other when their views, feelings, or understandings align. We can invite it, certainly, in deepening our capacity to recognize what we share with others, but this kind of sympathy isn’t really something we can make ourselves experience. It’s a natural response to affinity. We resonate with those who share our attitudes and beliefs, deriving strength and support from the communities we build together.
In its more familiar sense, however, sympathy is also a kind of “suffering with.” And while this often springs up innately, as when we contemplate the pain of someone we love, this particular definition does suggest a kind of charity we can choose, even without a natural impulse to kinship.
With the Greek word “pathos,” feeling and suffering are bound up in the same root. But to accompany someone else in suffering, to “suffer with” does not necessitate that we feel what they are feeling. (For that, we have the related word “empathy.”) Nor does sympathy require that the sufferer be blameless. Without denying the reality of evil, we can still exercise sympathy by remembering that sin and darkness do the greatest harm to those who perpetuate them.
No matter who or where we are, we remain connected to each other by our life in Christ. Through Him, no offering or prayer is ever in vain, even if we cannot see its fruit. In a supernatural sense, choosing to suffer with another person – to accompany their suffering in prayer or sacrifice, even where concrete gestures are impossible – participates by the grace of God in the sufferings of Christ Himself, Who took on the weight of all human sin, guilt, and pain, and Who accompanies us throughout our lives in our every private sorrow.
The deepest aim of sympathy is to see in another human face the face of Christ and to love it: to place ourselves along the Way of the Cross as Veronica or the Blessed Mother did. This weekend, let’s each try to remember someone who’s suffering – maybe someone for whom we struggle to find a sense of kinship. And in doing so, let’s renew our hope in God, Who transformed a sign of infamy and death, the Cross of Christ, into the sign of our salvation.
