Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

empathy

By

Dialogue in hard times

He who does not see God in the eyes of the next person he meets need look no further. —attributed to Gandhi

Your intentions are great, but you have to deal with your impacts, and you have to be accountable for that. People are dying. We don’t have time for every single police officer to maybe realize that their humanity is being sacrificed. Structural changes are things we can do now.

[In the meantime] raise your tolerance for discomfort: there’s nothing comfortable about what’s happening.” —Merle McGee, YWCA of the City of New York

This week I sat with about 65 people at Middle Collegiate Church to talk about race, privilege, policing, and politics. It was a mixed group: my coworkers, congregants, members of the public, artists. and actors.

They shared their concerns about the nation’s direction, about state violence and protesting people; they shared their stories and their hopes; and they imagined what it might take to order society differently.

And even in that group of people all holding in common a concern for a just society, these were difficult conversations to have. A panelist shared his process of releasing the racism his job had trained into him. Another challenged the catharsis of focusing on the exceptional individual and leaving the system unchanged.

The statement I’m still mulling over is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. At the heart of a society that doesn’t consume those in it is our mutual ability to perceive one another as we are: connected, related, one people.

If we can’t bake that basic awareness into our culture, every superficial and substantive change will be a band-aid. We’ll be tempted to snipe at our neighbors for not living or engaging the system in the same ways we do. We’ll wonder where “the youth” are, even if they’re entirely busy with direct action elsewhere.

It’s the fundamental belief that the so-called Other is also part of “me” and “mine” that frees us up to live like it.

By

Read: Reflections from Standing Rock and beyond

A couple and their dog sit facing away from the camera, and looking out at the sea.
Photo credit: Nathália Bariani

If you only read three items this weekend, make them these:

1. On the history behind the Standing Rock defense of the Missouri River and water supply in Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas

I don’t understand why we are expendable in America.” —LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, tribal historian of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack Comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre

Allard spoke with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now last weekend and her account of the Standing Rock nations, the United States military, and the Native intentions for the land are quite, quite powerful.

2. On the distraction and erasure of mass media reporting on #NODAPL

All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure.” —Kelly Hayes, Transformative Spaces, Chicago

Erased By False Victory: Obama Hasn’t Stopped DAPL

Hayes analyzes the patterns of media attention about the gathering of more than 100 Native tribes at Standing Rock. Social media energy has been building, and the conventional press is noticing. But, Hayes, argues, that just means the status quo moves to defuse activist concern: “This isn’t the victory it’s being billed as.”

3. Meanwhile, at a different scale: On the nourishment that devoted companionship can offer at life’s end

‘I’ve been coming here twice a day to be with my wife for nine years,’ he said. ‘She had a brain hemorrhage and hasn’t been communicative since then.’
I swallowed a lump in my throat thinking of that sort of love and devotion. Nine years. And while she might not be verbal anymore, the love and contentment she felt with him was clear from her body language.” —Daneen Akers, co-producer of Enough Room at the Table

Every so often, Daneen writes an email to the community that has supported her recent film projects (she’s been much better about this than I’ve been this year).

Her latest message reflects on the power of family and companionship to nourish someone through severe medical illnesses and the end of life stage—and ways our religious teachings make these periods unnecessarily complicated.

By

Video: What empathy looks like

Everyone has a story. And that story runs through their entire life like a tapestry thread.

This video from Cleveland Clinic asks:

If you could stand in someone else’s shoes . . . hear what they hear. See what they see. Feel what they feel. Would you treat them differently?”

The only audio on this video is light piano music; there’s otherwise no speech.

Thanks to Pr. Sam Millen for the share.

By

On Dodging Grief

My friend J Mase III, poet, writer, and co-founder of the weekly #qfaith Twitter chat, wrote an article about grief this week. He’d asked his followers about how others react to grief, what they say, and what we wish others said.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine died. We met at our church 4 years ago; he was an usher and deacon, and his wife often sat in our row. The two of them were and are among the sweetest and most grounded people I know; easy-going, open-hearted, travel-lovers, and wonderfully matched as a couple. While she recovered from breast cancer, he developed a terminal disease, underwent a series of conventional and experimental treatments, and then, about a week and a half ago, went to sleep and never woke.

We all knew it was coming. We just didn’t know when. We saw his suits hanging more loosely around his shoulders and a shadow form in his cheeks—but it was easy to deny impending death because he so thoroughly distracted us with a life that he lived the hell out of. His smile was perennial and his capacity for graciousness, kindness, and other-centeredness was undimmed by either declining health or increasing pain.

I can’t imagine anyone who knew him and won’t miss him. I also don’t know anyone who knew him who’s not glad he’s now beyond the reach of cancer.

Grief is a sneaky thing at times like this. Mainstream culture gives us a straightforward protocol for grief: for family, you get this much time to deny, cry, or pout. With friends, that much. For people with whom you had a social network in common, maybe a little. With celebrities like Nelson Mandela or Paul Walker, follow the news cycle without being maudlin, and then move on.

Who makes up these rules? They don’t fit for me. They don’t match my relationships and I don’t live by them.

Shame and belonging researcher Brené Brown has a gift for explaining how our responses to the vulnerabilities of others can open up our relationships or abridge them. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) animated part of a talk on empathy in which she describes how sympathy falls short, can be dismissive, and is often about assuaging the discomfort of the speaker rather than the person in grief, sadness, or pain:

One of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that’s very difficult, I’d rather you say, “Phew! 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. —Brené Brown

So here are 5 things I told J that I wished folk said when I was grieving:

“I don’t know what to say, so I’m going to be quiet. I love you.”

“I’ll only tell you my grief story if you ask—and you don’t have to.”

“Wanna play some pool? Can pick you up at 8.”

“Doesn’t matter that you’re not grieving a relative. It doesn’t hurt any less.”

“You can feel whatever you feel around me. I’m listening.”

Sometimes, I said, people fill the silences and the space with their noise, awkwardness, and fear-projected-outward, missing opportunities to just be. Not everyone can stand the light of vulnerability or loss or hope, and so when they can’t, yet show up in your space anyway, managing them while managing your own grief becomes an unnecessary and burdensome mission.

There are also some who can stand that light, who can bear it, who will sit with others through sadness without fixing, meddling, or minimizing. Are they rare souls? Does it matter?

I appreciate those I know. And I hope this year to be more of one for the people around me.

Check out J’s article at the Huffington Post: Rules for grieving in the New Year—or Grieving like it’s 1999. What grieving rules or customs do you live by? Share in the comments below.

By

Committing to Compassion

I’ve been aware of Compassionate Action Network International’s Charter for Compassion for more than four years now. Yet I only signed it today. I’m not sure why. No reason I can think of sounds right.

But when I re-read the text of the Charter today, I was struck by how worthy of endorsement it is, not simply as text on a webpage but as the inspiration for stronger relationships across social lines. I became the 94,133rd signatory. 

Charter For Compassion logo94,133rd Signatory of the Charter for Compassion

I bet I’m not the only reader who identifies with the Charter’s values but doesn’t feel as strongly connected to the community of thousands that’s evolved around it.

Dr. Karen Armstrong is one of the most visible representatives of this movement and I enjoy her presentations about it: she argues well why the pro-compassion movement adds value to religious and secular communities alike. But in my day-to-day sphere, I don’t hear much about it. I may become a reason for that to change.

The ethic of reciprocity (do unto others as you’d have them do unto you) is native philosophy to many of my friends and colleagues. I’ve studied ethics and moral systems of value as part of my work in an academic ethics center and in my social justice education as well.

But reviewing the text today made me wonder: how many accessible spaces for a discussion of compassion and respectful community are there for people not already engaged in religion or academia or the non-profit sector? Why should this be a conversation that only a subset of society participates in? What would it take to mainstream empathy? What’s the role of emotional intelligence? And how much of this is teach-able?

This is the Charter’s full text:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

If this resonates with you too, sign the Charter and consider how you can help to promote these values through your own lifework.