A young friend sat with a new friend and heard a story of evil unspeakable. I do not know the details. I do not have to.
It is not to our own evil that I speak, but to the evil of others, not us, but still somehow very much us.
Being a minister, a pastor, means that people share themselves with us in ways unique . . . we walk with them through dark and lonesome valleys as much as over joy-filled mountaintops.
Their wounds are shared with us . . . and in a sense, their wounds become ours . . .
The cost of the journey to the pastor, the therapist, the professional listener, even has a name: “compassion fatigue”, as if you could become tired from caring about other people.
The name is not adequate. It is too understated and too overstated, all at once.
It says too much to say that caring about other people makes you tired. People are not a set of jumping jacks or a run around the track to be recovered from. A good nap, that’s what I need . . . or so suggests the notion of fatigue. But it says too little to say that it’s merely fatigue, this cost to my body and soul of the lent ear.
I think, perhaps, that John Donne hit closer to the mark: we are not fatigued by the pain and wounding of others . . . what we are is diminished . . . somehow made less than we were before . . .
The evil that others do to still yet others diminishes me. It makes me less than I was. Less sure. Less confident. Less important. Less human. Less.
In empathy, I can cry for their loss, their hurt, their woundedness, but I am also crying for my own less-ness.
Let it be said that in the listening, there is holy space. There is room for the divine silence that is really the divine anguish, expressed beyond something as ordinary as sound. It is the place of the rent curtain, of Rachel weeping for her children, of the earth splitting itself and the sun disappearing from sight in the sky. It is the place beyond words where only the Holy Spirit travels, alone, comforting and comfortless.
Yet into such breaches does the pastor walk, often unwittingly, only to be blind-sided by yet another story of horror made ordinarily surreal by the comfortable living room surroundings in which the story is so often told.
Feeling helpless and hopeless, the pastor listens, nods the head, tries to seem caring and wise and come up with something important to say, something, anything, that will somehow magically change the past. And then she remembers what she has learned time and time again . . . the past cannot be changed. . . it is the listening here and now that matters . . . there is healing in honoring the story and the teller . . . there is honor in the lent ear, reminding the wounded one that her story matters, that she matters.
It is not everything. And it seldom even feels like enough. But it will have to do, because it is all there is. This ground is not the ground of redemption or purpose. There is no purpose in the gratuitous infliction of pain and harm upon the defenseless. There is only pain. The pain matters because the person to whom it happened matters. They were made less than, they were diminished. And in hearing their pain, so am I.
