Author: jdunderwood

Empathy work

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In a class I took a few weeks ago, the instructor read “Kindness,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet whose work I have enjoyed for several years. Here are the first few lines of it:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

She then, in the way of really gifted poets, begins to paint vivid pictures with few words. Here’s one of them: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness / you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho / lies dead by the side of the road. / You must see how this could be you, / how he too was someone / who journeyed through the night with plans / and the simple breath that kept him alive.“

“You must see how this could be you.”

Those words…

My mind brought up the first death I witnessed as a chaplain.

I was gaining clinical hours as a chaplain student at a community hospital in a neighborhood of Chicago. It had a single ICU with about 15 beds.

The chaplains were paged by the nursing staff. The paramedics had brought in a man found down in the street. He’d overdosed and was barely alive. When staff contacted family, they learned more about him. He’d just gotten out of prison and it seemed he had made the common error of taking drugs at the same level of use that he’d been using before going to prison. He didn’t think about the fact that his body was no longer used to that level and had overdosed on what he thought was a safe amount.

The morning we were paged, his condition had deteriorated, and the nurses knew he would die within hours. Family was planning to come in, but they were trying to figure out transportation for multiple members in different locations, and all this was taking longer than planned, and the nurses did not want this man to die alone.* So they paged the chaplains’ office to see if we had any bandwidth that morning to be with him.

My mentor chaplain took me with her to his room. We stood on either side of his bed, holding his hands, listening to the varied sounds of his breathing, watching the effort of his chest as it lifted and dropped. I tried to keep my eyes from the monitor showing his heartrate and oxygen levels slowly–so slowly– dropping. I remember thinking that it took a very long time for him to die (it often does, but I didn’t know that then). I remember looking at his closed eyelids and thinking how strange it was that I would never know the color of his eyes. I remember the mental work I did as I stood there. I was listing out the aspects of his life that seemed unimaginable to me and so different from my own, and I was setting them aside, one by one. Drug addiction, incarceration, overdose…

It was like I was going backward into his life (my imagination of his life) and my own, to a time when the different circumstances of our lives hadn’t yet so drastically changed our trajectories. And an image of him as a baby suddenly flashed into my mind. Cuddled in blankets, held in love in someone’s arms, the lashes of his eyes spread across his cheeks in peaceful sleep, his cheeks soft and warm.

I remember thinking this: “We were infants about the same time.” Life stretched ahead of us and for so many reasons that I did not know (though I could guess at some of them, such as the different colors of our skins, the socio-economic positions of our families, the educational opportunities afforded us, our families’ housing situations…), they took very different directions so that, in that moment, far from our childhoods, he was the person dying in the bed, and I was the one standing by his side.

“You must see how this could be you.”

Not like me… and also like me.

Change just a few of the things in our very different pasts: take away my dad’s medical degree and give it to this man’s father; let my genes be slightly changed so that my skin looked more like the darker skin of my father than my mother’s pale flesh; get this man enrolled in a fantastic preschool and elementary program…

and our roles could be reversed (though he might have chosen a more lucrative path than hospital chaplaincy 🙂 )

In that moment, the dying man became someone to me in a way he hadn’t been before.

The truth is that he was SOMEONE all along, in the same way that every single human is a SOMEONE: important, valuable, individual. The work for me was for me to recognize his “someone-ness,” for him to become someone to ME.

He was someone.

I was someone.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness … You must see how this could be you.

The dying man and the chaplain were no longer “he and I” to me. We were “we.”

*NODA (No One Dies Alone) is a program at many hospitals. It was started by a nurse at the Mayo Clinic (see this video to hear the story of why she started it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHbQwHHR7WI&t=98s) and has since spread to many hospitals. Most programs are run by volunteers, so if that sounds like something you would be interested in, just Google NODA and the names of your local hospitals to see if they have a program.

One Skin, Skeleton, Skull… (Empathy series)

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My job closely connects me with the impact of the body on people’s lives. There is my actual work with persons who are seriously ill and/or in pain, and there is also the daily walking around and through an adult hospital that’s right next door to a children’s hospital. The halls and common spaces have far more than the average number of assistive walking devices, beanies and caps covering chemo-bald heads, oxygen tanks, prosthetic limbs, etc. Every day I pass parents pushing children in wheelchairs or pulling them in wagons that hold not just their child but also some kind of bulky medical device. And then there are unhoused persons, many of them with skin sores and swollen hands or feet, drawn to the safety, climate-controlled open spaces, and generally welcoming attitude of a public hospital.

One morning, as a colleague and I walked the two blocks from our office to the building where our Spiritual Care Department has its daily huddle, we passed a middle-aged woman pushing a young man (20s, maybe?) in a wheelchair. Both his feet were gone, and the skin at the base of the amputation sites was pink and puffy. Once we were past them, I said, “I’ve seen them every morning this week.”

She sighed. “That skin looks painful.”

“It’s gotten me thinking about our specific bodies and the ways they shape our lives.”

“Say more.” (What a good chaplain she is!)

“These bodies of ours determine so much of our existence and even how we become as persons. I know there are lots of factors–socioeconomics, geography, family background–but the presenting aspects of our bodies–our skin, any disabilities, any anomalies–those impact how other people look at us and see us, and then their reactions shape how we think of ourselves.”

She nodded. “And then it shapes the opportunities that are open to us–or not–and the groups that are available to us for belonging.”

“Yes,” I continued, “and all I know is the experience of my one body and its specifics, but I tend to think that my one experience gives me information and insight into other people’s embodied experiences.”

I’ve continued to think about that conversation, and I’ve done a little practice with it.

First I listed out my identities that are connected with my actual body, starting with those that are most obviously connected (*the full list of the identities I used is at the bottom of this post). And then I explored each of those a bit.

For example, I am able-bodied, with all my limbs, ten fingers & toes, normal range of motion in my joints, able to use all my sense organs (seeing, smelling, hearing) in a “normal” range. This has been true since my birth. I followed a normal timeline of crawling-toddling-walking-running and my coordination and balance were again in the normal range. I wasn’t great at sports, but I could engage in them and never be the last one chosen when the kickball captains picked their teams (what an awful practice–why did we ever think this was a good idea?).

Then I tried changing one thing that is listed in the above paragraph and imagined how that would have impacted the actual life I’ve lived. What if I’d been born with one hand that I couldn’t use “normally”? Just one. What are the things that I engaged in as a child (like knitting, swimming, cooking…) that would have been impacted by that ONE change? How would I have been seen differently by my peers–in school, in sports? What facial expressions would I have seen regularly on some people’s faces when they noticed my hand? How would that have changed how I felt about myself, how I interacted with them? What about my daily life now? What adjustments would I need to make? What would I need assistance with? How would this change how I get around my city?

ONE change–and I could be a completely different person. I could have a completely different outlook and way of relating. I could walk around seeing my world and other people from a viewpoint that I (in the body that I inhabit) can only imagine.

I have to admit that this was not a comfortable practice for me. I am very used to life within THIS skin, with this particular skeleton, skull, organs, and mind. I know only THIS lived experience. This practice forced me to imagine my life from a different experience, one embodied “bit” at a time, which made it–for me–a little more real and possible than trying to imagine myself as a poor child in a war-torn country around the world from my own.

This also helps me to understand the compounded and complicated effects of intersectionality (such as a lesbian woman who is African American who’s had Type 1 Diabetes all her life). It was a lot to think of these changes ONE identity at a time; what about holding each one and then adding another and then another!!!! I remember once participating in a training exercise in which the facilitator had our group stand in a horizontal line facing him. “Take a step forward if your parents went to college,” he said. “Take a step forward if you’ve never had a stranger call you a name related to your physical appearance.” With one statement after another, some of us moved forward. Some didn’t. At the end, the facilitator asked those of us closer to the front to turn around to face the group members behind us. (Here’s a link to an example of this exercise: https://www.eiu.edu/eiu1111/Privilege%20Walk%20Exercise-%20Transfer%20Leadership%20Institute-%20Week%204.pdf)

Empathy work is hard work–good but hard. But it’s oh, so important.

*BODY-RELATED IDENTITY LIST (this is the list I created and used for my own empathy practice)

-Gender (from “super” feminine to “super” masculine and all that’s in between as well as the level of comfort with where one lands on that spectrum)

-Skin color

-Size (tall to short, small to large)

-Visible “Ableness” of the body (arms and legs, sense organs, etc.)

-Less visible “ableness”/health of the body (diseases such as sickle cell, diabetes, heart conditions…)

-Anomalies of the body that are visible (strange head shape, facial features)

-Sexuality

Praying for/with my “enemy”

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Several months ago, I visited a patient who had requested a visit with a chaplain. After I introduced myself, she began telling me that she was glad for someone to talk to because home was several hours away, and she’d told her family members not to come into the city. “I don’t trust Democrats,” she shared. “I told them to stay home so they don’t get beat up or robbed by the Democrats. They’re scary people.”

I didn’t tell her that–based on my voting record–I would most definitely fit in the group she so feared, and I wondered if she didn’t register the rather large pin on my lab coat that identifies me as an ally of black, brown, and LGBTQ+ persons. Or the pronoun pin I’ve attached to my badge. Or the DEI sticker.

Instead, we talked for a little while. She shared her anxieties about her illness and its impact on her loved ones. We named the losses–of independence, of mobility, of schedule–that have been a result of her cancer. She requested prayer, and so we spent a few minutes lifting up her concerns together.

I should have been labeled as an “enemy” for her. But she couldn’t match the person she met–who came in offering compassion and a willingness to listen–with the picture of “Democrat/Enemy” that she has in her mind.

If we are thinking of enemies as persons who purposely threaten our safety, health, or peace, I don’t know that I have any personal enemies. I get along with most people, and as a middle-aged, educated, employed, housed white woman, I’m not much of a target. But I have a lot of neighbors–both in the blocks that surround mine and in the city of Chicago at large–who cannot say the same. Many whose skin is darker than mine are afraid to go to work, afraid to send their children to school, afraid to go to the grocery store, afraid to go to the very court dates that they are hoping will one day provide them with permanent documentation. My mind tends to put the label “enemy” on those who are making them afraid: Donald Trump, JD Vance, ICE agents, white supremacists… And then from there it’s an easy jump to those who voted for Trump, to those who support sending ICE agents into my city, to the woman who told me she fears Democrats.

But then I remember there are actual people behind the votes and social media posts… with their faces and stories and worries and cares.

In a training session I participated in last year, we did a listening exercise in pairs. Each of us were told to think of something that really bugged us, really got under our skin. We then ranted to the other person about it–without interruption–for two minutes. We switched, the other partner getting their chance to vent, and then we got back together as a large group. Each person then shared with the larger group the values they heard underneath the person’s tirade. If the partner had ranted about their upstairs neighbor being noisy, then something like this might have been said: “They value quiet and getting to spend time at home recharging. They think that it is important for them to have some solitude and reflection time. They value having boundaries and persons having respect for the boundaries of others.”

This is good work–to look and listen beyond the words or stances that put us at opposition–to see the person and their values. And then there’s a step further–to engaging in prayer for them.

A number of years ago, in a pastoral education class, one of my classmates was a fiery young Presbyterian who’d grown up with a physical disability, and his own experience had fostered in him a deep longing for justice for any and all marginalized groups. We often spent our break times together, and our conversations often centered on social issues.

At the start of one class near Christmas, he shared the Magnificat, the prayer-song of Mary that follows Gabriel’s announcement of her pregnancy, and he highlighted the justice themes that run through it. “God has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. God has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. God has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” During lunch that day, he and I discussed it further. “I find myself longing for the downfall of quite a few ‘rulers,'” he told me.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, “but I’ve also thought about the restorative ideas that are present in that song. If the rulers are brought down from their thrones and the rich are sent away empty, I would imagine–knowing the heart of God for all people–that it is with the idea that the rich and powerful and unjust will also become humble and aware of their common humanity and vulnerability so that they also can then be lifted up and filled with good things. It is not punitive; it is so that they can be emptied of the conceit that keeps them from being filled with goodness, kindness, love…”

Based on the equation of “Democrats=scary people,” I should have been an enemy to the patient I prayed with. But I’m not. I’m not her enemy, and she wasn’t mine, and in talking and praying together, our hearts joined, and my initial wariness was softened (it doesn’t feel good to be told you’re the Enemy, right?).

Lately I’ve been practicing prayer for those who, like that patient, might consider me an enemy. For those who vote and think differently than I do. In honesty, I have to admit that I have thought of “them” as the “enemy.” I mean, I’d love to be like Ghandhi or Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu, wishing nothing but universal good will upon “them,” but I’m not. So a lot of my praying has sounded a bit like this: “May they recognize their safety and become concerned about the safety of those who don’t look like themselves or have a different lifestyle. May they be healthy–in mind, body, and spirit–and then desire health and care for all others, and consider healthcare as a right for all people…”

Do I think these prayers will change their minds or hearts? I don’t know. But here’s what I do know. They change MY heart. They deepen my resolve to support the values and needs of the vulnerable and marginalized–and they also attune my heart to the values and needs of the “enemy.” They help me do the work of transforming “enemy” into “neighbor,” reminding me that we are ALL–like it or not–neighbors. My prayers increase the chances that I engage in conversation with those who disagree with me rather than avoid it, that I listen for underlying values, that I stay in a room/space rather than leave, and that I return to a room or space for continued engagement.

These prayers are really about me.

I’ll keep practicing.

Empathy: Perspective taking

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I ran across The Enemies Project today and watched the above video. I found it incredibly moving, so much so that I cried at one point and my empath dog Ruby came over to check on me. There are other videos that The Enemies Project has made; I hope to watch more of them. Empathy can be fostered in many ways; I’ve written quite a bit how I’ve grown empathy through reading, through walking in the shoes of another as their story unfolds on the pages of a book. Ultimately, empathy grows through listening, listening not for the purpose of forming our rebuttal, our response, our witty comeback, but listening to understand, listening to connect with the other’s feelings, with their story.

I am convinced we need more of this kind of interaction, with no debate tallies and no “winners” and “losers.” So much of our debate today ends with each side even more fully entrenched in opposition, in us/them, good/bad, right/wrong. In the conversation in the video above, there is the expectation that each participant will move from seeing things only from their own view to getting the perspective from the other’s seat. There is the expectation that they will witness the other’s humanity, the other’s beauty, the other’s fears.

All the best, everybody!

WDJD (part of the Empathy through Reading series)

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When I was a teen, I found a paperback copy of In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? tucked away in our basement. Within a few pages, I knew to read it on the sly, aware that it supported a “social gospel” that was frowned upon by the fundamental theology I grew up with. I only read it once, but it stuck with me in some important ways. The story itself felt old–it was written in 1896, after all–and unrelated to the social, racial, and justice issues in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1980s–but its basic premise lodged deep: What WOULD Jesus do?

This question–the very theme of Shelden’s book–was THE wedge that created and widened the gap between my “stated” theology and my “lived” theology. With every encounter, every person, there was the question: What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say? How would Jesus act? This meant, of course, that I had to look at what Jesus DID and SAID to have an idea of what he would do in my circumstances. So to the Gospels I went.

The clearest teaching I found Jesus giving in the Gospels was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and it was a teaching that got “fleshed out” again and again and again, through both the stories Jesus told and the stories he lived. (He also said, “Love your enemy,” because some of us REALLY need it spelled out, I guess.)

There is one story that is specifically linked to the “Love your neighbor” statement. In case you’ve never read it or it’s been awhile, here’s a recap: Some religious guy is trying to test Jesus, so he asks Jesus, “What do I have to do to have life eternal?” Jesus turns the question back to the guy–after all, this guy is an Expert in religious law–and asks him what he finds in Scripture. Expert answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “Good answer–do this and you’ll live.” Then Expert–who is clearly not Mr. Rogers–asks, “So, who is my neighbor?” Jesus then tells a story to illustrate: a guy is traveling from one city to another when he gets jumped by some robbers who beat him so bad he’s left lying on the side of the road, “half dead.” First a priest walks by, but he ignores the victim. Then another person in the religious in-crowd walks by, also ignoring the victim (this is starting to sound like “a priest walks into a bar” joke). The third person who walks by is someone that the first two people would despise (and supposedly the victim would as well–were he actually able to express an opinion). This Third person is an outcast, an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong in the majority culture, who would get the side-eye were he to actually walk into a religious establishment or move into a middle- or upper-class neighborhood.

It’s Third, though, who actually sees and helps the victim. He cleans him up, bandages his wounds, puts him on his own animal (meaning, I’m assuming, that Third himself has to walk and slow down his pace), takes him to an inn, and pays for the innkeeper to keep taking care of him.

Jesus ends the story by asking, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” (Now that I’m thinking about it, this actually might be THE original “___________ walks into a bar” joke.)

I took this story to mean that not only was everyone my neighbor, I also had a responsibility to actively be a neighbor to everyone. So there was my life mantra: this neighbor, that neighbor, that one…–no matter how crazy different from me they were or I was from them, how ridiculously different our views were/are–love them. I’ve been very fortunate to encounter, through both my work and the places I’ve lived–lots of neighbors whose backgrounds and stories were so different we could have stood in for the two main characters in the story Jesus told, so lots of practice.

So I was building empathy through reading the stories of Jesus. There are quite a few of them, and they became helpful when I would encounter someone outside my framework. I could ask, “What did Jesus say?” and “What did Jesus do?” and let that guide me.

These days I feel like Jesus–the Jesus who said “Love your neighbor” and “Love your enemies”–has gotten forgotten in the rhetoric. I find myself wishing there were a whole lot more Jesus in the thinking of everyone who calls themselves a Christian. Not in the form of just slapping on a WWJD bracelet, but some actual searching out and discovery of what Jesus DID do.

This post has already gotten a little too long, so just one more bit. One of the first things Jesus DID do was this: he emigrated. He and his parents became immigrants. I don’t think they had the proper paperwork to go to Egypt, but they went anyway. I don’t think they felt they had much choice in the matter. They felt threatened and unsafe in their hometown.

The Gospels don’t include any stories from those years in Egypt. Knowing what I know about prejudice and drawing upon my years of experience as a middle- and high-school teacher, I am pretty sure that Jesus and his parents encountered a lot of people who rejected and bullied them, who told them they didn’t belong, who told them to go back where they came from. These encounters probably happened fairly often.

But I have hope that this immigrant family also had a few stories of kindness from this time in their lives. Stories of people who saw them, who loved them, who accepted them as neighbors.

Maybe Jesus had some of these stories in his mind when he told the parable of the guy who was beaten up and left on the side of the road. Maybe he had them in mind when he asked the Expert, “Which one do you think was a neighbor to him?”

The Expert answered, “The one who had mercy on him,” and Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”

Whump, drop the mike. There you have it, Jesus people.

And this Jesus person (guess I can still call myself that) is going to keep asking how Jesus’ words/actions should impact my own views, attitudes, and actions toward immigrants in this country to which my own WOP (WithOut Papers) grandparents immigrated.

Question, Ask, Ponder

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One of my favorite books when I was a preteen was The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. An orphaned girl moves to live with her bachelor uncle in a small village. She becomes friends with the Parson of the local church and begins spending time at the church along with several other children from the village. I remember being fascinated by the Parson, who spoke of God differently than anyone I knew in my childhood. In the Parson’s language and attitude there was a friendliness, a relational aspect, a living-life with God in a way that did not include fear. There was a desire to be better, a sense that a good God saw all, but there was no fear. 

There was the distinct idea that God was in relationship with all—all people, all animals, all beings—and all were in relationship with God. There was the idea that God actually liked people and had hope for their growth.

I remember thinking, as a child, “Oh, I wish God were really like that. I wish God actually liked everyone. I wish God were actually the God of every person.” 

I’d been taught that God was at odds with humans because we were all sinful and separated from God. God may have “loved” everyone (there was John 3:16, after all), but God only “liked” and “accepted” those who had “accepted” Jesus in a very specific way. The “others” were enemies of God—and I should think of them as enemies, too.

So I had this inner desire. I felt it. I still remember it. But alongside a long list of statements about God and about humans, I was also taught this: Do Not Question.

Don’t ask the innermost questions of your heart if they seem to contradict the “truth” statements you’ve been told. 

Sometimes the religious and spiritual authorities in my life raised some of the questions I was asking. They said these were the questions of “skeptics,” “non-believers,” and “the rebellious.” They would bring these up in sermons and classes so they could “debunk” them.

The ways they “debunked” them didn’t make me feel safe in asking my own questions. In fact, I often felt guilty for having my questions, as if my faith were not strong enough, as if I was not able to fully accept God as God is. Clearly, I did not understand God as well as the ones behind the pulpit did. 

But I was trying. Another book I read very often was my Bible. I’d been told it had no error and it was, literally, the Word of God. I was maybe 12 or 13 when I started a project of reading through the Bible and writing down the name of every woman mentioned in Scripture. I remember feeling intense sadness that there were so few of them. I listed them in a spiral notebook. I remember looking at the list of names and distinctly thinking: “As a girl, I am not worth as much to God. I can’t be as close to God as a man can. Why is this? Why can’t it be different?”

My parents sent me to very conservative Christian schools from grade school all the way through college, schools where your theology was expected to be exactly the same when you left as when you started.  

Years upon years of being told not to question things. Years of being told that my questions were wrong, were a sign of a lack of faith. And I’m a perfectionist by nature. I’m a people pleaser. I don’t like to rock the boat. 

There are times when I look at my past self and I wonder why it took so long for me to finally allow my questions and subsequently dismantle much of the theology I was taught.

And then I offer myself some compassion: those were some pretty formative years and there was an awful lot to dismantle! 

I won’t go here into all the things I questioned; eventually, it was pretty much everything!

But I am going to mention a couple of key ideas that have helped me along the way.

The first is the idea that what is unknown is far greater than what is known. There’s a whole bunch of Christian mystics and contemplatives from all kinds of traditions who echo the idea that there is far more mystery than certainty about the Divine, that much of our work in knowing God involves un-knowing what we believe we already know and what has been defined for us.*  

The second is my ability to know a good story. I’m not saying this like I’m different than the next person; I’m saying we tend to know a good story when we see it: when love overcomes differences, when people rise above their prejudices or stereotypes and find friendship or at least common ground. 

I know a good story. I know what kindness looks like. And if any God presented to me is not as good as the best story, the best person, the best act of kindness, then, hmm, maybe that is not God. 

One of my mentors along my way said something like this to me: “You’ve got your lived theology and your stated theology. You have to keep examining them, and when they don’t match up, question the hell out of it so you can figure out what needs to move, the lived theology or the stated theology?”

So, if the God you’re presented with seems to like one group of people better than another, question it.  

If that God endorses a political party or is on one side versus another, please question it.

If that God is okay with hating or condemning people for who they love or what gender they identify as, then question it.  

If that God cares about human-made lines on a map and the documents one has that determine where one is allowed to be on that map, then, for the love of all that is good and true, question it. 

I repeat his advice: Question. Ask. Ponder. 

If your God is not big enough, secure enough, gracious enough to allow your questions—all of them—then that is not God. 

*Here’s a a short essay on this I just found on this topic: What Is Apophatic Theology? Why “Unknowing” God May Be the Most Honest Path Today | by Jovit Paul Magadan | Medium

To Continue or Not: That was the question

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I have thought for several years of letting this blog go, letting it fade out of existence, a “404 not found” message the only thing to be encountered should anyone actually look for it.

I have thought about doing this for several reasons:

  1. I no longer agree with or hold as fully true much of the theology that this blog contains. (I’m aware that in my past traditions, that earns me a label such as “heretic” or “backslider” or someone who’s “fallen away.”)
  2. I’m no longer the same person I was when I was doing the vast majority of the writing in this blog. Obviously true of course–the hair is grayer, knees creakier, face more lined–but I actually feel like a different person. Freer. Seriously freer. Sometimes I read old journals of mine (from which most of the old blog posts emerged) and I feel deep compassion for that younger me. “Oh honey,” I think, “you were so unkind to yourself. You were so fearful of ‘doing it wrong.’ You were so bound and driven.”
  3. Letting this blog go and either starting fresh (or not) would feel a little bit like leaving behind parts of my past and some of my past affiliations. And, honestly, I regret some of those affiliations.

But I also have some reasons for continuing to write on this blog:

  1. Those affiliations and my past beliefs are part of my story. They are part of who I am now and part of my continued becoming. I don’t want to deny that or pretend it’s not there. Growth and change are part of my core beliefs–so I’ve grown/changed and continue to do so. That’s life. (Plus SO many cute pictures of my kids–and some funny things they said!)
  2. There IS a throughline, a thread that connects all of it. I look back at the “me” from the years of regularly posting here, and even further back to the “me” of my earliest remembered self, and I see in that little girl, that teen, that 20-30-40-something, the same longings and heart desires that urge me forward today.
  3. I am still pursuing what I was pursuing then: the Way. I remember being struck very deeply when I learned many years ago that members of the earliest churches called themselves “Followers of the Way.” When I first encountered this phrase, that meant exclusively “the Way of Jesus” to me, and I learned this phrase/descriptor right about the time I started reading the Gospels in earnest, with the intention of encountering Jesus in a fresh way. I asked myself, again and again, “What would it mean for me now in my circumstances to follow the Way that Jesus followed in the Gospels, in all those interactions he had with so many different people? This Way has come to mean something very different for me than a list of doctrinal or theological statements. It’s a way that’s not easily defined and gets impacted by every person I encounter in all their differences. It requires that I ask again and again, “What would justice look like for them? What would full equality look like for them? How do I learn from their story?” My understanding of the Way is also very much impacted by teachers and writers that I would have been afraid of in my past, people “outside” the approved list, people from other faiths and traditions. In all honesty, there have been times I’ve thought about jumping from the Jesus ship and onto one of theirs, but the stories of Jesus are written deep in my heart and psyche, so the Way of Jesus it is for me–with lots of other influences.
  4. The Way of Jesus led him into speaking out. Much of that included some pretty pointed words about the very groups with which he was identified. It led to him examining power structures, inequality/inequity, racism, violence, money and its uses… The Way has led me into doing a lot of questioning and examination as well of my own beliefs, of the gaps between my “stated theology” and my “guiding/lived theology.” The Way should also lead to my speaking up about this part of my journey. (The Way also led to Jesus getting killed. I’d like to avoid that, of course.)

When I wrote all of the above out on paper, I discovered more reasons for continuing than for stopping. So “To be continued” it is. I don’t know that I’ll post all that regularly, but when I do, it will be here.

Reading with a Magic Eye

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This is the second post in a series about increasing empathy through reading. The first post is here: https://jenunderwood.org/2025/05/03/empathy-through-reading-take-my-hand/

When I was in my early 20s, the Magic Eye posters* came out. They were hung in shopping malls (at least that’s where I encountered them), and people would gather around, stepping forward and backward, squinting and tilting their heads and torsos this way and that as they tried to see the image among the swirls and dots. Someone would cry out, “I got it! I see it!” followed by others asking, “How?” and then advice from the ones with the “sight.” Those left out of the “seeing” were told to look to the side, focus on a corner, not look directly at it…

Some of the books that have grown and informed my empathy have done so in a very similar way as the Magic Eye posters. I would be reading, enjoying the story simply as a story, or getting worked up about the plight of certain characters in the story, when suddenly I would have a realization that there was a correlation between the fictional story and flesh-and-blood people in the world I inhabited. 

As a middle and high school English teacher, I read a lot of young adult literature, both to suggest book titles to my students and also simply because I like YA lit. I thoroughly enjoyed Jeanne DePrau’s The City of Ember, with its post-apocalyptic tale of an underground city built to withstand an Earth-altering event and filled with orphaned babies too young to remember life on the Earth’s surface who are sent to the underground city with elderly caretakers who have taken an oath never to tell the children about a world other than their gloomy city. At the book’s beginning, it is 200 years and several generations later; the city’s resources and utilities are failing; and no one living in Ember has any idea that an outside world exists. Someone has to take a risk of finding a way to the surface before the lights go out forever.

It’s a fun story with interesting characters. And then I read the sequel, The People of Sparks. I remember early on thinking it wasn’t quite as engaging or original as the first book. But I was already invested in the characters, who had found a way out of their deteriorating underground city and onto the earth’s surface. I wanted them to make it, but it looks pretty hopeless at first. Then they find a small town inhabited by the descendants of those who survived the apocalypse on the earth’s surface. These people have figured out how to eke a living from the damaged soil and are finally producing enough that they can begin to plan for the future. They have named their town Sparks and have recently built a storehouse which they are filling with provisions for the lean winter months. They have worked hard, and they feel like they are finally making it.

And then the people of Ember, hungry and with absolutely no knowledge or skills that will aid them in this new world, arrive in their town. 

You can imagine what happens next. There is tension; there is the question of how much help is enough help; there is the dilemma of providing equal provision to persons whose lack of ability means they do not equally contribute.

The experience of reading this book was for me like looking at a Magic Eye poster. As I read this fantastical story, there was a moment when something shifted, and I could see something emerging in my real life. I’d been focused on the book, but it was as if my actual world was right behind it and I could see it differently. A Truth had emerged.

There’s a parable Jesus tells in the Gospels in which a landowner goes to the town square to hire people to work in his fields. He goes in the morning–hires some people; he goes at noon–hires some people; he goes in the mid-afternoon–hires some people. At the end of the day, he first gives pay to the last ones hired. He gives them a full day’s wage. Whoa, the others think, if they got a full day’s wage, I wonder how much WE’RE going to get? 

Psyche! They also get the full day’s wage. 

They complain: Hold on, this isn’t fair, we worked longer than they did; we should get more! They didn’t show up at the same time as we did! We were at the town square in the early morning and we worked all day long! 

The landowner responds: I told you that you would get a full day’s wage, and you did. There is no discrepancy. It is my choice to provide the same for the others. 

The People of Sparks was a story that shifted something in me that, once seen, could not be unseen. I’m still, even now, trying to live into the Truth—hinted at in Jesus’ parable—that was made clearer to me in my reading of that young adult novel series**. 

And finally, one other book recommendation that also had, for me, the Magic Eye effect: Little Bee by Chris Cleave*** (released as The Other Hand in Great Britain). It is about issues in Great Britain that are also issues in the U.S., and I found that little bit of distance helpful in shaping my thinking on issues in my own country. It is a fantastic, beautiful book—just a quick heads up that there are some violent scenes that are heart wrenching (but they are not gratuitous). 

*https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-hidden-history-of-magic-eye-the-optical-illusion-that-briefly-took-over-the-world/ 

**https://www.jeanneduprau.com/ 
***https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9781416589648 (link to an independent bookseller that sells Little Bee)

Compassion for the body

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Today is my spouse’s 55th birthday. I turn 55 in about 6 weeks. I’ve always enjoyed that little gap, when he is in “stated age” a year older than I am. So in the next six weeks, I’ll probably remind him he’s got a year on me and ask him how it feels to be over the hill. 

Last night, as I stood in the card aisle at the pharmacy, I didn’t see any specifically for the 55th birthday, but there were many for 50, and I thought, “What happened to his 50th birthday? I don’t really remember it.” Then I recalled that it occurred during 2020, and we had other things on our minds that year. 

All that led to my thinking about the change that has occurred in my relationship with my own body over the last five years. Like the vast majority of women in my culture, I have had a complicated relationship with my own body: how it feels, how it looks to me and others, how it compares to other bodies, how it functions… Just this week my sister and I were talking about how we were subtly taught to think of our bodies in our growing-up home: you fed it the right foods, you exercised it, you didn’t let “unhealthy” things near it (this included alcohol, drugs, and the body parts of anyone other than a spouse) and then it was supposed to function well. There were expectations of a certain level of functioning.

It was a bit like a contract. 

The change for me began when my foot pain flared. It wasn’t the first time; I’d had plantar fasciitis in my late thirties. But this time I couldn’t shake it. I’d begun working in a hospital. Hard floors, lots and lots of steps. Foot pain became the norm. 

At first my questions were curative: what will help this go away? And searching led me to the barefoot movement. (That’s not the focus of this post, but if you’re at all interested, I’ll refer you to Anya, whose website helped me tons along the way: https://anyasreviews.com/barefoot-resources/ )

But then my journey turned inward. How did I want to see/think-about my feet? How did I want to interact with my feet? (If that seems like a strange question, hang on.) I began to wonder if there was a way to think of my feet with some gratitude, with some sympathy, and with some encouragement. I wondered if there was a way to work with my feet rather than work on my feet like they were, yep, a machine. 

I began talking to them. I was working overnight shifts at that time, and after a stretch of sitting, I would get a page, and I would prepare to stand and walk. The first step after prolonged sitting is the worst when you have plantar fasciitis. “You’ve got this,” I would tell my feet. “It’s going to hurt, but I know you can do it, and after you get warmed up, it will hurt a bit less.” When I had to walk a longer distance, across the suspended walkways connecting the buildings (some on different city blocks), I would congratulate my feet, “Good job! Look at you!” 

Then came some gratitude. I found myself thanking my feet, acknowledging the miles upon miles they had carried me, often in shoes that, in hindsight, were harming them. “Oh, the place you’ve taken me,” I told them, getting a mental image of Dr. Seuss’s book.* I apologized for the times I’d mentally berated them for their pain. 

Without particularly trying to, this intention to work and be with my feet with kindness, gratitude, and acceptance began to spread to the whole of my body. I had already begun doing yoga, thinking that, yeah, it was probably time to move away from high-impact exercise. Yoga’s pace forced me to slow and actually feel sensations in my body, to listen to its messages to me. I began seeing pain and discomfort in an entirely new way, as my body’s only way to let me know that it was having an issue that needed a response—either to back off on too intense of a movement, to get more rest, to slow my pace, to massage or stretch, to drink more water, to eat differently… My body was letting me know what it needed.

And it needed, beyond attentive care, some acceptance and gratitude. My lower belly wanted to be acknowledged and thanked for carrying children (two of them at once, even) rather than berated for being soft and squishy. My knees deserved accolades for the years of playing high school volleyball (not very gracefully—landing on said knees far too often) and even more years of running in not-great shoes. My heart and lungs—wow, I thought, how had I never fully realized what those amazing organs have been doing every single moment of every single day of my (almost) 55 years? 

We humans tend to experience burnout less when we know our work is seen and appreciated. I did a Google search with that phrase and discovered that, just as I suspected, research supports that idea.** I know this may seem weird, but what if the same were true of my knees, my heart, my body? What if my appreciation of and gentle concern for my tricky right knee actually helps it to function better? Could my heart muscle warm a bit and settle in its rhythm when I thank it for its continual service? Does my body stand a little taller when I remember that it—the body—is what allows me to interact with the world, hug and hold my loved ones, smile at strangers, walk in the woods, pet my dogs, chop vegetables, hold a book…? 

Or maybe I (the whole of me, body, mind, spirit) am just happier, and so it feels like my heart is happier, my body is more peaceful. I don’t know, but it’s working for me. It’s making me gentler with myself—and not just my body. I am speaking more kindly to my own mind, thanking it for its seemingly crazy thoughts that, I’m pretty sure, are meant to protect me. I am more aware of and more tender with my emotions. 

Quite a few years ago now, a friend shared a quote with me, “If your compassion does not include yourself it is not complete.” She didn’t just say it to me once; it came up often. She included it in a card she made me that is now stuck to the bulletin board next to my desk at work. 

Self compassion for my body means I have empathy for my body. I acknowledge what it has been through and the possible “why”s behind its pain. In a way, I try on the perspective of my feet, my right knee, my gut. This practice has not made me less compassionate for the vulnerable bodies of the patients I see every day in the hospital and the bodies of my fellow city dwellers; it has made me more compassionate. That’s how self-compassion works. It softens the heart and reminds us that compassion is a valued commodity with enough for everyone.

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43092/oh-the-places-youll-go-by-dr-seuss

** https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelmontanez/2019/10/30/heres-how-smart-companies-tackle-burnout-using-employee-appreciation/

** https://www.workhuman.com/blog/how-recognition-can-help-reduce-stress-and-burnout/

Empathy through Reading: Take My Hand

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As one of the 5% white persons in a neighborhood that is 19% Latino/a and 73% African American (based on a 2022 community data snapshot (https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/Austin.pdf ), I regularly connect with neighbors who have a significantly different experience from my own. My work as a chaplain/spiritual care provider in a large hospital in downtown Chicago provides me with even more intense connections with people whose experiences are significantly different from mine. Each day I meet with people in vulnerable times in their lives, and I am the member of their team asking how they are doing emotionally and spiritually in the midst of it. I am the one asking what in their lives gives them strength and hope and can it be used in this present moment. I meet with persons who name themselves as agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Buddhist, Protestant, Pagan, Evangelical, atheist, spiritual-but-not-religious…, who come from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and varying socioeconomic statuses, and who may bear a number of identities that are different than my own. 

Each interaction gives me a little glimpse into the heart and the story of the individual in front of me. I know it is not anything close to their full story, but it is an important glimpse they are granting me. I bear deep gratitude and responsibility for the ways in which they trust me.  

My work in these interactions is that of practicing informed, embodied empathy. There is more to it, of course, but that idea of “informed, embodied empathy” is foundational to my view of chaplaincy, which I see as not only a vocation but also as a way of living. I want empathy to inform my entire be-ing, how I view and interact with my family, my friends, my community, my world, and myself. Though I know that, due to my personality type and my past work, I may have come to the work of chaplaincy with a fairly high level of empathy, I have also come to see empathy as a skill that can be fostered in a variety of ways. I now see my empathy less as a character trait and more as an active mindset that I can engage with. It takes work, and it always will. 

When I look back at my childhood, I see a fairly shy, introverted child who could be quite happy spending entire days reading (one of my favorite Christmas memories was when my mother gave me an entire box of books with a bag of York peppermint patties tucked in at the top and full permission to spend the two days after Christmas reading for hours on end). 

How did that child begin to learn empathy for others? 

In large part she learned it through those books. Not all of them, of course. Some of them were formulaic, supporting a single way of looking at the world as the “right way” rather than simply one particular way among many others. Some, though good stories and less rigid, were not very broad in their scope of characters and places. 

But others introduced her to characters outside her narrow world (or in her world but wearing a different skin or living in a different neighborhood). These books taught her about universal emotions, about the difficulties faced when people either feel or are made to feel different or lesser than those around them. These books allowed her a glimpse into others’ worlds and a chance to feel their emotions. They expanded her ability to imagine what it might feel like to have a different life, to experience both the joys and the challenges of it. 

Those books were a part of her empathy education, which stood her/me in good stead as a teacher and certainly now as a hospital chaplain. 

As I wrote above, I continue to build my empathy through every encounter with every other person—and I also continue to foster it through my reading. Some of my reading is purely professional and some is just for brain break, but much of the time, I challenge myself to read books (both fiction and nonfiction) by and about people who have significantly different stories, backgrounds, and identities than my own. 

So I’ve decided that I am occasionally going to post here about books that have stretched and informed my empathy and that continue to do so. Some will be books I read in the past; others will be more recent. 

Take My Hand is a book I read very recently. I want to highlight and amplify the voices of the authors, so here is the link to the website of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, who wrote Take My Hand: https://dolenperkinsvaldez.com/books/take-my-hand/ 

This book made me want to read others by the same author. I appreciate that she presents the nuances of people’s emotions and views. I appreciate that she explores the desire to “help others” and when that “helping” minimizes or even obstructs the choice of the person being “helped.” One of my core values in chaplaincy is the upholding of the autonomy and choices of the person I am meeting with, and Perkins-Valdez lays out the complicated nature of this as well as several other challenging topics. 

I don’t want to say more; I hope you check out the website above and possibly read the book. I listened to the audio version through my local library (and I highly recommend the audio version).

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms. ~Sterling K. Brown