books

Reading with a Magic Eye

/ jdunderwood / 4 Comments

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)

Empathy through Reading: Take My Hand

/ jdunderwood / 2 Comments

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