Empathy

We began to watch the much-trailed new TV series, Gunpowder on Saturday. Opening, as it did, with the horrific scene of the cruel execution of a Catholic woman for treason (hiding a Jesuit Priest) we chose to turn over. Maybe it is an age thing but I find it less and less entertaining, or helpful, to have to watch inhumanity.

Recently a song I love stopped me in my tracks. I must have sung When I Survey the Wondrous Cross a thousand times. I have even performed it.

I love lines such as:

Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my life, my soul, my all.

But I realised, for the first time, that I didn't like the word wondrous. Which victim of execution, looking towards the gallows, would be glad to imagine the method of  their destruction becoming an object of worship?

Gratefulness better than gaudiness, methinks. When I survey the empty cross, anyone?

Time for a bit of a rethink maybe. The writers of Gunpowder say they wanted the viewers to understand the level of anger that led to the Gunpowder Plot. Did it need to be that graphic? Reviewers are divided. I think they could have demonstrated the cruelty with more dialogue and less  screaming. Sometimes a cutaway says more than a lingering camera.

So why is this about empathy? In Karen Armstrong's excellent Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she has a chapter on empathy and shares this quote:

'...when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow-feeling - and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us.'
(Peter Abelard)

Now I imagine my extremist evangelical reader has probably gone elsewhere now, but should any new ones be around I know that we are saved externally, not by any action of our own. By grace and by God. But take a moment to ponder that any saving that has happened round here was not worth a thing without a response that makes the world less a place of suffering and more a place of love.