It’s hard for me to type “September.” The Summer of this emotionally-draining year went by far too quickly. But the nip in the air tells me it has gone by.
Mercifully, I love Fall, except for the part where there’s no vacation.
From The Dangers of Sympathy, a podcast of Frederica Matthewes-Greene:
The suffering person always knows what to do, they just suffer; when the suffering lessens then they forget it for a minute or two. But you, as the person who loves them, feel guilty if you even stop thinking of them for a moment.
(Dr. Timothy Patitsas, Assistant Professor of Ethics, in a seminar on bioethics offered by Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts, Spring, 2011; printed in the journal Road to Emmaus #49, Spring 2012)
The most dangerous thing you can give a person who’s suffering is sympathy, because you reward them for feeling bad.
(Quoting Fr. Meletios Webber, Abbot of the Monastery of Saint John of San Francisco) Sympathy can undermine the the suffering person by reminding them of how bad their lot is compared to “normal.”
The alterative to sympathy, Frederica suggests, is comfort – giving strength, etymologically.* An angel gave strength to Christ in the garden, as His agony made His sweat like drops of blood. (Luke 22:43) Not sympathy: strength. Even The God-Man needed it in that hour.
So stop the hand-wringing “worry prayers” and debilitating sympathy. Stand instead with the guardian angel in strengthening prayer.
* As Frederica mused, seemingly extemporaneously, I think she missed another alternative to sympathizing with the sufferer: valorizing the sufferer. That’s what I thought she was describing as she described her husband continuing to work as Priest and counselor despite very serious chronic headaches at one stage of his life.
One of a handful of bookstores worth a pilgrimmage some day has been in business now 24 years.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 