Osler's Razor

This past Tuesday, I went over to St. Paul to hear my colleague and hero-of-thinking Susan Stabile speak about her wonderful new book, Growing in Love and Wisdom. Susan is a captivating speaker, and she is from New York, so the whole thing is a physical exercise as she paces, gestures, leans on the podium, then ranges into the audience. At the end though, that all stopped. She had us close our eyes and do a meditation exercise that linked together many of the strands of her life's theologies-- one that required empathy for a person in pain.

It was a deep and challenging experience.

As I drove home, I remembered a long-ago moment that I have never fully understood.

When I was in college, I took a class from Prof. Joanne Braxton, who at that time was finishing up her Ph.D. at Yale. (She made Yale seem very cool-- her example was one reason I ended up there myself). Part of her work had taken her to Haiti, and she occassionally (though not often) talked about her experience there.

One day in class, one of my fellow students had a headache and was in obvious pain. Prof. Braxton paused and told us about something she had seen in Haiti: The "snatching" of a pain like that. She explained that the snatcher would cover the forehead of the subject with their hand, rest and feel the warmth of that person, and then make a snatching motion. If done successfully, the subject was free of the headache-- but the snatcher would now have it. It struck me, if nothing else, as a wonderful model of empathy in that it involved not "fixing" someone's pain or erasing it, but literally taking it on, as an act of self-sacrifice. Christ, of course, did this very literally.

Many years later, I found myself with a group of people on the roof deck of a bar near Wrigleyville. (Not this one, but in the same area). It was very late, and there was a small group of us around a table in the Chicago summer.

We were talking about headaches, and I told the story of what I had heard in Prof. Braxton's class. One woman I did not know, who was about 31 or 32, turned to me and claimed she had a headache and dared me to snatch it. So, I did. I put my hand flat on her forehead for a moment, feeling the warmth of her, resting her hair in my other hand, and then... snatch!

It floored me.

I didn't get a headache. Instead, what I got was a deep and profound sadness that was totally alien to me, like a dark cloud that filled me up. It was specific sadness, too-- the regret that I didn't have a child, and might not ever have one. Certainly, this was not my cloud of dread (I was 23 or 24 at the time). It wasn't a guy thing... it was entirely hers. It was with me for weeks; I couldn't shake it.

Genuine empathy, I think, is that difficult. It more than just listening; at its best, it is carrying the dark cloud of another within ourselves and working to dispel it through love.