I am still mulling it over. Richard Rohr wrote that compassion can only happen between equals. It is a deceptively simple notion, and yet I have felt it nipping at my heels when I might easily have kept walking.
There was an interaction with someone who was struggling in which I instinctively handed over good wishes. But then I looked deeper. There was an aftertaste of sympathy, which is not empathy. In pausing to examine whether I held this person as an equal, I realized that I didn't. I needed to first rectify that disparity, which it turns out was harder than handing out condolences like leaflets in a parking lot.
Then there are those people I see as better than myself. My gestures of empathy towards them came off as pandering in my head. Looking up can be as problematic as looking down.
One of the reasons God came to earth was to lessen the gap between us, which is cavernous. In taking on a human form, Jesus stepped into the fallibility that is our fate. God understands our inability to stay awake like John and Peter in the garden, or not worry like Mary when her son was left behind.
When I felt like my heart was breaking, trying to mother nine children, my sweetest comfort was believing that God wept with me.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
And not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Surely they may forget,
Yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands." Isaiah 49