Now And at the Hour of Our Death

No prayer comes as close as the Ave Maria does in embracing facticity and our being toward death. The one who prays this prayer petitions the mother of God to pray for the petitioner "now and at the hour of [our] death." Interestingly, the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek, Slavonic) versions of the prayer are similar, though the Western version adds the final sentence, based presumably on the Tridentine catechism and ultimately on Chalcedon and Ephesus (the Eastern tradition already includes the theotokos in its prayer of pure praise). The Eastern Marian devotion shows little interest in the yesterdays, todays and tomorrows of death; but the Western version insists on an awareness of the now and then.

The gospel of Luke and the conciliar church interest me less here than the prayer's incorporation of quotidian life and the hour that unites human experience. The presence of finality in every moment of living points to the very thrownness and facticity of the human predicament. There is an admirable acceptance of finitude in the prayer, even as it embraces the manner of the Incarnation, whose prayerful celebration entangles every life and every death. In this sense, the prayer does not merely petition, it calls for authenticity: it calls for a life whose being toward death authorizes a 'good life' ordered to its constitutive finitude and the preciousness of time.

The human life chiasmically united to the divine life in the instance of the Incarnation binds the infinite with finitude in the moment of the Christ event. The divine witness to the body and the flesh in Christ sees these human elements in their distinctions of contiguity: the body and the flesh are related not paradigmatically but syntagmatically. Dying belongs to the body; death to the flesh. The dying of the body and the death of the flesh do not therefore establish some kind of absolute dualism, a structural 'either/or' but an relation of contiguity that resists attributing a presence to one but not the other, in a mutually exclusive manner. The affectivity of the self plays out at the juncture of the horizons of the body and the flesh, in the chiasm where they interdigitate but do not mingle.

The body and the flesh unite at the level of the person, at every now and every then, at every instantiation of the self. The very image and likeness of the divine in the human, even in the divine witness of that image and likeness that sees it as 'good' and authentic, sees goodness from its essentiality of love. The hypostatic union par excellence, the Incarnation, mirrors the hypostatic union of the body and the flesh, which, in turn, reflects in distance the Christ event.

The event of death is the potential of the sacralization of space and time. The event of death is always 'my death'; it is a counter-experience of death, of the death of the other, whose death is always imbued with illeity, the death that is the death of the third person. There is not greater love than this: to lay one's life down for a friend---to die for the other; to die in the place of the other's self. But can one be in the hour of death of the other? Levinas's notion of substitution would say no; for the face of the other already saturates the intuition with deontological imperatives toward the face, and the closest one can get to die for the other is 'thou shall not kill.' We may stand for the other against the killing of the body, but we are unable to enter the flesh--- substitution might lean toward a sacrifice of self, but that my-self merely serves my-self when it desires to experience the flesh of the other: I am helpless to make satisfaction for the other, which I may approach asymptotically only, because I can do nothing but satisfy my-self, my own need to embrace the ethic created by relation to the other.

But what if the relation to the other at the hour of the other's death is not a 'hostage situation,' as Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, "Substitution") suggests, but the opposite---kenotic? Does the sacralization of time and space at the hour of death of the other open into empathy, against holding the self's place as a hostage? Perhaps better to pose the matter this way: does the erotic reduction at the hour of death break from the other gripping me as a hostage, and turn me toward a kenotic self-emptying that makes a space for the other in me to experience his self's exposure within his flesh as a saturated phenomenon? And is this not the moment of authenticity brought about in being toward death? The erotic reduction, then, might make a claim upon the givenness of the (face of) other, who, in being seen with a gaze of love, does not hold itself, its illeity as something to be grasped, or hold the gaze/gazer hostage, but also empties itself to receive the gaze. The human other has at least the potential to transform the gaze of the lover, and this might be an instance where the asymmetry in the phenomenal laterality is mitigated by love and the formation of empathy.

The call from the Cross, the centerpiece of the Christ-event, gives voice to its pure call from the very givenness of the divine love that witnesses to the event from the chiasm within the hypostatic union. The Incarnation, celebrated in the prayer to the theotokos that also petitions for the authenticity to embrace the facticity of quotidian life, cuts a space in the fabric of being toward death. This space is the treasury of merit from which the kenotic space opens in the face of the other. That space of empathy has a name: love.

Sympathy, Empathy and Being-for-Others

As a palliative medicine specialist, I am often asked to comment on the human qualities of sympathy and empathy. In particular, the question is often how can we ‘teach’ those charged with caring for the seriously ill and dying to be more sympathetic, empathetic, or at least how to have these workers seem to be sympathetic, empathetic. There is the potential for great benefits here, benefits for all, especially if we work from a system in which we are most truly who we are as humans when we are being for the ‘other.’

 

First, I should define my terms: by sympathy I mean that human quality that enables us to participate compassionately in the feelings or suffering of another, to allow those feelings and suffering to resonate within and  between ourselves and the other person; by empathy, I mean that rather extraordinary human quality that enables us to experience the feelings or suffering of another. I do not wish to commit psychology here, but these terms cannot be synonymous, even though they both involve compassion and the ability to form a response to the suffering of ‘the other’. Further, making distinctions among the types of sympathy and empathy (e.g., affective and cognitive empathy), or discussing psycho-pathologies that eradicate the capacity for sympathy and empathy, are tasks for another place and time.

 

All human beings who are psychologically and spiritually intact are capable of sympathy and empathy, and these qualities are likely hard-wired into humanness itself. Still, unsympathetic and un-empathetic behaviors often come into play, and in clinical situations, can be detrimental to the well-being of patients, their families and co-workers. Certainly, when such behaviors occur during the care of the gravely ill and dying, the stakes are even higher, as time tends to subvert recovery. These behaviors often result from misapprehending the situation, poor prioritization of needs, and a shift away from the other to the self. Workers who display such behaviors are not psychologically ill or otherwise pathological, but often preoccupied with a distorted hierarchy of needs.

 

Apart from educating professional and family care-givers caring for the seriously ill and dying (hospice patients, for example) in a patient-centered value system, and prioritizing the needs of the sufferer other over and against the needs of a beleaguered worker who simply has to get to the next patient, what else can be done to bring such caregivers in touch with their innate capabilities to sympathize and empathize?

 

Permit me to borrow a concept from early Christian literature: kenosis. From the Christological hymn in Philippians 2, the concept is one of self-emptying; moreover, it is a directed self-emptying, an emptying whose purpose is to take on another nature. A brief consideration of the text would be helpful:

 

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,  not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. [NIV, Phl 2:3-8]

 

The phrase, ‘made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant’ captures the concept of kenosis nicely. Theologically, of course, the passage cannot be read as an exchange of the divine for the human, but rather as a divine accommodation of another nature. The Christological and soteriological richness notwithstanding, the process of kenosis can be utilized, at least metaphorically, to bring people in touch with their own capacity for sympathy and empathy.

So, then, can sympathy, empathy and compassion be taught? Perhaps: to the extent that a caregiver can participate in the metaphor of kenosis, he can conceptualize his own self-emptying to allow room for the participation in the feelings, emotions and suffering of the ‘other;’ more specifically, to make room for those feelings of the ‘other’ within himself. Through this confrontation with the suffering of the other within himself, an appropriate response can be formulated and expressed as a sympathetic/empathetic gesture or word. Thought of in this way, sympathy and empathy can be related by degree, or on a continuum, rather than by essence: the greater the emptying, the likelier it becomes to move from compassionate participation and well-wishing to actual experience of and responding to the suffering in the ‘other’. In this way, the move from sympathy to empathy is less paradigmatic, and more syntagmatic, less a change of scene, and more an extended viewing along the horizon. This process is of course easier to state than implement, but considering the task before caregivers and the needs of the seriously ill and dying, the process is well-worth the attempt.

 Coda: For non-religious caregivers, no theological point need be made, but rather a participation in the celebration of the wonder and beauty of being human. For religious caregivers, and perhaps especially for Christian caregivers, the theological, Christological and soteriological depths of this kind of imitatio Christi can be fulfilling beyond the joy of humanism. Indeed, self-actualization, emotional and spiritual growth, and participation in individual and collective humanity are merely the surfaces of being ourselves and being true to ourselves by being for others.