Rev. Mei Wang on growing spiritually to become a true chaplain

From Sympathy to Empathy

I was brought up in an Asian culture, where people were more closely related in a social environment, and individual decision-making and behavior were based mostly on taking into consideration the conditions of others around them rather than taking into consideration their own condition. Feeling sympathy for others was a standard for good virtue, and feeling pity or sorrow for others informed a good-hearted person’s decision-making and behavior. After I became a minister, people’s trust in me was also built on my kind-hearted care for them, when I offered sympathetic and compassionate help with their difficulties or needs.

When I began clinical pastoral education, my well-practiced sympathy and compassion for my patients actively energized my approach to them. At the beginning of my training, I strove to offer spiritual care to my patients because I could hardly bear the pity that I felt about them. Seeing an elderly patient who was struggling with the tremendous suffering of her late-stage cancer, I felt terribly pained about what she was going through. Her weak voice and irregularly shaking hands offered me a vivid picture of her struggle. It moved my heart so deeply that I was driven to try all the possible ways to help her to feel better. Actually, the underlying power that drove me came from my deep-rooted subconscious motivation of wanting to help her to get rid of her suffering. In fact, it came from a big fear of the suffering within me, which sustained my sympathy for her, driving me to work harder and harder. As a result, I would often feel overwhelmed.

By chance, during my training, I visited a heart disease patient in critical care. His body was so thin that he looked like a skeleton, and he was connected to many medical devices. This frail man could neither speak nor move any part of his body. He could only open his eyes and make some dull facial expressions. “How could a life be like this?” I sighed to myself. Then, as I tried to speak to him in a very friendly manner, his eyes gazed at me. And after I blessed him, a smile appeared from his face. That smile was so touching. It was not only telling me that he was still alive, but also that he was living his life. That smile compelled me to recognize his life as fragile as it was, and accept it as authentic. Suddenly his life seemed to me to be so real, so tangible; it embraced my whole heart, dispelling all sorrow and fear from it. A voice within me affirmed that this was a precious moment in the journey of that patient’s coping with his suffering.

Since then, I have grown more accustomed to being fully present with my patients as I witness their suffering, without feeling fear, sorrow, or pity. I am no longer overwhelmed. That is because I have walked from sympathy to empathy, from a culture-oriented approach to the approach of a clinically-trained chaplain – more capable of walking hand-in-hand with my patients in their journey of suffering, yet remaining peaceful. Embracing suffering with an open heart, as an authentic part of life, offers me an ongoing source of energy and spirituality. It also brings me closer to being a truly professional chaplain.

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