on empathy and anthony bourdain
My husband and I first discovered Anthony Bourdain about five years ago on Netflix, through his television shows, “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown”. As wanna-be world travelers, we were immediately drawn in, not only by the food and the exotic locales, but also by his wit and his sharp intellect, which were equally matched by the depths of his compassion. He had mastered the art of the human connection, between himself and the people he met in his travels, but also between himself and his viewers, his fans.
Last Friday morning, when I read the news about his suicide, I felt as though my heart had broken wide open. Of course, it’s a complete cliché – the typical loss-of-a-celebrity mourning story: we didn’t know Bourdain, but we felt like we did, simply because of the way he wore his heart on his sleeve, and his grief in his weary, haunted eyes. And now, not only his fans, but much more significantly, his friends and family - his young daughter - must face a world without him in it. What a devastating loss.
I’ve read many tributes to Bourdain over the past few days, written by those who knew him well and those who didn’t know him any better than I did, and everyone in between. Woven throughout these tributes, there is a one common thread that appears again and again: Anthony Bourdain was a man of great empathy. He deeply felt the pain of the world and the people whom he met in his travels. The injustices and griefs amidst the geo-political conflicts he encountered were not neutral events to him. They happened to real people with names and faces, and when Bourdain met them, he could not remain unaffected - he seemed to take their suffering into himself, and tried to carry it with them and for them.
And now some people say that perhaps, in the end, it was all too much. Too much pain, too much grief, too much heartache. Too much empathy?
Was Anthony Bourdain’s empathy his undoing? I don’t know, and I don’t want to presuppose; only God can truly know the depths of Bourdain’s heart and the pain he carried. But I know that the suffering and grief of the world is a heavy burden to bear, made even heavier lately by the current state of politics and media - social and otherwise. It’s a burden far too heavy for any one of us to carry on our own.
Yet at the other end of the spectrum there is indifference, desensitization, and hardness of heart. Many of us have found ourselves in that place of numbness without even realizing how we ended up there. Our culture pulls us between these two extremes; information overload leads to either overwhelming despair or an unconscious act of “checking out”. So how do we live in between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all?
Empathy itself has become a bit of a buzzword of late, and overall, that’s a good thing. Many school children across the nation, including my own daughter, now receive empathy training through a curriculum called Social and Emotional Learning. They implement various tools such as role-playing different scenarios: how to respond to bullying, showing kindness to an outsider, etc., thereby allowing a child to walk in someone else’s shoes, and see things from their perspective.
Sociologist Dr. Brené Brown has written and spoken extensively about the power of empathy in forging true, authentic connections with others. An excerpt from one of her talks on this subject was even animated as a cartoon, which was widely shared through social media channels when it was first released. The talk aimed to show the difference between sympathy and empathy, and why the former creates barriers but the latter builds bridges.
However, empathy can be draining. Some psychologists call this phenomenon “empathy overload”. Empathy is a social good, yet it requires us to find a healthy way to process all the pain and grief we take in. As Mr. Rogers famously asked children everywhere, “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” Or the sad? Or the despair? Or the fear? What do you do?
I’m reminded of the character of May Boatright in Sue Monk Kidd’s shimmering novel, The Secret Life of Bees. May was a tender and sensitive soul, deeply feeling the pain of the people she loved. Her sisters created for her a “wailing wall”, where May could write down her griefs on little pieces of paper, which she then folded up and packed into crevices in the wall. The wall would hold her pain for her...until it didn’t. One day, after receiving some particularly painful news, she went down to the river, weighed herself down with a large stone, and ended her life. “She couldn’t seem to distinguish other people’s suffering from her own...In the end, it...burned her up.”
In the book of Ephesians in the Bible, Paul tells the Gentile believers to remember that before they were united with Christ, they were without hope in the world, but now their hope is in Christ. This hope is not a hope merely for the afterlife, but for life here and now. In a world filled with suffering, injustice, pain, loss, grief, rage, and every other negative emotion you can imagine, Christ is our hope. He alone can bear the weight of the world. He is our hope for the world, and He is the lens through which we must process all our griefs and sorrows. He can carry them, and He will.
I don’t mean to suggest that life with Jesus is easy or painless. I hasten to add that I also don’t mean depression isn’t real, or that Jesus is an alternative to Prozac. Hopefully we’ve come far enough in raising awareness about mental health to know the foolishness and danger behind that way of thinking.
And yet according to the CDC, most people who commit suicide didn’t have any known mental health issues. And most often, there isn’t simply one reason to which loved ones left behind can point. Instead, there are usually many contributing factors, which slowly add up and compound upon each other, until their cumulative pain finally becomes unbearable.
Empathy is an important and beautiful and worthwhile goal for our culture, more necessary in these times than ever. But if we are to help carry the pain of others, we must have a way to process that pain. We must have a glass through which we can peer, however dimly, and see a ray of the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. We must lean on a stronger friend and brother, who says to us, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
I don’t know whether Anthony Bourdain trusted in Christ, or whether it was his empathy that led to his pain, which finally became too much to bear. But I know that I feel the pain of the world deeply, too, and unless I take my sorrows to Jesus, they threaten to undo me everyday. Our world desperately needs the hope that Christ offers. May we be bold to love others well, and carry their pain alongside of them, and then lay it at the feet of Jesus and let it go.