Brave Souls

Experiencing the Audacious Power of Empathy

Belinda Bauman

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830870431
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What if empathy could save us?Belinda Bauman was living a comfortable life as a wife, mother, and nonprofit leader—but her soul was checked out. Then she met Esperance. An assault survivor living in one of the poorest, most dangerous countries in the world, Esperance and other Congolese women shared their harrowing stories with Belinda. Their vulnerability set Belinda on a path of embracing empathy. If Esperance could love in the face of so much pain, maybe there is hope for the world too.From the top of Mount Kilimanjaro to the borders of war-torn Syria, Belinda takes readers along her journey to empathy. With cutting-edge neuroscience, biblical parables, and stories of brave women from across the globe, she offers readers direction for seeing others' perspectives, listening well, and redeeming conflict. She casts a vision for lives and communities transformed by everyday Christians practicing empathy as a spiritual discipline.Join Belinda on a journey to be brave—and see your world changed.

Part One

Why Empathy
Can Save Us

He became what we are that we might become what he is.

ST. ATHANASIUS

1

Beautiful Collision

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

VICTOR HUGO

I learned about love from a woman named Hope.

Espérance is the French word for “hope,” and she and her sisters risked journeying for days by bus, motorcycle, and foot to tell their stories in rebel-occupied Congo. There we sat next to them, women listening to women about their stories of life in the midst of war. We sat for hours hearing the histories of survivors who had witnessed the deaths of their husbands or children, women who had survived brutal rape, torture, and other violence, their pain compounded by rejection from those they loved.

I use the term survivors rather than victims for this reason: yes, they were victims of corruption, systemic violence, and a soul-stealing culture of rape that had grown up in the weeds of war, but they were not helpless, not voiceless. They were survivors. And with every story, I wondered if I could ever be half as strong as they were.

I remember thinking, this is Esperance’s reality—her world. When I met her, my eyes took in only the obvious: her orange shirt stained with work. Her pink and blue tie-dyed skirt wrapped around her thin waist. Her white head scarf with a gray bow. Her neon-green flip-flops with white daisies. Her high cheekbones framing her deep-set eyes. Her lips pulled tight as she planted her feet, calloused like the roots of a tree. She was the first of eleven women to speak that day. Eyes downcast, she dutifully told us her name, her age, and the number of children under her care.

Esperance had beautiful hands, although I doubt she thought so. They were dry and rough from hard work, her long fingers elegant, intertwined obediently in front of her as she spoke.

She was fifty. I was forty-five.

She had four children. I had two.

She was a widow. I had no idea what that felt like.

She and I were alike. Yet she and I were so very different.

I was looking at my notes when I heard Esperance say, “You remind me I am still human.”

I was looking at my notes when I heard Esperance say, “You remind me I am still human.”

I don’t recall breathing as she unfolded her story like a new garment, turning back the corners of each sentence: She and her husband had set out to find cooking wood. “It must be done,” she said, “even though it’s dangerous.” Husband and wife met militia soldiers in the bush. Each man carried a machete tucked inside his fatigues, next to his gun. She heard them before she saw them, the click of metal against metal. But there was nowhere to hide.

For a moment, I looked away as she spoke. I was uncomfortable and anxious. I felt cowardly and disrespectful. Taking a breath, I looked at her feet, her hands, and finally her face. She had tears in her eyes. And so did I.

Esperance continued. In a nearby clearing, the soldiers bound her hands. When her husband resisted, she instinctively threw them, still bound, over her head, the universal sign of surrender. She knew all too well what the soldiers would do to anyone who resisted.

First, they shot her husband. Then they flung their fists at her. She was thrown to the ground, stripped of her clothes, and raped. Again and again. Hours later, they left her in the forest, where she remained for three days—torn, bleeding, unable to walk.

As she spoke, she looked at her hands. Her thumbs stroked her thin wrists nervously.

Eventually, she was found by women she now calls “sisters.” At the hospital, she struggled through month-long treatments for pregnancy, HIV, and STDs. The rape she’d endured was so violent, so destructive, she said she was “not whole” and could never be fully repaired, even with surgery.

Esperance explained she would have despaired if it were not for pastors who sent her Mama Odele, a trusted caregiver from the church, to her. Pointing to Odele, sitting in our listening circle, Esperance told us how she co-led a trauma recovery program with other volunteer counselors trained and supported by World Relief Congo.

These gentle, heroic women had cleaned Esperance, clothed her, and taken her to the hospital for treatment. When she returned home, they visited her, brought her children food, and helped her find work. Nine months later, these were the women who stayed with her through a complex maze of tears and pain as she gave birth to a baby boy. She finished her story by saying their kindness had brought her back to life. The room was silent as she ended. A holy silence.

Turning a Blind Eye

Esperance lives in a country full of beauty, rich with natural resources and an ancient, regal people. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) should be a tourist paradise with its lakes, volcanoes, and mighty silverback gorillas in the vast Virunga National Park. But tourists do not come because Congo is full of conflict. In 2011, a woman as young as three and as old as seventy-three could suffer violence as often as every sixty seconds.

When Lynne Hybels and I first started traveling together to Congo to understand the reasons for the violence and conflict in the region, we found that most of the Western world was turning a blind eye to the problem. Many in our circles had never heard of the war that Esperance lived through every day. These words about the DRC from a 2012 CNN report stole my breath when I first read them:

The wars in that country have claimed nearly the same number of lives as having a 9/11 every single day for 360 days, the genocide that struck Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic cleansing that overwhelmed Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the genocide that took place in Darfur, the number of people killed in the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004, and the number of people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all combined and then doubled.

Yet we rarely heard anything about it. Could it be that pain like this was just too much?

Esperance’s words had pierced my soul and left me undone. The ground we tread together felt hallowed. Was her experience heart-crushing? Absolutely. Unjust? Completely. But it wasn’t her pain that ambushed me. It was her response to her suffering. Her story—her life—wasn’t characterized by the version of love I was trying to live out in my life. Her love was far greater. It was audacious yet sacred, gentle yet fierce, and entirely brave.

I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.

But it wasn’t her pain that ambushed me. It was her response to her suffering.

Love, Actually

In a café on Fifty-Second Street in New York City, in the fall of 1939, W. H. Auden penned a poem that included one of his most stunning lines in just seven words: “We must love one another or die.” There was plenty to fear that year. Germany had invaded Poland, marking the beginning of World War II with its six years of devastation costing an estimated more than sixty million lives. Critics say Auden both loved and hated his poem for a simple reason: his words proved to be true.

With so much pain in our world—personal, global, political, philosophical, and theological—I resonate with Auden. Violence against women had been too much for me to bear, but Esperance gave me a glimpse of hope in one of the most difficult places on the planet. If she could love in the face of so much pain, maybe there is hope for the rest of the world too.

Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). This kind of love is holy and set apart, the kind that knows fully, that cares deeply, and that is willing to do something despite the cost. But this kind of love is hard to find. When was the last time you were caught off-guard by an unselfish act? Moved to tears by someone’s pain? Amazed by the bravery of someone willing to sacrifice for the greater good?

Is it too much to envision this kind of love in our world today? Love in a sea of refugees? Love that convinces people that black lives really do matter? Love for a child who feels different inside than he is on the outside? Love for the person who offended you? Love that knows when to speak and when to act? Love thick and resilient enough to silence disagreement, argument, judgment? Love strong enough to hold back a war and soft enough to open a way for peace?

Even as we’ve become more connected virtually, we’ve grown more isolated and distant from each other. More than sixty million Americans—a full 20 percent of the United States—suffer from what sociologists call chronic loneliness. As Mother Teresa said, “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody.”

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody.”

MOTHER TERESA

Had I forgotten how to love—really love? It was too easy for me to imagine my enemy as “them” or “those,” or anyone against me or different from me, whether across the world, the political aisle, the street, the row of cubicles, or the hallway at church or home. As journalist Susan Faludi aptly wrote, “When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.”

For me, it’s far too easy to cave in to the lesser angels of my nature, to draw lines, to define who I am by who I am not, unknowingly drinking in complacency as if it were medicine. For me, fear swells. And when I become afraid, everything inside seems to stop. Maybe I justify my caving-in by saying I can’t hear. Or maybe I’m too overwhelmed to understand. Or maybe I become too busy to care.

When I stop caring, I stop loving. And when I stop loving, I stop doing. I trade in the messy for the quaint, the gutsy for the tame, the authentic for the fallacious. I give in to pampering. I rationalize apathy. I settle for less. And sadly, I become less.

Something began to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Christine Caine
• Prelude: A Mother’s Day Epiphany
• Introduction: If I Could Be Brave
• Part ONE • Why Empathy Can Save Us
• Part TWO • Learning to Love
• Part THREE • Now, Take Your Risk
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Reflecting on Your Empathetic Listening Skills
• Appendix B: Empathy Mapping: Putting It All Together
• Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Discussion
• Notes
• One Million Thumbprints
• Praise for Brave Souls
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright