By Donald DeMarco
The Interim

Experience may be the sharpest teacher. "One thorn of experience," the poet James Russell Lowell tells us, "is worth a whole wilderness of warning." But only the most insulated individual can learn no other way. More often than not, unfortunately, learning through experience is learning the hard way, getting the test first and the lesson afterward. This explains our penchant for equating "experience" with our mistakes.

Empathy is the intellectual, emotional, and imaginative apprehension of another person's situation that takes place without experiencing it. It is learning through identification, through entering that special matrix where one encounters the unifying co-humanity of self and neighbor.

Moments of empathy often arrive unexpectedly and under most unlikely circumstances. I had finished a talk on abortion, some years ago, and was hurrying to get back to my car. It was a cold and rainy October evening. I was tired and anxious to get home. Someone was running after me, calling out my name. He had a story to tell me and neither the time nor the weather nor the setting were going to deter him from his mission. I stopped and listened to him as he unraveled his tale, first with polite indulgence, then with rapt interest.

He had been in Uganda doing peace work as an emissary of the Canadian government. The political situation under Idi Amin had reached a crisis point. My engaging confidante was advised to return to Canada at once.

He boarded a train that would take him out of the country and to freedom. It was his only route out of the jungle. As he soon discovered, he was the only white passenger. A soldier came over to him, pointed a machine gun at his face and contemptuously declared that he could blow him away and not a soul on the train would be at all concerned. For a half-hour, the soldier taunted him, reiterating that any second he might squeeze the trigger and then throw the dead body into the jungle where no one would ever find it.

While the cat-and-mouse game continued, the other passengers seemed utterly indifferent to my friend's predicament. No one interceded in his behalf. He was an alien in an alien world. His misfortune, which he had no opportunity to avoid, was being in the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong people.

In his state of terror, my eager storyteller began to concentrate, with excruciating clarity, on the fragility of his life and on his state of utter helplessness. He waited, without appeal, for the unpredictable judgment of a stranger who wielded an instrument of death.

The thirty-minute ordeal, during which time seemed to stand still, finally ended. The soldier withdrew. For whatever reason, unlike Meursault in Camus' The Stranger, he chose not to pull the trigger. My friend was reborn. But in that torturous process of rebirth, something extraordinary happened. For a half-hour, he had been completely at the mercy of another person's will. Whether he lived or died hinged solely on someone else's arbitrary choice. And he had survived his appalling ordeal in the damp, womb-like environment of a moving train.

All the elements of his experience assisted him in establishing a deep and, what would prove to be, enduring identification with the plight of the unborn. This is why he had to become a lifelong member of the pro-life movement, why he could never be "pro-choice," and why he had to tell me his story.

A sadistic Ugandan soldier had unwittingly led my friend into the pro-life movement by pointing a machine gun at his head. Sometimes it is a force other than conventional reason that brings people to see what is at stake in the abortion issue. It may well be that at the heart of the movement is a profound empathic identification with every human being - those who wait in hope of being rescued, as well as those who wait in silence to be born.

In her autobiography, It Is I Who Have Chosen You, Judie Brown recounts her own story about what can be accomplished through empathy. At a time when she was but a neophyte to the art of debating, Mrs. Brown sent a highly distinguished obstetrician/gynecologist scurrying out of the room simply by describing what happens to the unborn during an abortion. The truth that sets us free may first send us running for the exit.

As fate (or Providence) would later decree, Judie and her debating opponent were brought together again, though under a much more dramatic set of circumstances. That same pro-abortion doctor was summoned to use his skills in assisting in the difficult and life-threatening birth of Mrs. Brown's third child.

Judie later discovered that the same man she both opposed on the debate floor and welcomed in the delivery room no longer performed abortions. She likes to think that his acquired empathy for the unborn in general and little Christina Brown in particular were instrumental in his change of heart. Empathy has a way of transmitting itself from one person to another in a potentially unending fashion. Empathy is truly an "unending story."

There are two forms of intelligence. One is of the mind, the other of the heart. In the moral sphere there can be no doubt that the empathy of the heart is incomparably more important than the photography of the mind. Through the mind we can know and understand, but through the heart we can love, serve, and change the world.