Much has been written in the past few years about the difference between sympathy and empathy. Both of these words share the Greek suffix “-pathos,” which means “to feel,” but the critical difference comes in the first syllable. While sympathy means “to feel with,” empathy means something more like “to feel in.” When we’re relating to someone who’s gone through a difficult experience, sympathy is often the most accessible emotion because it can describe the curious mix of sorrow on their behalf as well as the underlying current of relief that it didn’t happen to us. There’s a distance between us and our neighbor in those moments which allow us to feel for or next to them, but not allow the sadness, anger, fear, or surprise too far inside ourselves. 

Empathy, of course, requires that invitation to difficult feelings. It’s most often described as the ability to put yourself in the other person’s place, and to see the world through their eyes for a while. But in order to do that — in order to walk a mile in their shoes — we have to know something about their shoe size! An empathy that tries to imagine another person’s world without ever learning about that world from the source can never be helpful or healing, and in practice isn’t truly empathetic. If a friend of mine loses a parent to cancer, for instance, and I attempt to practice empathy by imagining myself in their place, but never talk with them about how long their parent had known about the diagnosis, what their treatment was like, or how close my friend was to that parent, my attempt at empathy is just something I’m doing to make myself feel better.

So how much knowledge is necessary for empathy?

If we want to truly understand others, we need to have some combination of facts and feelings, which is why I believe Jesus used parables the way he did. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus draws from his knowledge of his hearers by using tropes and characterizations that they would be familiar with. He asks them to place themselves in the shoes of the man who was robbed, the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, and to draw conclusions about their own actions in part by seeing which character drew their empathy. He used stories to connect facts and feelings, which led to greater understanding, and then to a greater ability for empathy. 

But when we use archetypes or even stereotypes in our descriptions of others, we also need to be aware of the difference between those two-dimensional characters and the more complex lives of our three-dimensional neighbors. One of the ways Jesus held this tension was by telling multiple stories about the same subject, as if looking at the same gem from several different points of view, which presented a more well-rounded picture and allowed people with different perspectives to connect with each other. Luke 13 is a great example of this strategy, where Jesus first uses the parable of the lost sheep, then the parable of the lost coin, and finally the parable of the prodigal son to describe the relationship between God and humanity.

The layering of stories to move towards the truth is common in many cultures.

In the Buddhist story of the blind men meeting an elephant for the first time, one man feels the elephant’s trunk and decides this new thing is a snake, while another touches the elephant’s ear and pronounces it a fan, and a third touches its leg and declares it a tree. None of these stories the men create to explain their experience are correct individually, but they begin to approach the truth when held together.

When I speak with congregations about what it’s like to be a transgender Christian, I usually get asked some version of this question: “What do you wish the Church understood about transgender people?” My answer always depends on the context, but lately I’ve been talking a lot about how I wish faith communities would welcome our layered stories the same way we welcome the ones found in scripture. Right now in media and culture in the United States we have few narratives about what it’s like to be transgender, and the ones we do have often force individuals into harmful positions. The most prevalent story, of course, is the “born in the wrong body” narrative that says that all transgender people feel a complete disconnect from their body, or believe that God somehow made a mistake. The origin of this phrase is murky, but it’s easy to imagine that it came about when a transgender person tried to explain to a cisgender person what it felt like to be trans. Within the system of body/soul dualism that both North American and Christian culture inherited from Greek thought, it might make sense to a trans person to explain their feelings and experiences by saying that God must have put a female soul in a male body, or vice versa.

But of course this story about transgender experience is only one possible description, and is as flat an explanation as it is to say that an elephant is just an ear, or a that God is only a shepherd. What ended up happening, in the case of the “born in the wrong body” explanation, is that the metaphor apparently worked for some people, and so it became the dominant narrative over time, which then meant that when younger trans people began to understand their gender they saw it not as one possible experience among many, but as a requirement. If you felt uncomfortable with the way others perceived your gender but you had a good relationship with your body, you didn’t fit the narrative. If you believed that God made you transgender on purpose and intended for you to have your particular body and soul, you didn’t fit the narrative. If you were nonbinary and didn’t believe in male/female dualism any more than body/soul dualism, you didn’t fit the narrative. Measuring everyone against a single story meant that it took longer for trans folks, who were just coming out, to find support, and made it easier to discriminate against people who weren’t telling the “right” story about their experiences. It also put cisgender people into the position of only offering sympathy — rather than empathy — because they were working off of what they imagined transgender people must feel, rather than the more complex reality.

In actual fact, there is no one way to be transgender, which means that there’s no single transgender experience.

The widest definition of what it means to be transgender is to have a gender identity that’s different from the sex you were assigned at birth, but within that category we have a collection of stories that need to be held together in order to get closest to the truth. Some of our stories may be unexpected, like the fact that 66% of transgender people in the US have been part of a faith community in their lifetime, and that even among those who left due to rejection, 42% went on to seek out a new affirming community. This conflicts with the story we often hear about how trans people want nothing to do with religion, and it also means that there’s a pretty good chance that you have a transgender person in your congregation, whether you know it or not. How are you listening for their stories? How are you including gender-expansive people in the past, present, and future stories of your church?

Within Transmission Ministry Collective, the community of trans Christians I lead, we talk often about the effort and rewards that come with holding multiple stories together at the same time. In our support groups each week we share stories around a theme related to gender or faith, and it’s not uncommon for one person’s experience to be the exact opposite of someone else’s. And yet, when we don’t allow those differences to keep us from hearing each other, this is when we learn the most about empathy. This is when we can bring our whole selves to the table, looking at one subject from different perspectives, and allowing those facts and feelings to help us imagine what it would be like to walk in our neighbor’s shoes. By inviting these kinds of conversations, we open ourselves up to seeing people as they really are and not as we imagine them to be, and that creates a community which invests in authenticity, diversity, and resilience.

This is the kind of community I think the Church can learn from, and indeed the kind of community that we’re called to be. If we can learn to hold complex theological truths together — such as the complete humanity and complete divinity of Jesus, or the bread which is also Christ’s body — we can learn to honor and empathize with the complex stories present in God’s people.