Empathy vs Progress

 Joseph Graham Hill

To call empathy a sin is to misunderstand both sin and empathy.

Sin distorts love, isolates us, and turns our hearts inward in selfishness. But empathy—our ability to enter another’s suffering with compassion—is love moving outward. It refuses to remain untouched by another’s pain. It’s the willingness to carry even a portion of their burden.

If we’re called to love our neighbors as ourselves, how could we do that without first understanding their sorrows and joys?

Empathy isn’t the abandonment of truth. It’s truth made incarnate. It doesn’t mean losing yourself in another’s emotions but standing with them in solidarity, saying, “I see you, and I won’t turn away.”

That’s not sin. That’s the pattern of divine love.

If sin is separation, then empathy is communion.

Those who fear empathy often confuse it with passivity, as if feeling another’s suffering means condoning it or being swallowed by it. But real empathy isn’t an erasure of self—it’s knowing, deep down, that we belong to one another.

It’s the farmer kneeling to tend the soil. The poet listening before speaking. The friend lingering when words have run out.

It’s the way of the One who bore our griefs, who wept at gravesides, who refused to pass by untouched.

The heart isn’t meant to be a fortress. It’s meant to be a dwelling place.

And to dwell with another in their suffering isn’t sin—it’s love.