[00:00:00] Speaker A: If I was sitting there watching TV and I could hear the garage door open, I would just go into sheer panic. Like, was everything in the house okay? Had I raked the shag carpeting?
[00:00:10] Speaker B: That sounds like a 70s thing.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Yeah, it was green.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Raked the green carpet.
Note to anybody under the age of 50 that yes, there was shag carpet that we did have to rake.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: With a real rake.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: With a real rake.
Often in green or red, orange, gold. Yeah, yeah, foreign.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the collective table season 11.
My name is Janelle Coker, and I'm going to be your solo host today.
We've titled this season Making the case for Empathy. And we're diving in with the lived stories of empathy from those within our own community. Community.
And we're asking the question, is empathy a sin?
Amid a time when some Christian leaders are pushing this narrative, we think it's important to have a conversation about it.
This is Caroline's story.
Well. Hi.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: So we are here today to talk about empathy.
And so you gave us some information about how you have, I think, worked through being an empathetic person your entire life.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Well, I noticed that I was different than probably my father and my sister, who were able to kind of hold it together better.
I was always the emotional one, the one that cried longer and sat with sadness longer than other people, but at the same time was really able to connect with the people in my life. We would frequently go back to Holland every three years for home leave, and I would get to be with my cousins.
And I just felt that very deep, deep connection with family.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I want to share a little bit about how I met Caroline. We first met during the pandemic.
She and a group of her friends were taking a hard look at their megachurch through the eyes of the Black Lives Matter movement. The rising pain expressed from the LGBTQIA community around Christian trauma, and what felt like a tone deaf and uncaring group of Christians in her Orange county neighborhood. So she and her group of friends did some online digging, as many of us did during the pandemic, and found our little congregation. And they began to watch services online because their group was just on the other side of Camp Pendleton. It wasn't long before Jason and I were invited to a one time outdoor meeting to talk about our journey of faith. After deconstruction, this quote unquote, one time meeting turned into a twice a month group that first began outside and then eventually moved inside after the COVID threat had lessened. The group morphed into a sweet time of talking about theology, love and Jesus. And when dinner was suggested, I thought it sounded like a super delicious way to end the restrictions of COVID and Caroline. Our dear friend Caroline was one of the first to offer to cook for the entire group. I use the word cook loosely because she would make such extravagant meals. She would show up early with bowls and hot plates in her hand, smiling and rushing around the kitchen to make sure we were all getting enough to eat. And over those meals, I got to know that Caroline was someone who wore her heart on her sleeve. She was very heartfelt in every way, often showing her love for us and society through the tears that she she.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: I was born in Osaka, Japan.
My father was a banker and did international banking, so we moved quite frequently.
When I was 2, we moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and lived there for three years before we moved to the States.
One of the things that I feel like I benefited from with all these moves is being able to be in cultures that were very different than mine. I was raised in a typical Dutch home, patriarchal. My mom was a stay at home mom. We were everything to her.
But I was able to see that many people didn't leave, live the very wonderful life that I thought we had. And I felt special with having my parents and the kind of life we had.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Today. I've titled this episode a phrase that many of us have heard before, which is Stop making mountains out of molehills. Making mountains out of molehills.
[00:05:45] Speaker D: Making mountains out of mole hills. Don't get disturbed emotionally by mo molehills.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: The constant line was, you make mountains out of molehills. If you could just knock down your mountain, you'd be happy. Again.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: This phrase, often mockingly said to sensitive kids, gave her the message that her feelings were exaggerated, unnecessary and something to be overcome quickly.
It was a direct instruction to quiet the very essence of her empathetic nature.
So if you are anything like me, you're wondering right now, where did this phrase even come about?
And believe it or not, the phrase dates back to 1548. UDL was translating a text by a Dutch philosopher named Erasmus. Instead of translating Erasmus use of the Latin proverb about making an elephant out of a fly, he coined this phrase making mountains out of molehills, which was considered a delightful upgrade at the time. And let me tell you, this is a long lasting phrase and was very much in style while Caroline grew up. Even Christian Commentary got in on the action. The forerunner Commentary was conceived as a publication to reach young people with the Christian faith. In the 80s and the 90s Ah, the 80s and the 90s.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Believe it or not, it wanted to use conservatism as a counterpoint to liberalism. They took Proverbs 10, 11. Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sin. And translated it as hatred makes mountains out of molehills. But love covers or puts out of sight and enables one to overlook insults and wrongdoing.
Boy, I'm not sure about you, but I'm being triggered by this interpretation as I read it. As a woman growing up in the 80s, I remember all too well girls and women especially, being subject to this kind of thinking around sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, especially coming from Christian leaders. If you were a true Christian, you would forgive 70 times 70 and not make such a big deal out of it. 70 times 7, you forgive whatever it was.
Okay, well, anyway, I digress.
By now, I hope you're wondering what might have been the molehill in Caroline was accused of turning into a mountain.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Well, I think it was probably my mom's death.
My mom was my. We were very codependent. She was also very empathic and she was the center of my life.
And other people seemed to be able to get past it easier than I was.
One of the conversations that I had with the pastor of our church that we were attending at the time was he came to me and he said, this person just lost their mother. I have to remember, I was 13, so seventh, eighth grade.
And he said, I think that you should talk to them and tell them how you've gotten through it. And I can remember just the tears pouring down my face, thinking I'm not through it. I don't know what you're talking about. I can't provide anything for them because I'm still so sad.
The time between my mother's death and when my dad remarried, our family dynamics changed.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Caroline was just 13 years old when she lost her mother.
At this very formidable age and feeling things deeply, the loss of her mom was like Mount Everest to her. But for two years following this loss, a period of unexpected grace emerged.
Caroline describes her dad as a skinny, tall, Dutch, cold man of a father.
And during this two years, he transformed into an incredibly empathetic, sympathetic and compassionate man around the kitchen table.
This 45 minute dinner time each evening became a sanctuary where she, her father and her sister could openly cry and share their sadness.
However, this fragile safety was shattered.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: My dad married my stepmother and it was no longer safe.
People, like people, have a lot worse problems than you do.
So how dare you be sad if you want to Cry, you go to your room. We don't talk about sad things in this house.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Her stepmother's arrival brought a drastic change, effectively shutting down any open expressions of emotion.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: I was really mad at God when he took my mom away because I thought he was nothing but goodness. And how could a good God take away something that was obviously so important to me?
When my dad remarried, we ended up transferring to my stepmother's church.
And I think that was the beginnings of my resentment towards this Christian lifestyle that I felt was very isolating and not warm, not welcoming.
And so I think it was always difficult for me to reconcile that she called herself a Christian but behaved so cruelly.
And I think that's one of the times that I walked away from the church.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: This period marked a profound suppression of grief for Caroline.
She felt immense pressure to knock down her mountain of grief and become less of herself to gain approval and avoid conflict.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: I always wanted her to love me, so I did everything I could to try to be strong and not show tears and be grateful for all the wonderful things I had.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: In high school, Caroline became a pleaser, striving for good grades and trying to never do anything wrong.
This constant invalidation of her feelings and the forced suppression of her natural empathy towards others created a deep, deep internal conflict. Boundaries, self worth, and a constant need to be liked and loved by all still haunt her to this day.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: I feel like people lost patience with me and that I had to learn how to pull it together at home. It was even harder. In retrospect, I think I'm able to look at now that my stepmother lacked any empathy.
She didn't have the skills to listen and to feel empathy. So I lost a lot of that during that time.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: So with all of this, the question that arises for me is does pushing children to suppress their emotions cause boundary issues and struggles with self acceptance in the future? Wendy Snyder, founder of Fresh Start Families, author and parenting coach, says this.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: When we push kids to suppress their emotions, we create struggles with boundaries and self acceptance later in life.
The truth is, all emotions like mad, sad, afraid, hurt and happy are God given wisdom carriers that guide us towards inner strength and healthy boundaries. For example, justice is actually born, oftentimes from anger.
So when children are told, stop crying or don't be angry or you're fine. Instead of being taught to feel emotions fully and that they are safe, children learn that their internal experience isn't trustworthy. These suppressed emotions will get louder and stickier, often creating adults who struggle to set limits and carry shame about their authentic selves.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: If you listened to our first episode, you may remember that I talked about empathy, sympathy and compassion all being on a kind of continuum of emotions we have when interacting with other humans. Taking in Wendy Snyder's words here, I think it's important to now imagine that boundary issues, self acceptance, struggles, shame and emotional regulation or all now are added to this wheel of emotions when as children we are not given the space to feel, and Caroline's own experience reflects this. She describes an overwhelming drive to connect and feeling it as a shame and failure. When she cannot get through to someone else, she turns in on herself feeling responsible for their pain or lack of interest in a friendship, and she wants to fix those that she encounters. She admits to struggling with setting boundaries, acknowledging that being too empathetic can lead to people who take advantage of her openness. It causes me to wonder if the word empathy is the right word for how sensitivity can be distorted when not given proper room to grow.
Perhaps we need another word for not teaching sensitive, empathetic children how to use their empathy as a power. Oh wait, we do.
It's called authoritarian parenting.
But before we move on to the next part of Caroline's story, let's hear a few words of hope from our parenting expert, Wendy it makes sense why.
[00:16:42] Speaker C: So many parents struggle with emotional literacy, because the truth is most of us weren't taught that emotions were safe growing up.
But here's the beautiful news. We can break this cycle. We get to as parents choose feeling encouragers rather than feeling discouragers, helping kids understand that emotions are simply energy that, when acknowledged and processed, transform into guidance for healthy relationships, self respect, and a thriving state for the body, mind and heart.
[00:17:21] Speaker D: Hello Collective Table listeners. It's CJ again. A lot of people out there might not realize that this podcast is part of a real life faith community. The Collective Table Podcast is a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary, a progressive Christian community whose mission is to foster collective expressions of inclusive, inspiring and impactful Christian spirituality wherever it is needed. And as a 501c3 nonprofit organization, that mission is only possible because of the generosity of people just like you. So if you believe in what we are doing, if you benefit from this mission, please Visit
[email protected] Give to become a supporter today. Together we can keep building communities of love and liberation.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: So in this podcast we are wrestling with whether empathy is truly a Christian virtue or just an excuse to condone sin. Throughout our interview, Caroline expressed that she is a person who cries frequently and was in fact moved to tears throughout our interview, I want to offer a perspective that maybe flips this script, transforming what is often seen as a weakness into a powerful strength.
Tears are a universal and complex form of paralanguage, communicating physical distress, joy, anger, and all emotions on the spectrum. For some, they are vehicles of feelings that go too deep for language.
Across religious traditions, tears are richly charged with symbolic meaning and ritual efficacy, serving as forms of intercession and conduits to the divine.
In Western medieval Christianity, weeping became an increasingly formalized spiritual practice, encouraged for common people and seen as an effective means of communication with God.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Because I cry when I'm frustrated, I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I'm sad.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: You're almost crying right now.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: I am always. But I get so frustrated by that because I feel like when I start to cry, it takes away the validity of the conversation because it's coming from an emotional side, not an intellectual side.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: To remind you of our last episode, we talked quite a bit about how Jesus himself wept. Figures like Catherine of Siena and Walter Hilton wrote instructional guides on holy crying.
Hilton explicitly stated that genuine emotions of the heart manifested through weeping is more desirable and advanced than intellect alone. Catherine of Siena believed that every tear proceeds from the heart and that tears authorize words and point to a divine source. She also uniquely emphasized the importance of the other in spiritual tears, believing that perfect tears signify a soul overflowing with divine presence and love for others.
So while Caroline is not wrong in her feelings of invalidation, logic has been uplifted as a more intelligent way to make a decision.
And while this isn't a podcast about disparities between men and women, there is a common and pervasive thought that women are the emotional ones and men are the logical ones.
As I say this today, it causes me to wonder if this is why we are seeing a war on empathy.
The question begs to be, are we willing to let our sons feel deeply for others and themselves?
Okay, so let's refresh on Caroline's story going back. She experiences the loss of a mother. Her dad remarries, and her stepmother was verbally abusive and unable to help Caroline work through her pain. Are you wondering what I'm wondering? When does the wicked stepsister come on the scene?
Well, unlike Cinderella, Caroline had a beautiful stepsister.
Susan helped her see how her tears, compassion, and deep feelings were a good thing.
Susan became like another mother to Caroline. Susan, through her own therapeutic journey, validated Caroline's experiences, telling her that her ability to feel other people's pain and Caroline's need to be part of the lives of others and to really listen to them was not a bad thing.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: She made me feel as though I wasn't a broken mess, that my ability to feel other people's pain and my need to be part of their lives to be able to really listen and feel was not a bad thing. It flipped a switch for me.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: This shift, along with personal growth, wisdom through age and self care, has allowed Caroline to write a new script about who she is today. Caroline channels her profound empathy into her work as an aide in high school's therapeutic intensive behavior class, or tbic, working with emotionally disturbed teenagers who have experienced horrible traumas and mental illness. She finds this work both challenging and deeply personal, and it often echoes her own high school experiences of needing to be heard, feeling that need to be included, feeling that need to be loved.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: At the beginning of every day, I go to each student and say, I'm really happy you're here today.
And I think about what that would have felt like for me and for the few people that did that in my life. My home EC teacher was like that. She saved me during those painful years. That's kind of who I want to be for these kids.
These kids come in with hurts that are so deep that even my love can't fix them, but I can just accept who they are. But the conflict then becomes, how do you keep boundaries and try to ward off the hurt? I feel like maybe now I may be a little bit better at that.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Working with these kids has helped her realize she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to absorb all their pain without becoming ineffective.
I don't know about you, but I'm super impressed. Way to go, Caroline.
Through Caroline's faith, a great husband, kids, grandkids and great friends, Carolyn Caroline has recovered her own glass slipper.
She found ways to give back to the community, let go of authoritarian ways of seeing God, and celebrate her empathetic personality as she communicates to the kids in her care that they are valuable and that they are loved regardless of their circumstances.
She brings light to them and to her own past so her healing can find wholeness in her service.
Caroline's brave journey reminds us that empathy is not the problem.
The problem is the way we raise up sensitive kids when nurtured and celebrated. Holy tears, deep solidarity and standing up for the underdog is a profound wellspring from which we can indeed change the world, one deeply felt connection at a time.
Well, thank you for crying with us. Thank you.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: It's what I do best.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Thank you for allowing yourself to physically pour out, be that physical representation of pouring out the heart of God.
I think that's good. I think that's a power.
And I appreciate your time.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us for the Collective Table Podcast, a ministry of the Oceanside Sanctuary Christian Church.
Firstly, thanks so much, Caroline, for all that you did to bring your story to us. The Collective Table Podcast is created by Jason and Janelle Coker and directed and edited by Niko Butler. May the peace of God be with you and have a great week.
[00:27:06] Speaker D: Hey CJ here. We want to take just a quick break to tell you about something we are really excited about. We've just launched the Sanctuary Community. It's a safe and inclusive place for progressive Christians to connect with each other, learn and grow together and work together to impact their communities. You'll find thoughtful conversations, groups and classes and helpful resources for growing in your Christian spirituality. If you've been looking for a place where you don't have to hide who you are, where Christianity is expressed in love and liberation, then this community is for you. You can join us
[email protected] we can't wait to see you there.
