Praying with Empathy

Empathy makes a good companion to prayer, both helping us pray for others and deepening our sense of our own souls.

Consider taking on an experiment of intentionally praying with empathy. Gather your attention and imagination and do your best to fully embody the perspective of another person. You might choose someone you are concerned about, or perhaps somebody you love deeply. Consider choosing a person with whom you’ve had conflict recently.

For this experiment, pick a period of days, and then decide whether you wish to identify the same person each day or a different person each time you pray.

Think of this experiment not as much as simply praying “for” the person in question, but as closer to imaginatively praying “as” them. Take a moment before you pray to consider what you know about their circumstances, what you know about their thoughts and feelings. Pray out of this perspective.

What we know about the thoughts and feelings of others is always an incomplete picture, of course, and we understand this truth more fully as we consciously practice empathy. The inner lives of others remains a mystery to us.

As we practice empathy, our perception of that mystery deepens. We see each other better, even as we encounter the very real limits of our perceptions. In turn, we develop a better sense of the mystery of our own inner lives, which remain somewhat obscured to ourselves and certainly to others.

The practice of empathy is a path to love, and cultivates other virtues along the way.

As you take on this prayer experiment, reflect on what you find within yourself in these empathic prayers. What does it feel like to pray in empathy? What limits do you find? What would you desire a person to know who took on this experiment with you in mind?