Leslie Jamison begins her essay “The Empathy Exams” in a medical school exam room, performing someone else’s pain. As a “medical actor,” her job is to pretend she has mysterious symptoms so future doctors can practice bedside manner. She plays a girl who doesn’t know why she keeps having seizures and evaluates each student with a checklist. (Item #31: “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.”)
On the surface, this is straightforward — a training exercise designed to help others perform compassion. But as readers, we feel the essay tilt. The empathy exam reveals not only what the students are being tested on, but what Jamison herself longs for: to be seen clearly, to be heard, to be cared for — not abstractly, but specifically.
That longing sharpens when Jamison shifts from her rehearsed pain to her real pain: her heart condition, and especially the story of her abortion. In these moments, she is no longer acting. She is vulnerable, frightened, and dependent on others to interpret her suffering faithfully. But repeatedly, she experiences the frustration of having pain disbelieved, dismissed or misread, of offering her story only for someone to turn it into a puzzle to be solved.
Jamison critiques how quickly we sanitize others’ suffering, or rush to interpret it, or explain it away. She suggests that people don’t want their pain solved like a riddle — they want it received. They want someone willing to sit with them long enough to understand that the truth of their experience cannot be reduced to a chart, a theory, or a label.
I’ve seen this longing up close, though in very different circumstances. Years ago, serving as a college chaplain, I expected my work would center on students. Instead, some of my most frequent conversations were with the president and vice presidents, leaders affectionately (or not so affectionately) known as “the evil administration.” These leaders carried burdens that no one else saw. Behind closed doors, they spoke about agonizing decisions – budget cuts, personnel issues, public controversies – knowing that every choice would upset someone. They spoke of their families, their fears, their exhaustion. Their longing echoed Jamison’s: See me beyond my role. See me as a person.
But empathy is complicated. In his 2016 book Against Empathy, psychologist Paul Bloom argues that emotional empathy, the act of feeling another’s feelings, is often a poor guide for moral decision-making. It is biased toward those closest to us, easily swayed by dramatic stories, easily manipulated. This empathy directs our compassion toward the one person whose pain we can feel most vividly, rather than toward the many whose suffering we may not see.
Bloom doesn’t argue against care. He argues for “rational compassion” — love that is warm but also wise, rooted in discernment rather than emotional contagion. Emotional empathy zooms in on an individual; rational compassion asks, What choice will genuinely do the most good? Who might be overlooked? What are the real consequences?
Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” invites the imaginative leap of empathy — to see another’s life as intertwined with our own.
This tension is familiar to Christians. Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” invites the imaginative leap of empathy — to see another’s life as intertwined with our own. But Jesus never leaves us with emotion alone. His empathy is paired with truth-telling, justice and discernment. He feels deeply for people, yet he responds not simply with shared feeling, but with purposeful, wise action.
Near the end of Jamison’s essay, she writes, “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.”
Here, Jamison names what many people have been quietly asking for: someone willing to enter their story without prematurely defining it. Someone willing to encounter pain without dismissing it. Someone willing to extend themselves toward another — not to solve them, but to understand them. Jamison, Bloom, and Jesus each remind us that empathy is not a simple virtue. It is a practice.
Our call is not to abandon empathy nor to idealize it, but to practice it, with humility, curiosity and compassion. To remember that understanding one another is both an art and an ethic. And to extend ourselves, gently and deliberately, toward a world full of people longing to be understood.
