Empathy is, for me, the hallmark of humanity. As I watch the wrenching and sometimes stirring images from Houston, I understand how central empathy, not argument or judgment,  is for me in my moral universe.

I have been following the awful tragedy in Texas, trying to move along with my work and life while still respecting the suffering and loss. Our days this week are so beautiful and This morning, I felt the need to pause a bit and cope with the reality of our powerlessness and the challenge in absorbing so massive a scale of suffering.

As I have mentioned, I believe empathy is greatest aspiration of any moral human, it is the standard by which we can measure or own humanity. Houston calls on me to be a friend in silence,  I have no advice, solutions, cures, statements,  or opinions to offer, I hope to lend a tender hand  when I can.

In our culture tragedy is often just another political issue to argue about, another way for corporations and politicians to profit from our suffering.

I am glad the government is responding aggressively and quickly and hopefully, with compassion.  I don’t care to be distracted by anyone’s shoes – this so trivializes the awful suffering of people – or bureaucratic back-slapping. It’s too soon for medals when very brave and very ordinary people are risking their lives to pull people out of flooded houses and when countless others are traumatized or dead.

It doesn’t matter to me what Donald Trump’s secret motives are or might be, he is paying attention and offering help. Good for him. That is all he can do and the least he can do.

Now, perhaps he and the pundits and politicians can be silent for a while and let the real heroes do their work, and the real victims begin to heal. That will mostly happen out of our sight or consciousness.

For Houston, I think of Henri Noewen’s Three Meditations On Christian Life, and every politician and journalist would do well to read it. He writes of the “friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

I thought today that much heroism, connection, love and community will surely come out of this darkness.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote that the most beautiful people she has known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found the way out of the depths. These people, she wrote, have an appreciation, a sensitivity, “and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen”

I love those words, that is also my experience with people who are filled with feeling and empathy, most often because they have suffered.

I’ve sent off my donations and paused my own fund-raising for the Army Of Good, it seems inappropriate to ask for donations while so many people are suffering so much and have lost so much. and whose need is so great right now.

Empathy hurts, especially when it calls upon me to try to stand in the shoes of people who have lost every single thing except their lives and must give rebirth to themselves in a world that will not stand  still for them for too long. In a week or so, the cable news networks will be gone, Twitter will be onto something new, the politicians will be arguing and maneuvering for power and position again.

But the pain will be there for a long time. It is difficult for me to even begin to grasp a catastrophe of this magnitude.

So what can I do?

For today, I’m just going to think of Houston, and try to be the friend who can be silent in despair and confusion, cheer the heroes on as they do their work and speak to the best of humanity, and accept not knowing, not curing, not healing, and offering a gentle hand when I can.

Empathy is heavy because it asks us to feel rather than just sympathize, wrote Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. Sometimes, not even our own pain weights as heavy as the pain we feel for someone else, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

If you watch the news, many more echoes than that.

Empathy, wrote Maria Popova on her compelling blog Brain Pickings,  is not the same thing as sympathy. “We revere it,” she wrote, “as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, and the gateway to reaching our highest human potential. It is a centerpiece of our very humanity.”

So this is not a day for me to be a hero, or a poitician,  but to cheer the heroes on. Not a day to offer miracles, but empathy and silence in the time of despair. A day to count my blessings, and hold the ones I love close.

Thinking of you Houston and pausing in my life to try to stand in your shoes.