There is an old Spanish expression, “Ojos que no ven, corazon que no siente,” which roughly translates as “The heart cannot feel what the eyes do not see.”  If we have not been exposed to the suffering of others, their suffering does not touch us. Their pain, their grief, their misery is just another statistic, another news story, another depressing fact that we would rather avoid. In the late 1960’s, those pre-digital days when the evening newscasts were our prime source of news, people started tuning out because there was so much bad news. So, in order to boost ratings, some television stations started what came to be known as “happy news”.  Between the hard news stories, there was banter back and forth between the on-air personalities. The theory was that if there is enough humor and laughter, people will still watch.

Having four broadcasters suddenly break into laughter for no apparent reason may have been ridiculous: but at least the news that was reported was still based on facts and not ideology. We all saw the same graphic scenes of the Vietnam War, racial protest in the cities, unrest on the college campuses, and, later, the Watergate Hearings. With the proliferation of cable news and internet sources came a proliferation of niche news sources. In order to compete for a market share, news sources have become more selective in what they report, how they report it, and, sometimes, what set of facts they use. Watching the news now can mean getting one’s own opinions and perspectives reinforced. It has become easier to avoid unpleasant facts, whatever our political perspective.

But what about the Gospel? What about the way of Jesus? Jesus certainly did not isolate himself from human suffering or fail to sympathize with those who were carrying heavy burdens. In fact, he often criticized religious leaders for caring little about the real life situation of the ordinary Jew, creating a multiplicity of rules impossible to observe. “The heart cannot feel what the eyes do not see.” It is only when we allow ourselves to come close to the pain of others, that our hearts are moved to grief, anger, outrage, compassion, and understanding. What makes us uncomfortable leads us toward change. Two events last weekend in Chicago reminded me how true that is.

Thanks to an invitation from the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild, Fr. Fontana and I were privileged to attend a talk last Friday by Sister Helen Prejean, whose ministry for the last four decades has focused on prisoners on death row. Sister Helen has been instrumental not only in changing public attitudes toward the death penalty, but also helping shape the Catholic Church’s opposition to capital punishment. Sister Helen realized early on that by sharing her experience of interacting with prisoners condemned to death and describing what an execution is really like, she would open our eyes to injustices in the justice system and humanize the lives of those who are executed. She even quoted that Spanish proverb, “The heart cannot feel what the eyes do not see.” As most of you know, her first book, Dead Man Walking, became a very successful feature film. Sister Helen is vibrantly pro-life and allows her belief in the sanctity of human life to energize her efforts on behalf of the condemned. Her talk was eye-opening (and heart feeling) in the best sense of the word.

On Saturday a statue was unveiled of Mamie Till-Mobley in front of Argo High School, which she attended. Till-Mobley is best known as the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old from Chicago, who was lynched during a summer visit to relatives in Mississippi in 1955. Because Emmett had made a remark to a young white grocery clerk, two men took him from his relatives’ home, beat him, gouged out his eye, shot him, and dumped him in a river. The body was so badly disfigured when it was recovered that everyone assumed that there would be closed casket at the funeral, everyone except his mother. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” A photo of Till’s mangled body was circulated and then published in several magazines. Thousands of Black people had been lynched in the South since the end of the Civil War; but now everyone was shown the human reality of lynching. That open casket helped ignite the Civil Rights movement. “The heart cannot feel what the eyes do not see.”

You and I are not likely to be part of something as earth moving as St. Helen’s ministry or Emmett Till’s funeral. However, we can all resist the temptation to crawl inside a bubble, avoiding those whose life experience and perspective is very different from ours. We can resist the temptation to turn away when we are shown scenes of the war in Sudan or the global refugee crisis or disaster victims. One of the real benefits of hands-on charity work is that it puts us in contact with those whom we would not otherwise encounter on a personal basis. As we learn their story, our own horizons expand. ‘The heart cannot feel what the eyes do not see.”

                                                                               Fr. Joe