There, There

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 – “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.” (NRSVUE)

Sheldon Cooper is a character from the sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. He is a brilliant scientist but has difficulty relating to other people. Sheldon is heavily coded as being on the autism spectrum, and his idiosyncrasies are used to comedic effect. I personally don’t love The Big Bang Theory because it tends to spend more time laughing at geeks and neurodivergent people than with them, even if it does not do it maliciously.

Although Sheldon develops a lot as a character over more than 400 episodes of television, at first, he cannot feel empathy for other people. Empathy is the ability to emotionally connect with someone else’s suffering. It allows you to suffer with them and often leads to compassionate action on their behalf. But in the earlier episodes, Sheldon can only express sympathy, which while not useless, is a more surface-level understanding that someone is suffering and should get some support. So, when one of his friends is having trouble, he puts on a patronizing facial expression and says, “There, there.”

When we are truly suffering, we need more than someone to say, “There, there”. We need someone who feels for us and with us. And while some people are naturally open to the emotions of others, most can best empathize when they have experienced suffering themselves. When someone is seeking empathy, they aren’t looking for some brilliant expert or pillar of strength. They are looking for someone just as broken as they are.

This is the attitude that the apostle Paul shares with the church in Corinth in his second letter to them. Paul was someone who suffered a lot for his faith. His uncompromising and confrontational preaching style often led to him being chased out of town or thrown in jail. But Paul saw it as an advantage, not because of the romance of suffering for one’s faith, but because it helped him console other people. He knew that God was with him in his suffering, and if this was true, he could then console others in their suffering. In Paul’s mind, suffering was just a link in a chain with love and consolation on both ends.

Sheldon’s selfish misunderstanding does not resonate with my understanding of the empathy of neurodivergent people. True, they tend not to immediately understand the feelings of others, but they are experienced with suffering. They have suffered by being misunderstood, ostracized, and having to put on a mask in front of others to avoid being rejected by them. This suffering can ironically make them more empathetic and more compassionate to others. Their brokenness, indeed, anyone’s brokenness, is what can actually lead to healing and wholeness.

When you feel broken, when you have lost something or someone important to you, when you feel trapped by your personal demons, when you are ground down by the sorrows of life, know that you have a lot to give. We don’t need invincible people. We need broken people. For it is broken people who can bear that chain of suffering together to find that consolation and wholeness we all need.

Prayer: Lord, console me in my days of sorrow and help me bring consolation to the sorrowful so that all might know joy through you. Amen.