by Elder Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, American Methodist pastor, nonviolent community activist, and author. Photo by Amanda Villegas
Offered as part of Morning Prayer at the Atlantic Life Community 50th Anniversary Retreat, May 30, 2025.
I’ve been thinking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Given the times, I can’t help it. When Daniel Berrigan went underground in April of 1970, he did so on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s hanging by the Nazi regime. So, while moving from safe house to safe house, he read the biography just then out by Eberhart Bethge – with particular interest in the underground seminary which Bonhoeffer convened at Finkewalde in the 1930s to train pastors of the Confessing Church to face the rising tide of fascism and war. To do so he cancelled an arranged visit to Mohandas Gandhi to learn from him nonviolence and the Sermon on the Mount. Meanwhile, he made the Sermon core curriculum for the school; his lectures later published as the Cost of Discipleship.
I’ve been mindful of all that in part because it figures into the genealogy of the Festival of Radical Discipleship we just completed here at Kirkridge last weekend, but in a broad sense it’s part of the deep genealogy of the ALC as well.
Bonhoeffer wrote a little account of the monastic pattern of that seminary community, called Life Together. Pertinent to my thoughts this morning, he writes there about intercession as central to the life of the community, and he defines that as bringing another into the presence of God. He suggests it is to feel their need or sin so heavily that we cannot but pray. Indeed, we pray their prayer.
Let me say that again. We feel their need, their pain, their grief, their sin so deeply that we pray their prayer. On their behalf. In their stead. That is the seed of intercession I am bringing to our prayer time.
When Dan was in prison at Danbury he wrote a long poem, we could say a long prayer really, on behalf of the prisoners, “Letter to the Vietnamese.”
It begins like this. (Pay special attention to the pronouns, which suddenly turn to become inclusive – as though no walls come between at all).
Dear friends, your faces are a constriction of grief in the throat
your words weigh us like chains, your tears and blood
fall on our faces. Prison; Vietnam, prison; U.S.
prison is our fate, mothers bear in us prison,
our tongues taste its gall, bars spring up
from dragons’ teeth, a paling, impaling us.
A universal malevolent will, crouched like a demon
blows winter upon us, stiffens our limbs in death, the limbs of
women and children.
Later in the fifth section, he writes…
In a time of sanctioned
insanity, same conduct
is an indictable crime.
In a time of omnicompetent
violence, compassion
is officially intolerable.
We are in the time of officially intolerable. Some of you will have read the recent Guardian article by Julia Carrie Wong. It appeared April 8, so I actually could have read it on Bonhoeffer’s anniversary, April 9. I can’t get it out of my head. It’s titled “Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right are Waging War on Empathy.”I don’t want to linger on Musk, but he is quoted as saying, “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” It’s “suicidal” – bringing about civilization’s own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries. By western civilization he clearly intends dominant white culture. “They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.” Empathy is an error, a fatal glitch.
Related to that is the way that he and the “tech bros” refer to those same people, as well as fired federal employees or poor folks dumped from medical or support roles as NPCs –“Non Participant Characters.” This is a gaming term that refers to those figures who populate a game’s landscape, but are not avatars for other players. They have no one inside, no agency or feelings. You’d be an idiot to empathize with them. Just blow them away as targets. Dispensable by definition.
I’m not saying this is new. From the Doctrine of Discovery to the institutions of chattel slavery, Indigenous Peoples have been deemed less than fully human. Pagan savages or constitutionally three-fifths of a person, with names to mark their bodies. It was done to the Jews and others in Nazi Germany; they were vermin, Untermenschen (subhumans) to be exterminated. And now it’s done to Palestinians. The Israeli Defense Minister calls them human animals, and Netanyahu names them “children of darkness,” deserving a final solution.
You may know there’s a 2024 book, introduced and published by Steve Bannon, and endorsed by JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr., that suggests the violent crushing of those on the left, Franco and Pinochet-style. Those targeted are called “unhuman,” and that’s the title of the book.
The NPC phenomenon is a significant turn on all this because it hints at the role of technology in the assault on compassion. Call it insulation, isolation, distancing, abstraction…whether we’re talking about the machinery of war, the drones targeting from elsewhere, or the ascendency of Artificial Intelligence directing the round-ups or the bombing runs. Too much for a morning prayer reflection.
But I do want to say something about the Christian right’s assault on compassion. People are also writing books and pastors preaching sermons against empathy. Essentially against compassion.
Consider a couple titles: Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion and The Sin of Empathy: Christian Compassion and its Counterfeits.
There is clearly a profound and official anxiety that if you start to understand the pain and experience of queer and trans folk, say, you may be led to question what you’ve been told are the legalisms of God’s Word, you might come untethered from prescriptive “truth.”
Or if you feel the fear of being disappeared right off the street in unmarked cars, or empathize with the pain of family separation, indefinite detention in privatized prisons – you might become a threat to public policy.
I think how Steve Baggarly invariably begins his nuclear analyses with a first-person account of experiencing the bomb in family, home, and flesh. Everything comes rightly into question.
A friend of ours in Detroit, a Palestinian Christian, human rights attorney and international nonviolent activist, recently posted a photo of herself. Her face was drawn, cheeks sunken and her eyes a haunting plea. Yes, she is fasting – but she is clearly bearing in her body, and even more, her soul – the suffering of people in Gaza. I believe she is praying their prayer.
For such very reasons, empathy is now named, the “devil’s tool” – though what is really being questioned and attacked is compassion itself. Let’s say love itself.
Fascism always sees the gospel as a threat and assails it. And does so in part by seducing, coopting, mobilizing Christian institutions against it. The Gospel is attacked in the name of Christianity.
Their goal (and the mechanisms are many) is a nation of people with carefully hardened hearts. Any ability to respond to suffering, is shrewdly undermined, dismantled, and discredited. Which is to say, the kind of people required by fascism are those who are spiritually incapacitated. Constitutionally incapable of empathy.
I think of the way men are spiritually formed in white culture – to be out of touch with their hearts, their own emotions (let alone anyone else’s), their own guts and even their muscle-bound bodies.
The flip side of that is the threat that women represent – seen as vulnerable and susceptible to the devil’s wiles of emotional and spiritual empathy. They must be reigned in, brought under control. The attack on compassion is thoroughly entangled with the predacious reassertions of patriarchy.
One flash point for all of this came on Day Two of the administration – the Inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral. Bishop Mariann Budde, a woman ordained and consecrated, addressed Trump directly in a plea for compassion, for mercy – things of which I believe he has become spiritually incapable.
To be sure, we gather as a community for whom compassion is treated as essential to life in the gospel, which practices as discipline the works of mercy, which rejoices with those who rejoice and weeps with those who weep.
I am stressing that we do so not just in a culture that neglects compassion, but one which actively assaults it, renders it officially intolerable. Our spiritual practice is an engagement. A form of resistance. It is part of a large spiritual struggle, inner and outer.
Maybe two more thoughts to end, both of which could open on wider reflection. One goes back to the Unhuman book. I’m struck that what we now may wisely call the more-than-human world has been treated as unhuman. We’ve severed ourselves from it, reduced it to resources for extraction, treated it as disposable, and ceased to hear and feel her voices. Can we hear the waters cry? Feel the trees? The fungi singing between their roots? Can we hear the white-tailed deer, the piliated woodpecker, the salamander and the water bug? Like the Psalmist, can we pray their prayer? Even join their praise?
Lastly, having returned to intercession, where we began with Bonhoeffer. Feeling the pain or need of others moves us to pray their prayer. In the gospels, Jesus is said characteristically to be moved by compassion. My concordance translates the Greek word beneath it as something like “gut yearning.” It’s his bodily experience of compassion that invariably moves him to action, often healing. So, I want conclude on the notion of intercessory action. And the suggestion that the vocation of the Atlantic Life Community has for some time been public intercession. A compassionate calling indeed.
Let us take some silence and turn our hearts to prayers of gratitude and intercession.