Pity is Not For Fools

Dear Pitiful People,

Language drifts. Words’ meanings change through context and use, and when considering the word pity, many of us have lived through the transformation from a noble expression of the heart to the trivialization of another’s pain. I would suggest the culprit who spun pity from blessing to insult was none other than television’s A-Team’s most memorable character, who frequently used the phrase, “I pity the fool!” Of course, I refer to Mr. T, who said things like, “I pity the fool who hurts my son E.” (Dani told me not to use that joke, but every time I read it, I start laughing again. So, there you go.) Contrast Mr. T’s pity with Geoffrey Chaucer’s phrase, "pite renneth soone in gentil herte" (pity runs quickly in a gentle heart). No one would call the A-Team for their gentle hearts, but I believe it was Mr. T’s focus on fools that morphed pity into an insult.

“Don’t pity me!” was a phrase I often heard while serving as a chaplain to spinal cord injury patients at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, now the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab. Their resistance to pity arose from a sense of dignity, identity and personhood. As one patient told me, “I’d rather be ignored than pitied.” Such resistance illustrates pity’s long drift from its earlier definition that arose from the Latin pietas, translated "piety". What has been lost is the humanity of the one pitied. As another patient told me, “All they see is my wheelchair; they don’t see me.”

Of course, when a word loses its common meaning, another word is needed to take its job. I would suggest this accounts for the steep rise in the use of the word empathy, directly corresponding in timing to the mid-1980s popular T.V. show. (See last week’s Musing on Empathy and Illusion.) Both pity and empathy acknowledge powerlessness, but a sense of empathy explicitly focuses on the one who is feeling, not the one who is struggling. Pity, I would suggest, sparks a pious inventory of possibilities. Gentle hearts never presume a sufferer to be a fool. What my patients found disgusting were the faces of pity, a repulsion that one’s able-bodied day was interrupted by another’s disabled reality. Consider by contrast the visage of Mary, Jesus’ mother, in art which takes its name from the same Latin word Pietas. What makes pity pious is the gentleness of a softened heart, not the disgust of a hardened face.

In my scale of Christianly responses, pity is nestled between indifference and empathy. Pity can inspire the heart to move towards empathy, sympathy or compassion, but pity may also pivot to another reasonable response—indifference—as in, “I’d rather be ignored.” Pity is a spark, the heartfelt reaction to another’s pain; in its unadulterated expression, pity drives a human connection, seeing the person beyond their affliction. They’re not fools; they’re fully embodied people facing genuine obstacles. Our hearts are gentled, and we become open to the reality of another. What we do with our pity determines if we are responding with piety to a T.

Defending the powerful potential of pity, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor