An empathic reaction is a knot in the stomach, tears, unexplained emotion unrelated to what I am rationally thinking. Sympathy, of course, is related to empathy, else you could dismiss a tragic story or the hurt someone is describing. It is more helpful for me to think of sympathy and empathy being connected by a line, so we might never have one without a bit of the other. We should be far more worried about the opposites--apathy and antipathy, if you will.

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Walter Brueggemann once wrote that before Israel in ancient times could hear God’s word, they had to grieve in order to understand what they had lost. Forgetting 9-11 dishonors that day. It was a terrible day, not in the way the deluded anarchists intended, but a day that caused the world to stop and consider itself. We should never forget the dead, one or three thousand. They have much to tell us, if we will listen.

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The blues can teach us to have a sense of moral seriousness, a steely ethical and spiritual backbone that continues to hope without collapsing into a giddy, almost pre-teen naivete about spiritual matters, in which all is victory, glory, and joy, which requires a selective, edited memory of ourselves and each other that the world around us scorn as hypocrisy that remembers your sins and forgets mine.

The final episode in this series, "Feeling the Blues," originally given in 2009.

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