“Interfaith Reflections on Sympathy in Religion and Literature”

O’Brien, Barbara. “Interfaith Reflections on Sympathy in Religion and Literature.” Samvit: Knowledge that Leads to Enlightenment 79 (March 2019): 14-21. 

O’Brien’s interfaith reflections illustrate how sympathy can help bring heaven to earth—as evidenced in four women: Mary Baker Eddy, Emily Dickinson, Sarada Devi (wife and mission partner to Ramakrishna) and Simone Weil. O’Brien finds a basis for this sympathy in “the experience of oneness between the supreme Spirit and everyday empirical reality” (14). In all four women, preparation for this non-dual perspective came about via a “sadhana, a discipline of deprivation and loneliness” (15). O’Brien then examines how the lives and writings of these women demonstrate their “expansive benevolence” (17), or sympathy, as a natural expression of seeing from a divine or non-ego perspective.  O’Brien finds this “existential kindness” (17) in Dickinson’s poetry; in Eddy’s writings that “spell out a western or Christian Advaita or non-dual philosophy and yoga with a profoundly practical slant” (16); in Devi who was called the Divine Mother; and in Weil who worked tirelessly for the lowly and had a vision of Christ as the “perfect exemplification of the Buddhist Void, a state of being so empty of self and attentive to the divine that the ego disappears” (20). The lives of these women demonstrate Swami Vivekananda’s motto: “a sympathy… even unto death” (21).

ISSN: 0972-4869

(For access to Samvit Magazine, go here or here.)

See also annotation:

“Swami Vivekananda and Christian Science” by Joseph Peidle