What Two Years Of Writing About Israel/Palestine Taught Me About Empathy

The answer to this conflict is hiding where you don’t want to look.

Photo by cottonbro studio

In his novel, The Secret of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton tells the story of a priest who also happens to be a world-class detective.

A visiting playboy named Grandison Chase asks him how a man of the cloth got so good at solving grisly, diabolical murders. And Father Brown offers him a powerful and slightly alarming lesson in empathy:

You see, I had murdered them all myself, so, of course, I knew how it was done.

I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course, I knew who he was.

After a moment of shock, Chase relaxes. “You frightened me all right, for the minute I really did think you meant you were the murderer […] of course, if it’s just a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychology…”

But Father Brown isn’t having it.

No, no, no, I don’t mean just a figure of speech […] I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self…