Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
We speak of “putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes” as if empathy were a simple act of imaginative substitution. As if, by imagining what we would feel in their circumstances, we could access their experience.
This is not empathy. This is projection.
The phenomenological question is more precise: How do we access the lived experience of another consciousness without either collapsing the distance between us or rendering that experience inaccessible?
I have lived, across the course of a single life, inside more identities than most institutions are comfortable acknowledging in a single person.
I was born Jewish, into a family that observed the traditions with a seriousness that shaped everything I would later become. I became, through philosophical inquiry, an atheist – not casually, but rigorously, as a consequence of the questions I was asking and the answers I was finding. I became, through a process I can describe but not fully explain, a Catholic, and eventually a Carmelite nun. I was, throughout all of this, a philosopher – a student of Husserl, a scholar of phenomenology, a thinker who could not stop thinking even when thinking led to places that were inconvenient for the identities I inhabited.