If you’re saying that you should never offer words of sympathy or condolence to someone who is in pain or difficulty or grief—that such words, without actions, are always unwelcome and self-serving—I disagree. Plenty of people are comforted by knowing that someone else cares what they’re going through.
But I do agree that any words or deeds offered to a hurting person should be for that person’s benefit and not your own; that they should be, to the best of your knowledge, what that person would welcome; and that no thanks should be expected.
I don’t think they should come unsolicited. If I share my pain with you, then you respond however you think is best, whether that be words or casseroles.
If I don’t share my pain with you, if you just hear about my loss from the office gossip, then don’t. I didn’t ask for your condolences, and all you are doing is forcing me to thank you for making me think about my pain. If you think that you have something that I will find useful that you are willing to offer, then sure, offer to make dinner or help with PTO paperwork.
If you hear about someone’s loss and rush to offer your thoughts and prayers, then it’s about you and your needs, it’s not about the one in pain.
Not enough, and I’m sure that anyone who does rush to offer condolences to any co-worker they hear has suffered something will be offended by my observation.
I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of useless platitudes.
And it depends on context. When my father died, clients giving condolences didn’t really mean anything to me, and did more harm than good, but I kinda had to accept them graciously, as I want them to continue giving me money.
When I was at the funeral, in a church, such platitudes were fine, it was reasonable to expect that I shared a faith in that situation. It was even reasonable to expect that I would be appreciative of them.
When my mother’s neighbor offered to mow my mother’s lawn for the next year, that was something useful and appreciated. When her other neighbor came over to talk her ear off about how much my father would be missed in the neighborhood, all that did was keep twisting the knife in my mother’s gut.
When I was on an earlier version of this forum, in 1999, I had a family member suffer a rather horrific death. I was devasted.
I posted about it and many members of the board responded to the post, with sympathetic thoughts and yes, even prayers.
I cannot describe how much comfort I got from those messages. I printed them out and carried them with me for months, reading them over and over whenever I got overwhelmed. It made me feel less alone. I like getting sympathy when bad things happen to me, and even if the person doesn’t say EXACTLY what I would’ve said, I accept it in the spirit that they intended.
OK, you’re right, it has come up repeatedly on the boards.
Although I’d read at least part of two of those threads, though, it didn’t stick in my head as some sort of famous analogy; it was to me just one of a batch of different ways people tried to explain what they meant. I don’t expect everybody to remember every analogy I’ve ever used on the boards, even if a couple of other people liked it and picked it up. And I don’t remember getting confused by those earlier posts, either; because in their context they made it clear what they were saying, which your first post of this sort did not; at least, to me.
I took you to be saying the exact opposite of what you apparently meant: in part because of your second paragraph, which seemed to be saying that you think it entirely unnecessary to be able to say that one isn’t religious. Looking back, maybe you meant to answer two different people in two different fashions, rather than expecting those two paragraphs to be taken together.
I recently had surgery. There were three broad categories of support.
Group 1 (actually, just two people) said they’d pray for me. I was glad they cared enough to say something, but I could tell they didn’t care enough to think about what would be meaningful to me. I found that kind of support unhelpful.
Group 2 said something nice - “I’ll be thinking of you,” “I hope everything goes well,” etc. It genuinely helped to have that kind of support, even though it was words only.
Group 3 did something concrete: brought over a dinner, walked my dogs, handled my responsibilities at work, or assuring me that any time off I needed would be covered no matter what my PTO balance. That kind of support was immeasurable.
I don’t want to dismiss the importance of just knowing someone cared, even if they didn’t do anything other than offer kind words. But minimum criteria for me was if I really thought they cared, and invoking their religion over mine (or their assumption of mine) suggested they didn’t.
Everyone obviously will draw their line differently, and any expression of support will be helpful for some people. It wasn’t for me.
So, you are saying that you were inviting condolences? You came to a place where you have friends and shared your pain in the hopes that you would find comfort?
That’s a bit different from being in the office when John from accounting that you don’t know from Adam in receivables comes by to tell you that they will pray for you without knowing if you would like that or not.
And that’s my point. Much of the time in the workplace, the spirit that such condolences are intended is to make themselves feel better about themselves for going to all the work of telling you that they will pray for you. They don’t care about you, they don’t even know you. They just feel that this is something that is expected of them, and they want to clear their obligation.
Obviously things are going to be different when the people who are offering condolences are those who you voluntarily associate with out of friendship or at least aquantanship, and those who you have to associate with because you work in the same building.
I realize I may be shitting this thread but wanted to share a distantly-relayed experience. I thought of it because one writer here wrote about being an HR manager.
At my work they started as an Episcopal ministry and then decades later they became a federal contractor. The CEO wrote in an unrelated but posted internal newsletter three months ago as an aside that “we’re on a mission from God.” He sounded like Dan Akroyd in The Blues Bros. I can see how it’s out-of-bounds yet nobody would ever bother to take action over it.
My pt is the sheer effort to have a workplace be secular is hard to muster.
As another tangent, four of my cousins and in-laws are pastors. They understand that I’ve found my and their prayers to be worthless. After forty-seven years of polite conversations we’re at that common understanding. It takes that long to have change.
Actually, bald by choice is a thing. When I was shaving my head I read about others who chose baldness. I read a bald board and “bald by choice” was one of the sub forums. I stopped shaving after a few years and have a full head of hair again.
Where appropriate, sure. Even if the chicken casserole gets thrown out because they have no appetite under the circumstances, its a concrete way to show you care.
And it annoys me that just expressing one’s atheism (or wanting separation of church and state according to constitution in the US) or declining to have religion foisted on them marks one as “militant” while Christians can casually express their religious beliefs 50 times a day with “have a blessed day” (which, in my neck of the woods started as explicit tactic to keep religion in the public domain as an alternative to “have a nice day” when persons in government facilities were told not to endorse religion) at the end of every phone call or ever burger served or every other professional interaction and that’s not considered evangelized or pushy or militant. You have to blow up abortion clinics to be a militant Christian, but simply challenging the default assumption of Christianity or not being okay with it have privileged place in government is militant for an atheist.
This is obviously Easter weekend, and our office was closed Friday as part of the holiday.
My boss likes to send out emails on the last day of the work week; he usually closes the office a little early and offers some platitude about having a good time off.
This time, he sent out the email, told people to clean out leftovers from the office refrigerators for the long weekend, and finished with…
Obnoxious? I think so. It’s exactly the sort of “microagression” that the non religious have to endure with polite acceptance.
I’ve had a prior boss who would do something similar: send out a firm wide email that references their faith, or Jesus Christ.
I don’t like it, I don’t appreciate it, and it’s all I can do to not reply (“we make our own luck. Have fun with your fairy tale this weekend.”)