Small Things Like These, adapted from the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Claire Keegan, takes place in 1985 Ireland. Cillian Murphy is Bill Furlong, who works selling and delivering coal to his village and a convent. He’s a quiet man, rather shy in groups, but he does open up when he’s home with his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and five daughters. It’s Christmastime and although they are struggling to make ends meet, it should be a good time for them.
Then making his holiday deliveries, Bill sees some small things that disturb him. He watches as a young girl screams in protest as she is pushed into the convent by her mother; she is obviously unwed and pregnant. Bill’s own mother was too, but she was taken in by a kindly employer.
Later, on the road, Bill encounters a young boy collecting sticks; he says they are for his dog but Bill knows his family is poor and will use them for fuel. The boy reminds him of his own childhood, glimpses of which we get in flashback.
Delivering an invoice to the convent, he is approached by a young girl who has been scrubbing the floor; she begs him to take her away. Later that night, putting coal in the coal shed, he discovers another girl, Sarah (Zarah Devlin), locked inside and shivering in the dark. Shocked, he takes her to see the Mother Superior, Sr. Mary (Emily Watson), a no-nonsense woman who implies that not only is the girl’s fate not Bill’s concern, but he needs to let what he knows go or else his own daughters may not be admitted to the convent’s school. His wife and a good friend also warn him to forget what he has seen.
The convent is actually a Magdalene laundry, one of the facilities run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 18th to the late 20th centuries, that took in “fallen women” and made them work in laundries; some were prostitutes but others were girls who had been raped or gotten in trouble with a boyfriend.
Bill’s reactions to his discoveries illustrates the difference between empathy and compassion. We can assume that most of the villagers know what is happening with the girls and even feel sorry or empathize with their fate. But the convent is powerful and a source of income for the community so most people remain content even when complicit. Given his own history, Bill has to act.
In a talk given to the students in Spirituality & Practice’s Spiritual Literacy Certificate Program, Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg made a distinction between empathy and compassion, which we will paraphrase here. Empathy is like the trembling of the heart in response to seeing pain and suffering. It evokes a certain body resonance that likely hurts. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to compassion; it could lead to empathic distress. Compassion is more; it is movement toward the suffering to see if we can be of help.
Bill Furlong is able to be empathetic because he has suffered like the boy on the road and he has been close to the suffering experienced by the unwed mothers. Like the other villagers, he could have just stopped there. But instead he moves toward the suffering to see if he can help. He walks away from the boy and then returns to give him a few coins and a Christmas wish; that’s compassion. He tries to find out what is happening to Sarah, and when he has a good idea what it is, he returns, rescues her, and takes her home. That’s compassion.
“Compassion is just what the word says; it is ‘suffering with.’ It is an immediate participation in the suffering of another to such a degree that you forget yourself and your safety and do what is necessary.”
— Joseph Campbell, mythologist