Anyone who has ever suffered a tragedy in life will recall that sympathy is rather a cheap emotion, one that seems pleasant enough in the giving, but somewhat less satisfying in the receiving. It’s almost too easy to feel sympathy for someone; all that’s required is that we pause long enough in events for a brief show of pity before moving along with our regularly scheduled lives.

Sympathy, unfortunately, is a default position for most of us. It’s the feeling we have for the quarterback who broke his leg on that last play — right up until the game resumes with a new quarterback who distracts us from the stretcher being wheeled into the bowels of the stadium. It’s one of the emotions we call up as we’re passing the scene of an automobile accident, while we’re craning to see whether the person sobbing on the side of the road is crying because she’s hurt or because she’s standing over a dead friend. And then we drive on a few miles, perhaps shudder at the scene as it plays itself out in our minds, and turn up the radio a bit.

There’s nothing wrong without sympathy, at least as far as it goes. But therein lies the problem — sympathy really doesn’t go far enough for humanity. What takes up the challenge where sympathy wears out is a far more powerful, far more important, far more affective emotion: empathy.

To have sympathy for someone is to have feelings of pity for that person. To have empathy for that person requires us not just to recognize a person’s plight, but also, to some extent, to share in their pain. Empathy requires an emotional commitment greater than that of sympathy. Empathy often begets action; sympathy only occasionally does.

Folks in the village of Driver understand about pain. Having lived through the horror of their community literally being ripped apart by a tornado in 2008, the memories were still fresh for them when they heard of the destruction left in the wake of a twister that tore through Virginia’s Middle Peninsula earlier this year.

While many of us were sympathetic to the plight of folks in Gloucester and the surrounding area, the people of Driver could not help but feel a deep empathy for their fellow Virginians whose lives were turned upside down in the violence of that storm.

So, pressed forward by their empathy, Driver got to work raising money for a Gloucester school that was demolished. Last week, residents presented a check to that school’s grateful principal. Having raised a little more than $1,500, Driver will not have made much of a dent in the reconstruction costs.

But the emotional connection people there have with the people of Gloucester — and the fact that it caused them to reach out so selflessly — is a stronger lesson in humanity than could have been delivered in a check 10 times the size of the one they gave last week.