Moral Injury and Ballast of Incarnation
We are in the full swing of summer on this Solstice day, having just returned from swim lessons and browner from swimming with what felt like the rest of Harrisonburg yesterday. Dahlias from my backyard are mixed with larkspur on my table, and my husband is able to work from home—he’s doing laundry between phone calls.
And yet, when I simply swipe right absently while putting the kids to bed, I can read half-a-dozen horrors in quick succession. Alliances, famines, superbugs, 0% contained wildfires, disposable civilians, thirsty asylum seekers, shootings at splash pads, and lead in our waters. Friends have loved ones with broken backs and broken minds. Cancer comes up where it was supposed to have been eradicated. How in the world wide web of connections can we simultaneously hold asters and atrocities? Popsicles and poured out wrath? Somewhere beneath my breastbone I feel a churn or maybe a rending at disparate realities at the edges of my awareness.
I just learned of a word that partially describes what many of us have been experiencing individually and collectively: moral injury.
In a newsletter I receive from We Welcome, I read this this week:
“It’s been years since we started hearing the common refrain about “unprecedented times,” and we’re guessing that you are probably as weary as we are of both the term and the experience. Life feels so out of our control, and our minds are under assault of a steady stream of bad news, injustice, human rights violations, and moral injury.
A few weeks ago, our colleague Laura from South Carolina shared reflections on the impacts on our hearts and souls from living in these times. In summary, she shared that “moral injury occurs when we observe evil but don’t (or can’t) respond in a meaningful way,” and that “cognitive dissonance (my reality vs. the one I’m observing) amplifies moral injury.”
This is a crushing mental and spiritual weight to carry…”
Experts define moral injury like this:
“disruption in an individual’s confidence and expectations about one’s own or others’ motivation or capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner”
“the inability to contextualize or justify personal actions or the actions of others and the unsuccessful accommodation of these . . . experiences into pre-existing moral schemas”
leadership failure and a “betrayal of what’s right, by a person who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation”
“a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society”
A few years ago as we were coming out of the most intense part of the pandemic, I had a virtual ceremony of grief with a few close friends. It was an attempt on my part to have some venue for lament. One of the exercises was naming something we had lost. Besides deeply felt answers like funeral gatherings for loved ones or being surrounded after having new babies, one of my friends named, “a loss of belief in people caring about the common good.”
I would never have been able to put it into words like she did. Moral injury and disillusionment are types of loss—deaths of confidence that those with power (which sometimes and sometimes does not include us) will do what is best for human flourishing or even for human survival. Powerlessness sometimes it feels like it hangs over our homes and communities like the hazy smoke of last summer, making us all vaguely or acutely ill.
A few weeks ago, I wrote this about the ongoing killing of civilians, especially children, in Gaza:
In Saigon in ’67…
… Nhat Chi Mai
went up in flames (a woman
not a city). Self-immolation,
they call it. “I offer my body
as a torch to dissipate
the dark, to waken love,”
she wrote— her violent end an attempt
to end violent ends consuming
to the nth degree.
Peter warmed his hands over a fire
after Living Water poured out to extinguish
all altar fires. Hallelujah, we no longer need to burn,
we nod, unlike those Buddhists (and a Quaker)
did, do. Hallelujah, sacrificial systems
are over.
Instead, it seems, we choose to ignite
babies.
11,000 wrapped in white,
if there is enough after payload pyres
to bury.
I feel the bile rise when I make
s’mores now. A blurred news photo showed
a fetched Hershey bar in the hand of a wailing
man
bringing it back to his
son
who burned when Colorado missiles
“missed.”
A
grandfather
kissed the eyes of his
grandson
after the twin embers
sputtered out.
…
We recoil at the thought of
Nhat Chi Mai’s bicep burning,
holding her basin as the smell made
people
vomit on pavers. But somehow,
we who are meant to be the fragrance of
Christ,
(Christ) lay children on the hot hands of
dragons with forked tongues.
Mothers
Fathers
Grandparents
allow immolation
until we can be sure there is no TNT
among the dust (at least that’s what we say,
stuffing receipts in our pockets).
We bury and bury
and bury (good thing some gods
always carry a spade).
…
I, a
Daughter
Mother
Sister
Mother
type with a basin of tears
I wish were gasoline,
search in lotus pose before a laptop
for words that could
ignite fury,
make us sick on stones
like a nun turned charred bones…
Even searching for an image to insert among these words, there were page after page of pictures for “war” and only a handful for “grief.” What we do we do with all this impotence and despair?
We Welcome’s newsletter went on to say this:
“…We are not without hope to keep moving forward. We keep our souls from despair when we:
Hold joy in one hand and sorrow in the other, recognizing that both are true.
Reflect on the suffering of God, drawing comfort from the knowledge that we are not alone in our grief, and that we have a Savior who carries it with us.
Walk in welcome right where we are. We do not have the physical ability to wrap our arms around so many of those who are suffering in the world, but what about those in our own communities who are lonely or hurting? Reaching out to welcome “strangers” in your neighborhood is not only a way to pursue the flourishing of your city, but can often bring flourishing to your own life as well.
Reflect on the suffering of God, drawing comfort from the knowledge that we are not alone in our grief, and that we have a Savior who carries it with us.
For my morning quiet times, I’ve been reading Wearing GOD: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God by Lauren F. Winner. The book explores metaphors for the Divine that we can use to awaken our imaginations and stir our love. One of chapters, “Bread and Vine,” had a take on Jesus as the Vine I had never heard before:
“[In the Old Testament] to be a vineyard is to be lovingly planted by God and sometimes to flourish. But there is judgement in this imagery, too. Vines are fragile. Sometimes they wither. Sometimes God lets them go, or removes them if they are unproductive. Sometimes God destroys them. This Old Testament imagery is the backdrop against which Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, ‘I am the true vine.’…
To hear Jesus call Himself the vine, then, was to hear a metaphor of startling vulnerability: I, God, am one of you; I have come down from the manager’s office to become, with you, part of the vineyard.
Usually we hear in Jesus’ identification of Himself as vine a statement of our dependence on Him, and an instruction about what we need to thrive…but perhaps Jesus as the true vine…also tells us about the perils of incarnation. It is as if Jesus studied the Hebrew scriptures and found the most precarious depiction of humanity He could, and said, ‘That is who I am: I am allying with humanity when it is most endangered.’ When I am producing bad fruit and farthest from God’s pleasure, Jesus is already in that place. It is not alien to Him, and I am not alone.” (Wearing God, pg.119-120).
This week, I’ve been battling spotted lanternfly beetles on my grapevines. It has felt like another blow in what feels inevitable and unbeatable, even if more annoying than devastating. Now as I look at the vulnerable veins of our grape leaves, I’ll think of Jesus’ kindness in choosing to know what it feels like to be on the brink of destruction, and even, in his death, destroyed.
And beyond that comfort and grounding weight, I want Jesus’ solidarity with us to spur us into action like We Welcome suggested:
Walk in welcome right where we are. We do not have the physical ability to wrap our arms around so many of those who are suffering in the world, but what about those in our own communities who are lonely or hurting? Reaching out to welcome “strangers” in your neighborhood is not only a way to pursue the flourishing of your city, but can often bring flourishing to your own life as well.
In a world that feels overwhelming, injurious to our imaginations and souls, unrelenting, harsh and inevitability destructive, we can reach out and add our ballast, our weight, to the experience of others to help us collectively make it to shore.
Maybe that means eating pie with neighborhood kids who have been watching YouTube videos all day since both parents are working long hours this summer.
Maybe that means turning off our AC for a day and finding relief a the pool and library so we can better understand what our unhoused and vulnerable neighbors feel during this climate-change fueled heat wave.
Maybe that means calling our representatives like it was our own children that our country was aiding in displacing and dying.
Maybe that means sharing freeze pops with the teenagers that cut through your yard, trying somehow to reclaim collective good, to bandage up our wounds from fear, suspicion, individualism, and separation.
May you note the ways in which you feel under assault in body, mind and soul. May you seek the solace of a Savior who knows what it feels like to endure injury and insecurity. May you reach out in compassion and common good this week, finding healing in using muscles that are new or out of practice.
