Facing moral injury > political expediency

What if lament is the most radical practice for this moment?

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

Several months ago, I confided in a trusted loved one about the dilemma I was facing:

“I do not know how, in good conscience, I can vote for this president.”

I realized later that I had been attempting to convey my experience of moral injury. According to the National Center for PTSD, moral injury comes by way of acts that are antithetical to one’s deeply held beliefs and ethics. These can occur as acts of commission (things you do), omission (things you fail to do), or through “betrayal from leadership” (people in authority over you acting on your behalf).

As a person of faith, I conceive of moral injury as a soul wound. It threatens to disintegrate the self, because it is a violent rupture between the way one believes a person should act in relation to others, and one’s embodied experience of harm rendered. At scale, it immobilizes movements, leaving people feeling helpless in their grief and alone in their guilt.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Over the last nine months of genocide in Gaza, I have experienced immense guilt and grief while contemplating my complicity in (and benefit from) systems that do not abide by the values I hold dear. I have continually witnessed a death-dealing Empire dehumanizing and destroying beloved children of God — the devastating opposite of the baptismal promise I made to honor the dignity of every person and to seek and serve Christ in all people.

Here are just a few ways moral injury has manifested in my spirit during this time:

• I have experienced the moral injury of feeding my own young children while footage of Palestinian children wasting away in a forced starvation plays on a loop in my head.

• I have experienced the moral injury of being a person with Jewish heritage, as that identity is being weaponized to justify the atrocities taking place. I grew up understanding the story of my great-grandfather’s flight from Eastern European pogroms to be a catalyst of compassion toward anyone experiencing the targeting of their community. Yet over the last nine months I have realized the extent to which unhealed intergenerational trauma has metastasized, rendering many of my Jewish siblings numb to the pain of Palestinians, and others fiercely struggling to differentiate Judaism from Zionism.

• I have experienced moral injury as a Western Christian witnessing the Church’s failure to intervene, best described by Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac in his now-famous “Christ in the rubble” Christmas sermon:

“We are outraged by the complicity of the church. Silence is complicity, and empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action --- are all under the banner of complicity.”

• And I have been filled with the moral horror of seeing someone whom I helped put in office, who represents the party to which I belong and the country of which I am a citizen, as he has used my tax dollars to supply the instruments of genocide. He has done this while serving as Apologist-in-Chief for Israel’s impunity, and has had the audacious vainglory to assume my allegiance, effectively asking me to absolve him of genocide in November.

All of this was the backdrop to revealing my moral injury to my loved one. In sharing my state of disintegration, I was hoping for the reality of my distress to be validated. In effect, I was asking my loved one to see my pain and suffer with me, as the Latin root of “compassion” would suggest.

Instead, my loved one simply cautioned me to “Consider the alternative.”

The shift to political expediency was not surprising, though it was emotionally jarring. I was left feeling unmoored, grasping for a theological anchor to reconnect with my deepest spiritual self.

I believe this response was rooted in care, based my loved one’s keen awareness of the devastating effects of the last Trump presidency on the most vulnerable among us, and a reality-based fear of what another term could mean.

Still, this response politically bypassed a moral and spiritual crisis that is no less real than the political predicament in which we find ourselves. Indeed, our chaotic political realities are symptomatic of our spiritual distress as a society. 

Ever since that conversation, I have wondered:

Where, exactly, can we give voice to our moral injury?

All along Biden’s campaign trail, those who dared give voice to the plight of Palestinians were summarily dismissed. There has been no public forum open to receive our expressions of moral injury, no repository for our collective grief.

The baton pass to Vice President Kamala Harris has produced a rising tide of enthusiastic support, including the largest fundraising day in Democratic party history. Yet all the smiling, self-congratulatory identity politics in the world cannot erase the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, nor the morally injurious policy that systematically dehumanizes the collective that dares to care for them.

The candidate has changed. The need for our moral injury to be aired has not.

There will be no moving forward together without seeing, hearing, and acknowledging one another in our state of moral injury. An honest account is required of the profound violence done to our collective soul as a result of the violence perpetrated against our siblings in Palestine. In the absence of such sacred spaces, we will continue to perpetrate real harm.

As always, this harm is most acutely experienced by those who already bear the brunt of trauma. For example, Palestinian therapist Maria Fakhouri recently described the ways in which Palestinians and Arabs in the West have had to mask their grief in the workplace:

She writes:

“We’ve grown so horrifically accustomed to the physical violence we see in Palestine every day, we don’t often have the time to talk about the emotional violence done to our people in Western countries. As Brown people, we are expected to conform to the apathy of our workplaces. We are forced to repress our emotions for 8 hours a day to ensure that we can continue to pay our bills and provide for our families. This too is violence.”

There is a way to make space for moral injury to be expressed — a liberating alternative to this soul-suffocating cycle of silence and suppression:

Lament.

Dr. Tamisha Tyler, professor of theopoetics, defines lament as “naming the dissonance between the world that is and the world that should be” and grief as “the experience of loss within that dissonance.” Lament leads us through this grievous gap via contemplation, confession and public witness, providing soul wounds with fresh air to begin to heal. In our moral distress, lament leads us to God, toward our communities, and finally into the world.

Contemplation: Get still to hear the cry of your soul.

Our souls have a story they are longing to tell — of hurt experienced and longed-for healing, of distress and dreams of new possibilities. The Psalmist writes, “In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help.” (18:6a, NRSV). In naming the pain of our moral injury, we are inspired by the Divine dream of a world made whole. God dwells with us in these liminal spaces, as we bring our grief over the dissonance of these days to light.

Our capitalistic world is built for consumerism, not contemplation. Soulful self-examination threatens the foundations of the imperial project, which depends on our remaining singularly focused on survival. It is a daunting task to face the depths of our moral injury — a practice for which we are not equipped by our culture. But as James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It is a humanizing act to courageously face the moral and spiritual crisis produced by the violence we have done, the violence we have failed to prevent, and the violence done on our behalf.

Confession: Tell the truth with others

There is tremendous power in naming within community a shared moral injury. One of the confessions used in my Episcopal tradition says, “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” The evil done on our behalf can be hardest to see and easiest to keep at arm’s length. Together, it becomes possible to more accurately and courageously name the disconnect between whom we have professed ourselves to be, and our participation in systems that propagate harm in our name.

Confession takes place in good company. In it, we remember our ancestors who knew that the world was not as it should be and acted on this insight with courage. We recall our friends whose example of integrity inspires us. We look to those communities targeted by empire who have resisted their oppressors at great cost. From them we catch courage to say, as PCUSA minister Bruce Reyes-Chow recently wrote, “I, for one, will not sacrifice my soul to save a system that was not built for my ancestors, me, or my descendants.”

Confession in community is soul-sustaining — even life-saving — because it combats the shame of isolation. It beats back the toxic lie that we are the only ones grieving and guilty. And it can help us see more clearly the community around us of other people who are willing to be rigorously honest with themselves. It is with such communities that we can go on to organize in order to bring our convictions and our actions into closer alignment.

Public witness: Lament as protest

Taking public our stories of moral injury saves us from the imperial illusion that we are helpless. Participating in public lament gets us out of our heads and outside of ourselves to make visible to those around us the devastating effects of continuing along with the status quo.

Raising our voices to weep and wail over the evil that has been done on our behalf is highly affective, and this emotionality often makes people uncomfortable. But this focused emotional energy is also what renders it effective.

From mothers lying on city streets to highlight the suffering of women in Palestine, to guerrilla theater portraying death marches in front of the White House, to the devastating self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell, to Christians for a Free Palestine shutting down the Senate cafeteria with cries of “Woe to you who eat while others go hungry,” lament has been a powerful tool of protest.

I am convinced that Biden stepped down because of widespread lament. The DNC can ascribe it to his debate performance, or poor polling. But there’s no denying that the movement for justice in Palestine has galvanized the spiritual imaginations and public action of millions of people in this country, including a significant portion of the progressive base. The party knows it cannot win without those who courageously call upon our leaders to see and respond to the harm done.

This lament mustn’t lessen. Our public witness of lament is our most powerful resistance to the lie — propagated by both parties — that violence is necessary. Lament makes room for truth to breathe. Lament is the pathway to life.

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“Your empathy is your superpower,” my loved one said to me, as we processed our initial exchange a couple of days later. As destabilized I felt by his response to me, the intensity of my response had been emotionally overwhelming for him.

This being human is hard. Staying present to one another in the thick of lament is achingly difficult. Yet it is in the with-ness of true compassion that healing becomes possible. Listening with love to the lament of others can lead us into concern, care, and courageous work for the change that alleviates suffering.

To stay human in these times, we must take moral injury seriously and insist our loved ones and our leaders do the same. We must see the soul wounds of those crying out for justice as real and worthy of care. We must pause to prioritize within ourselves the preciousness and dignity of human life over power-hungry politics.

Courageously confessing the ways we have caused harm, and the ways in which harm has been done on our behalf, we must bring our lament to the halls of power, conveying that as long as our siblings suffer, so do we.