‘I was Born into Moral Injury’: Viral Implications of COVID-19 on Healthcare Chaplaincy

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic quickly ruptured into pandemics. The multivalent stressors of the virus have laid bare the vast inequalities of the United States. These inequalities are brought to the surface in healthcare, and staff are confronted with three realities: caring for patients and families, caring for interdisciplinary colleagues, and caring for oneself. However, within the reality of COVID-19 is the pandemic of anti-Black racism as a virus continuing to kill the vulnerable. Chaplains, tasked with providing holistic care, must harness an intersectional analysis for the ways in which the most vulnerable and marginalized are impacted by these pandemics. Utilizing the hermeneutical framework of moral injury, I argue that COVID-19 reveals a betrayal of our societal moral values and a revelatory clarion call that our silence in the face of anti-Black racism is complicity with its mendacity. To heal these wounds, solidarity becomes an embodied intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• healthcare chaplaincy
• moral injury
• intersectionality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names and stories are composite narratives to protect the identities of those involved.

2 Cultural Studies Theorist, Stuart Hall, often described the work of culture and politics as a conjuncture. For Hall, the work of the cultural theorist is to analyze ‘the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, how did they arise, what forces are sustaining them, and what forces are available to us to change them?” Hall, “Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” 312. The Conjuncture takes seriously that social change is bound up within historical conditions.

3 Hye Jin Rho, et al., “A Basic Demographic Profile of Workers in Frontline Industries,” 3.

4 For additional theological interpretations of moral injury and pathways to recovery, please see Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War and two edited volumes: Exploring Moral Injury in Sacred Texts, ed. Joseph McDonald (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017), and Military Moral Injury and Spiritual Care: A Resource for Religious Leaders and Professional Caregivers, eds. Nancy J. Ramsay and Carrie Doehring (Saint Louis: Chalice Press, 2019).

5 Shay, “Moral Injury,” 183.

6 Litz et al, “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans,” 697.

7 Nash, “Because We Care – Risk for Moral Injury During the Covid-19 Pandemic,”.

8 Thornton, Broken yet Beloved, 123.

9 For in-depth caregiving competencies within intersectionality, see Ramsay, ‘Resisting Asymmetries of Power,” 83–97; “‘Intersectionality’,” 453–469.

10 Coates, Between the World and Me, 10.

11 Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, ix.

12 Jones, “The Loud Silence of Racism,” 6.

13 Smith, The Relational Self; Miller-McLemore, “The Human Web: Reflections on the State of Pastoral Theology,” 366–369.

14 Thornton, Broken yet Beloved, 124.

15 Jones, “The Loud Silence of Racism,” 6.

16 Hutt, “A Manifesto: Black Spiritual Care in American Hospitals,” 191.

17 Rushton et al., “Invisible Moral Wounds of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” 125.

18 Hutt, “A Manifesto,” 190.

19 Carucci and Praslova, “Employees are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises,”

20 Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hand, 186.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua T. Morris

Rev. Joshua Morris, Ph.D., teaches introductory and advanced spiritual care courses in hybrid and on-campus platforms at seminaries across the United States, and serves as a pediatric chaplain and also as a chaplain in the United States Army Reserve.