SECSOR: Community and Good Company
Moral Formation and Reintegration in United States Service Members and Veterans”
By Logan Martin Mehl-Laituri, Independent Scholar
Southeastern Commission on the Study of Religion Annual Meeting
March 8, 2014 (Atlanta, GA)
ABSTRACT:
The rising numbers of military and veteran suicide is cause for alarm and consternation in America. A new paradigm is being advanced in order to understand the unique nature of the psycho-spiritual effects of these modern wars. We now have the phenomenon of “Moral Injury” at our disposal, but it can be improved upon. This paper will argue that the concept of moral injury must always account for the moral self that is the subject of injury, and specifically that this self emerges within a particular context of moral formation. For the purpose of concision, this paper will focus on Christian moral formation (especially liturgies and hagiographies) and how American culture (especially literature and cinema) often informs, contrasts, and complements such a formation. By illuminating the formative processes at work, practices and resources for moral reintegration after war will also be explored.
Since as early as 2007, it has been public knowledge that the United States military and veteran populations have been experiencing an epidemic of suicide. Initially, veterans were found to have been taking their own lives at a rate of 17 every day. Beginning in 2009, active duty suicides during the last years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan outnumbered combat fatalities and in fact became the leading cause of death in the military community. More recently, the rate for veterans has been found to have increased to 22 per day while active duty suicides still average about one every day. The issue of military and veteran suicides has made headlines in virtually every major print and television news outlet nation wide.
While Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can explain some of what we are seeing, a new dimension for understanding this epidemic has emerged. Several Veterans Affairs clinicians have ignited new interest around what they have called “Moral Injury,” which they claim results from “perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that violate ones religious or moral training and beliefs.” Numerous religious leaders have similarly invested time, money, and energy into this phenomenon by creating an interfaith “Soul Repair Center” at Brite Divinity School in Texas.
However, the language of injury can be unnecessarily constraining, and does not venture to describe the necessary body upon which such an injury could be inflicted. This paper will argue that the concept of moral injury must always account for the body that is subjected to said injury, and will argue specifically that this body emerges out of the particularity of its own moral community and formation. In other words, the moral formation of individuals must be accounted for in order to more fully comprehend, and subsequently diagnose and treat, moral injury.
To explore such a formation, we must look to experiences gained by individuals that constitute the “moral and religious training and beliefs” acquired prior to injury. Such experiences would include catechesis and other religious doctrine and ritual, but also the cultural experiences that inform, contrast, or complement them. Moral formation does not occur in a vacuum, but within a broader context with its own ceremonies, liturgies, and hagiographies.
This paper will explore how media, especially film (for its breadth and popularity), acts to form moral agency in American Christians. The United States is especially fruitful for this project, as it is often popularly conceived of as a “Christian nation.” Our fighting forces themselves often rely upon a religious lexicon that simultaneously creates and reinforces explicitly Christian imagery. Herein lies both he problem and the solution, for the loss of meaningful moral discernment and formation has produced profoundly uninformed expectations about combat that cannot possibly equip men and women in their early 20’s for the lived experience thereof.
This evacuation of contemplative and thoughtful language in public discourse and media has created deep rifts in moral coherency and integrity between what is collectively believed and what is individually found to be true by those who do eventually see combat. This catastrophic stratification of ones moral self is what I call moral fragmentation. It is this schism between perception and practice, between popularized accounts and embodied reality, which frequently gets brought up in VA mental health clinics and veteran “rap sessions.” In the second half of this paper, I will explore moral fragmentation in greater detail, utilizing anecdotes from both research and experience to explore this phenomenon.
I will also incorporate discussion of moral reintegration of persons into full participation within congregational life. After all, fragmentation does not have to carry the day. While some frameworks like “moral injury” and Soul Repair are helpful, they are also deeply flawed. More generic language of “pain” is more widely applicable and less problematic. In the military community, after all, the language of “injury” is heavily stigmatized, and military personnel and families must retain primary authority in determining the terms of their own rehabilitation, moral or otherwise. For moral reintegration after war to occur, communities must mine their own traditions for the stories, people, and rituals that tell a more coherent story about war and its effects. Dark memories must be given space to be heard without judgment and absorbed into the life of the congregation in which our veterans find themselves, recognizing that the Christian faith is a complicated story of both joy and grief. “Where two or more are gathered,” after all, joys are shared, but so are our burdens.
Thankfully, the work to stem the epidemic of suicide has begun in earnest in secular places like the VA and in religious places like the Soul Repair Center. This paper intends to widen the foundation upon which work like theirs may rest, leveraging every possible resource that our common history as Americans or as Christians can offer.
Moral Injury – Origins and Assumptions
Those newspapers whose headlines tell us of the epidemic of soldier suicide will, with increasing frequency, also earmark this phenomenon being called “moral injury.” Despite its recent resurgence, it actually has a lengthy trajectory worthy of interrogation and helpful in correcting certain shortcomings built into its history. So we will begin with an etiological exploration of where this idea originated by beginning with how it is currently understood.
Defining moral injury can be difficult since the communities and authorities doing so are diverse and multivocal. However, if there is any general consensus on the matter it implies that moral injury is the effect of violating some basic notion of right and wrong. The following definition, from the press release for a conference on moral injury held just days ago in the capitol my home state, gives us a good starting point in understanding this phenomenon. It states;
Moral injury results from having to make difficult moral choices under extreme conditions, experiencing morally anguishing events or duties, witnessing immoral acts, or behaving in ways that profoundly challenge moral conscience and identity and the values that support them. Moral injury is found in feelings of survivor guilt, grief, shame, remorse, anger, despair, mistrust, and betrayal by authorities. In its most severe forms, it can destroy moral identity and the will to live.
In this description, we see the multifaceted nature of moral injury and the repercussions of failing to identify and treat this “injury,” which springs from morally problematic acts themselves, but also mere proximity or perception thereof.
The major force behind educating the public about moral injury, and the convener of this particular conference, is a group that operates out of Texas Christian University. The Soul Repair Center is a product of the vision of two theologians, Rita Nakashima-Brock and Gabriella Lettini. Coupled with the center’s founding was their 2012 publication of Soul Repair: Recovery from Moral Injury After War. Relying on interviews from multiple soldiers and veterans, they describe moral injury as a “violation of core moral beliefs… the result of reflection on memories of war or other extreme traumatic conditions… [that] comes from having transgressed one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs.”
We find in their definition a brief gesture toward identity, toward the self in a particularly moral framework. But they do not venture toward any kind of exploration thereof, only hint that the moral nature of identity is somehow inherent to the moral nature of this injury. Their broad understanding of moral injury comes as the result of a two-part conference that they convened in 2010 and called The Truth Commission on Conscience in War. The first part, held in the historic Riverside Church in New York City in March to commemorate the 2003 invasion of Iraq, featured expert witnesses and firsthand testimony about the moral costs of war upon human beings. The official report from the truth commission was released at the second part, held at the National City Christian Church in Washington D.C. on Veterans Day of that same year, represented the convictions of over 70 commissioners present in the New York city gathering. The Truth Commission official report called for interfaith and ecumenical education about moral injury and for taking seriously theological common ground, like Just War theories, as preventative measures for PTSD and moral injury. Indeed, the mission of the Soul Repair Center, currently co-directed by Brock and retired chaplain COL Herm Keizer, therefore focuses on public instruction about moral injury in religious communities.
Brock and Lettini co-convened the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, a major two-part event that followed from discussions provoked by two very important events that predate the Soul Repair center and book. The first was the 2008 documentary Soldiers of Conscience, which received official sanction and cooperation from the United States Army to record and interview numerous service members, both dutifully active soldiers and conscientiously objecting veterans. The second, and more relevant to our discussion here, was the 2009 publication of a proposed treatment model for moral injury by numerous Veterans Affairs clinicians and academics across the country. Brett Litz and six other authors penned “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy” which was shared with Brock and Lettini prior to its release in the academic journal Clinical Psychology Review, and subsequently influenced their definition of and interest in moral injury. An evolution of the overall definition is evident in reading the peer-reviewed article, in which Litz et. al. see moral injury as “the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
Finally, both Soul Repair and Litz’ “moral repair” take initial cues from Jonathan Shay’s landmark books on combat trauma, especially his 1995 Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Cited for coining the term “moral injury,” Shay seems to equate it with a “loss of humanity” and a “betrayal of what’s right,” the latter he returns to frequently throughout his monograph. Careful to make the case toward the end of his treatise for a universal “species ethic,” Shay situates his argument firmly within a collective understanding of right and wrong, indicting the society that sent soldiers off to war only to turn their backs to them upon homecoming. A marked difference from later frameworks, Shay fundamentally assumes the individual injury is only possible within a community responsible for dictating what’s right such that it can be betrayed in the first place.
To be fair, the inclusion by Litz et. al. of “social impact” and “bearing witness to” includes non-agential experiences and locates at least some causality external to the self, and therefore indicates a communal dimension of moral injury. Similarly, the definition proposed by the Soul Repair paradigm, makes mention of “witnessing” and “authorities,” referencing the necessarily corporate agency of this particular kind of injury. But it is very hard to find in their bodies of work a robust and critically engaged exploration of the self in moral terms. Consequently, the moral self upon whom an injury might be inflicted remains troublingly ambiguous. After all, moral persons reside within a social context, and external factors are not just necessary for injury, but also for the creation and sustainment of the moral self. (For example; from where do Litz’ “expectations” arise? In what context do Brock and Lettini’s “conditions” and “identity” exist?)
The externality of these morally injurious factors must not be overlooked, and not only because injuries (with the exception of self harm) are often inflicted by someone or something outside the self, but because the self is socially constituted and maintained. Formation and context is therefore critical to evaluate in this regard. Indeed there are important methodological distinctions between essentially therapeutic approaches of the treatment models espoused by Litz, Brock, et. al. and discussions of character and virtue from which Shay seems to draw and which are far more instructive for any discussion of things moral.
After all, Litz is formed by the clinical community and evidences instincts and assumptions relative thereto. The paper of which he is primary author assumes certain clinical realities and leverages particularly clinical resources like “working definitions, research in related areas, conceptual models, and intervention suggestions.” Brock and Lettini, trained in gender and theology (Brock from Claremont in 1988, Lettini from Union in 2004), are similarly products of their own contexts as women trained in liberative theologies combating the invisibility of minorities in normative (western) discourse by elevating the significance of perspective and voice. They therefore understandably propose recuperative models based on dialog, requiring “people willing to listen compassionately and carefully to the moral anguish of veterans.”
However, 14 years before Shay’s very helpful and obviously influential works, another model was proposed that warranted comparatively little attention. In 1981, Peter Marin wrote in Psychology Today not of moral injury, but “Living in Moral Pain.” Writing against a TIME Magazine article that suggested veterans were primarily victims in need of more social expressions of gratitude, Marin instead insisted that soldiers’ moral pain erupted out of out of a “profound moral distress arising from the realization that one has committed acts with real and terrible consequences.” On the surface it seems his definition is not far from similar ones later proposed by Shay, Litz, and Brock, but he continues in his article to cite the “inadequacy of prevailing cultural wisdom, models of human nature, and models of therapy to explain moral pain.” Marin already took issue as far back as 1981 with clinical and pyscho-analytical models in which the self is “seen as separate and discrete from what surrounds it – an isolated unit complete in itself, relatively unaffected by anything but inner or familial experience.”
Compounding the problem, according to Marin, the nature of our particularly American context is such that “the past is escapable, that suffering can be avoided.” Implicit in models of moral or soul “repair” are assumptions that, like machines, we can be restored to a condition more near our original packaging. We hide our scars and refuse to accept new forms of normal. The combined effect of the assumptions such models necessitated, of the autonomous self on the one hand and the evacuation of painful experiences on the other, had the effect of depriving veterans of what Marin insists is “precisely the kind of community and good company that make it possible for people to see themselves clearly.”
Like Shay, Marin turns to archetypes in (western) mythic figures in order to think through identity and character, but not to the same effect. Tellingly, Marin relies not on Achilles and Odysseus, as Shay does, but on Oedipus – in a direct shot across the bow of psychoanalysis’ founder, Sigmund Freud. Freud, Marin claims, diagnoses the Oedipal complex poorly, for the epic archetype “suffered not so much because of what he had done, but because of what he had learned he had done.” Indeed, Marin finds that life’s best lessons and most powerfully transformative resources for moral pain are rarely couched in therapeutic or psychoanalytic frames, helpful as they might be, but in stories and narration, since identity forming and sustaining narratives are “more apparent in literature than in therapy.”
Moral Formation & Reintegration - Character in Context
If I may summarize the miscarried emergence of moral injury, it would be to identify an otherwise healthy start in its focus on character and the use of culturally significant literature as Shay does but to lament its adoption by the psychoanalytic community with its inherent aversion to the social reality of human being and knowing. Litz and Brock, in their persistent use of the language of “injury” reveal a distance from the very service members they otherwise hope to help. For discussions of “injury” are highly stigmatized within the martial fraternity and any talk thereof immediately displaces itself from any internal deliberations by military communities. Shay himself only uses the term sparingly, and substitutes “injury” with other words, like moral “survival” or “luck,” and “violation.” Indeed, the departure from early categorizations of combat trauma within character and virtue frameworks is noteworthy and not without significance. The earliest commentators, including Marin, instead focus on moral “pain,” a much more inclusive term which is not nearly as provocative for soldiers and veterans to adopt. After all, pain is merely weakness leaving the body, and can be experienced even by Congressional Medal of Honor recipients.
The Christian community, on the other hand, similarly has a very short history of speaking of moral distress in this way. After returning home from battle, medieval knights were required to purify themselves, as Israelites of old were. Though the prior century had the term evolve in secular discussions quite quickly and at times eclectically, moving from “soldiers heart” and “shell shock” to “operational battlefield fatigue” and “posttraumatic stress disorder,” the church already has a narrative architecture in place for the constellation of acts performed in war. The word they gave to this was not “injury,” or even “pain,” but often simply “guilt,” describing the violence inflicted in battle as some proximity to or manifestation of sin.
Tragically, Christian culture and syntax has failed to form mature moral agents such that they may identify and engage decisively with sin. Lewis Mudge, in his book The Church as Moral Community, astutely observes that “from nursery school to adulthood a secular formation reinforced by peer groups at every age, reflected in the media, and needed simply to function in an advanced industrial society, functions far more forcefully than anything congregations can provide.” Indeed, mass media provides disturbing case studies in the de-evolution of thoughtful and morally coherent discourse into rhetorical exhibitionism; we need look no further than movies like Sergeant York and We Were Soldiers, phrases like “God bless America” and “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out,” or books like The American Patriot’s Bible and A Table in the Presence. The symbolism, rituals, language, and often beliefs of church-going Americans themselves, though passed off as Christian, frequently fail to express anything distinctive from the world around them. Born into a culture and its rhetoric, the Church too often cannot tell itself apart from the world it is called to be in but not of. This is caused by ineffectual formation within distinctively Christian communities whose identity too often reflects the interests and expectations not of Christ, but of the world.
Along with this dislocated identity comes descriptions of combat that fail to account for the actual lived experience thereof and thereby fail to properly form young men and women in the martial virtues necessary to operate within the moral framework required by war. Cases in point abound, but we shall look, etiologically as before, at two in particular, both from the realm of cinema. The first involves a 2009 film that took both Best Picture and Best Director, the first awarded to a woman. Military and civilian communities perceived Katheryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in Operation Iraqi Freedom, very differently. Upon its release, the veteran community largely agreed with their civilian counterparts that it was a gripping theatrical presentation, but objected to its portrayal of war. One of the film’s main subjects in development, EOD expert SFC Jeffrey Sarver, sued Bigelow et. al. for defamation of character. Many other EOD service members voiced similar concerns that the film was drastically unrealistic in its main character’s swaggering disavowal of military procedures and values, and who was at times an endangerment to unit cohesion and safety. Sentiments amongst the military community at large suggested that, were a character like Blaster One to actually exist, would endanger the lives of his team as well as bring discredit to his unit.
Movies that depict violence cavalierly and without coupling it with its social and moral consequences do a grave disservice to the consciences of the men and women we eventually send to fight our wars. That one can reference “John Wayne” and, in the United States at least, simultaneously evoke war films such as The Green Berets, The Sands of Iwo Jima, or The Longest Day, illustrates my point well. The movies themselves are less injurious than the character Wayne frequently conjures up – the same swaggering solitary stoic figure that Blaster One evokes. Whereas the character this kind of figure presents presumes to be virtue, the actual people it fictitiously represents openly declare to be vice.
Credibility, however, should rest on the latter – the moral authority to speak of war belongs not to paid actors, but soldiers themselves. The fog of war has formed their identities and we would be wise to follow the path they have forged before us. The character of the moral guides we choose should matter immensely. John Wayne, for example, infamously swaggering and stoic in his many starring roles in war films, was too young for WWI and by the time WWII rolled around, he was Republic Studio’s biggest moneymaker and was made ineligible for the draft by being classified 2-A (“in the national interest”) with the all too eager help of his studio. Jimmy Stewart, on the other hand, left a lucrative movie career and sought help from his studio to get into the Army Air Corps, where he had to fight against being used as a USO propaganda tool or as a spokesperson for war bonds. After coming home from the war as a full colonel, including numerous combat missions over Europe, he remarked brazenly to LIFE Magazine, “no more war pictures.” The first picture he did star in after his wartime service centered on the story of a young man who wanted to end his own life, which directly contravenes the kinds of movies in which “The Duke” decided to invest himself. It’s A Wonderful Life continues to be a classic movie and seems prophetic in light of the epidemic of real soldier and veteran suicide committed by my own generation and (more statistically significant) the generation influenced by John Wayne and his monetarily beneficial but malformative manliness.
Tragically, it is these stories that persist in our culture and even in our churches. They dominate our perception of war, and overpower those images the Christian community is otherwise engaged in providing its members. Hilde Nelson, a philosopher in the narrative school of thought, describes what she calls master narratives as those “stories found lying about in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared understandings… often archetypal, consisting of stock plots and readily recognizable character types.” These overpowering paradigms are used “not only to make sense of our experiences, but to justify what we do.” They are “repositories of common norms” that “exercise a certain authority over our moral imaginations and play a role in informing our moral intuitions.”
The problem with these master narratives about war is that one cannot be both swaggering and stoic while being realistic about the humbling and horrific experiences gained in modern war. Blaster One was not just diseased himself, addicted to the very thing that destroyed him, but is at the same time a disease threatening the moral imagination of communities both martial and ecclesial. The assumptions inherent in these types of characters and stories infect the hearts and minds of those we prepare for and send to war. Indeed, Mudge claims,
Certain moral principles or materials - both from the Christian tradition and from the worlds in which church members live - are drawn into congregational life and used to help build the sacramental household. These perspectives begin to participate in the moral substance of the body. They combine to produce the assumptions and principles that go into actual formation.
Secular symbolism, inclusive of what Mudge calls “principles or materials” and what Nelson terms “stock plots and readily recognizable character types” informs Christian assumptions about war, its legitimacy, exercise, and moral content (or lack thereof). Dangerously young men and increasingly women are masculinized into superficial forms of life that cannot withstand the profound moral pressure impressed upon them in combat. Wayne’s infamously unstrapped helmet would, as soon as a new recruit hit the drill pad, be violently smacked off their head by any self-respecting drill instructor interested in preserving the lives of his charges once they arrive at the frontlines; “better a cracked skull than a mothers broken heart” I often overheard my own drill mutter frequently.
Churches have at least some distinctively theological formative instincts, and it is important to explore the “moral and religious training and beliefs” which, upon violation, might produce something like a moral injury. The various doctrines of Just War are helpful in this regard, though they rarely are aired out in times of any significance, like on September 12th, 2001 or in March 2003, for example. In fact, Litz, Brock, etc. would find it encouraging fact Saint Augustine, the ancient theologian often cited as being responsible for the conception of Just War, did not intend his scattered remarks about war to be leveraged for use as a “public policy checklist,” as Daniel Bell recently laments in his Just War as Christian Discipleship. Instead, Augustine’s remarks were not issued as some public intellectual, but as a pastor responding to the deeply personal letters written by soldiers such as Boniface, Marcellus, and others; not blanket statements, but specific responses to individuals within particular contexts. Leveraging Augustine’s employment of Cicero’s legalistic martial justifications misses the forest for the trees.
The failure of churches to engage meaningfully with those it participates in sending to war creates morally fragmented individuals. The stories we tell in our culture and in our churches do not reflect the actual lived experience of war and those we send are catastrophically ill prepared to participate conscientiously therein. Without taking extreme care to identify what war actually requires, without forming agents morally equipped for the extremes war produces, the best our communities can do (and have been doing) is to repair the effects of our own shortcomings. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If Basic Anatomy classes are prerequisite to those like Intravenous Therapy or Cardiac Rhythm Interpretation, how is it that we claim to be able to identify moral “injuries” without first identifying the moral body upon which they might be inflicted?
To return to the methodology proposed by Marin and practiced by Shay, churches must mine their own literary (i.e. scriptural and liturgical) traditions for exemplars of moral persons worthy of leading the way to just wars. They will be those who descended to the hell of war and returned to tell the tale not only with their lips, but with their lives. Such individuals also abound, and are surprisingly well known, though not for their military service. Saints like George, Martin of Tours, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Ignatius of Loyola, and Franz Jagerstatter would all prove deeply informative for Christian communities wrestling with how Christians respond proactively to wars and rumors of war. Many such individuals paid dearly for following their own moral and religious training and beliefs, but rarely did so in keeping with our own modern partisan impulses. George, the patron of such sprawling empires as England and Portugal, faced not a dragon (as the Golden Legend recounts fictitiously) but a gaggle of pagan Roman governors who insisted he confess Apollo as the son of God. Martin, famous among pacifists for refusing to fight, only did so after a full military term of over 20 years. Joan, the poor maid of Orleans, in her trial insisted she preferred the standard to the sword and favored not leading with weapon in hand, but with guidon held high. Francis and Ignatius, each once formidable knights, who both in their own way turned their back on war while persisting in their martial virtues. Francis would today be diagnosed with PTSD for hearing voices and wandering the streets at night. Ignatius’ order was modeled on the obedience instilled in soldiers and to this day is referred to “God’s Marines.”
To recover a sense of moral selves in particularly Christian contexts requires we base our identities in scriptural and hagiographical literature. Virtue and character based frameworks, which Shay and Marin are quite amenable to, assume we need exemplars, moral guides in the life of faith upon which to base our own self-understanding. Identity formation occurs within a community of fellow individuals engaged in constant construal or re-imagination of the moral universe based upon shared symbolism, rituals, and belief. According to Mudge, the challenge for the Christian is “to live authentically both within the church’s reshaping of the moral imagination and among the corrosive pressures of political life.” *Nelson describes identities as “complex narrative constructions consisting of a fluid interaction of the many stories and fragments of stories surrounding the things that seem most important” to a person or community over time. * Simultaneously a political and social formation, becoming a moral being takes place within a particular context within a community of shared values and convictions. Insofar as therapy is unable or unwilling to venture into moral and societal territory, it is inadequate for the task of genuine and lasting moral formation.
It is not responsive therapy the church needs, but proactive adoption of its own extant liturgical resources. Rather than using Just War preemptively as justification for certain wars, churches would more accurately employ Augustine’s gifts as elements to form morally robust and coherent agents prepared to engage in necessary evil with restraint and compassion for one’s enemies. Tragically, few Christian communities took responsibility for such doctrinal frames, and the stories of Just Warriors going AWOL to avoid violating their own “religious and moral training and beliefs” were distressingly sparse. The church needs not stories about John Wayne, but John of God, known as the patron of booksellers, he was also a Portuguese soldier whose combat guilt led the saint to scream incoherently in the middle of a sermon by John of Avila. As soldiers today are, he was committed to an asylum, where he heard God tell him to tend to the infirm, insisting upon remaining at the hospital even after he was discharged, eventually becoming its superintendent. A distinctively Christian participation in war is not expressed in stories like the one featuring Blaster One, but the one described by Bill Mahedy, whose own writings wrestle profoundly with the nature of God in the midst of combat in Vietnam. With Marin, Mahedy dismisses modern therapeutic assumptions by saying “The incessant search for a perfectly fulfilled self is nothing more than undisguised narcissism.” The emphasis on the individual within what he calls the “phoniness and inner emptiness engendered by the therapeutic mind-set” can double back and cripple a veteran’s moral integrity by failing to account for what Marin called “the kind of community and good company that make it possible for people to see themselves clearly.”
Unclouded by embellishment and unencumbered by national or political self-interest, it is to this liturgically inclined literature that the church may turn to form its people more robustly, for, as Mudge rightly claims, “moral formation in the church seeks to generate communities in touch with the world and all its problems yet shaped in a daily telling and retelling of the Christian story.” It is people like these, integral to the community of faith, that have what Mudge calls the “formational density needed to enact the faith in its integrity.” Their firsthand stories can carry the moral content of war far more reliably than others outside the Christian cannon.
Bibliography:
Brock, Rita Nakashima and Lettini, Gabriella. Soul Repair; Recovering from Moral Injury After War. Boston: Beacon, 2012.
Nelson, Hilde (as Lindemann-Nelson). Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2001.
Litz, Brett, et. Al. “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review, no.29, (2009): 695-706.
Mahedy, William P. Out of the Night; The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets. Knoxville, Tn.: Radix Press, 2004.
Marin, Peter. “Living in Moral Pain.” Psychology Today (Nov. 1981): 68-80.
Mudge, Lewis S. The Church as Moral Community: Ecclesiology and Ethics in Ecumenical Debate. New York, NY: Continuum, 1998.
Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
