Abstract
Resilience is an outcome of caregiving relationships that help people spiritually integrate moral stress. Moral stress arises from lived theologies and spiritual orienting systems—patterns of values, beliefs, and ways of coping energized by shame, guilt, fear of causing harm, or self-disgust (some of the so-called negative moral emotions that cut people off from social support). Spiritual care compassionately brings to light these life-limiting lived theologies of shame and fear shaped by intersecting social systems of oppression like sexism, classism, and racism. Spiritual care helps people co-create intentional theologies that draw upon goodness, compassion, and love—moral emotions that connect them to the web of life. This interdisciplinary approach to moral stress draws upon the living stories of moral stress and resilience by feminist theologians Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Valerie Saiving.
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Notes
Haidt and others study the social dimensions of emotions—their potential to make people isolate from or connect with others. Moral emotions like shame, anger, fear, disgust, and anxiety are labelled negative because they tend to isolate people, whereas “positive emotions such as gratitude, interest, and love” (Fredrickson et al. 2003, p. 366) move people to reach out and connect with others. Moral psychologists explore the social and moral functions of emotions that function to either bind people together or isolate people (Haidt 2003).
Moral stress can be understood as a kind of religious struggle, as recent research on religious struggles suggests. Exline and Pargament’s scale measuring religious struggles has two subscales that are useful for measuring moral stress as a dimension of religious struggles: the moral and ultimate meaning subscales. The moral subscale is self-focused rather than God- or other- focused and predicts “a greater tendency to attribute a specific r/s [religious and spiritual] struggle to the self. . . . Moral struggle also predicted slightly less anger toward God and less attribution of responsibility to God for a specific r/s struggle. These connections make sense if people are blaming themselves rather than externalizing blame to God. The other two indicators of divine struggle (religious fear and guilt, instability) focus largely on concern about one’s own misdeeds and perceptions of God’s disapproval toward the self….Our main prediction about the Ultimate Meaning subscale was that it would predict more effort in searching for life meaning. We also reasoned that a sense of ultimate meaning would offer some protection against doubt. We thus expected that higher scores on Ultimate Meaning (i.e., more struggle about meaning) would predict more religious doubt and more doubt about whether God exists. These hypotheses were supported” (Exline et al. 2014, pp. 216–217).
I use the term intentional theology in a way similar to how the term lived theology is used by the Project on Lived Theology based in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. According to the website http://livedtheology.org/ , the project’s mission is “encouraging younger theologians and scholars of religion to embrace theological life as a form of public responsibility.” The website describes lived theology as the theology one hopes to live out in one’s practices.
In this issue, LaMothe (2014) describes social imaginaries of faith in ways similar to the way I describe intentional theologies co-created within spiritually integrative relationships. These social imaginaries of faith “serve as interpretive frameworks that provide meanings, values, and beliefs that justify our motivations and actions in resisting Others.” LaMothe’s use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s early years illustrate King’s moral stress of feeling hatred towards Whites as he tried to emulate the Christian social imaginary of faith emulated by his parents and their church.
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Doehring, C. Resilience as the Relational Ability to Spiritually Integrate Moral Stress. Pastoral Psychol 64, 635–649 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0643-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0643-7