Resilience as the Relational Ability to Spiritually Integrate Moral Stress

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.