The Wound That Shows You Care

Homily prepared for "The Wound That Shows You Care" Spiritual Feast – March 8, 2026

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Welcome, friends.

Today is International Women's Day. It is not lost on me that women have always been among the first to say not in my name. Across wars, across policies, across the long history of other people making decisions with devastating consequences, women have shown up and named what was being violated. Gold Star Mothers. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Reproductive rights activists. Anti-war organizers. Women who looked at what was being done in their name, with their tax dollars, with their silence, and said: no. Not this. Not me.

And today, March 8, 2026: women are striking and marching again, in France, in the USA, acting on the IWD theme "Rights. Justice.Action.".

We are a part of that lineage today.

I want to talk about something that doesn't always get named correctly. We call it a lot of things — burnout, despair, outrage fatigue, anxiety. But I think what many of us are carrying right now is something more specific, and it has a name.

Moral injury.

Moral injury was first named in the context of soldiers: people who were made to do things, or who witnessed things, that violated their deepest moral commitments. But it belongs to a much wider human experience. Moral injury is what happens when the world breaks faith with a value you counted on. When something you believed was a guardrail turns out not to be there. When you are made complicit,  through your taxes, your silence, your inability to stop what's happening, in harm you would never choose.

It is not the same as guilt. Guilt says I did something wrong. Moral injury says something wrong was done, and I am somehow inside it, and I cannot get clean.

It is not the same as despair. Despair says nothing matters. Moral injury actually says the opposite. You can only be morally injured by something that violated a value you hold. The fracture is proof that the value is real. The hollow place, the wound, is in the shape of your integrity.

And it is not helplessness, though it can feel that way. Faithfulness is still available to you, even when action feels impossible. Even when you cannot stop what is happening. You can still be in relationship with your own values. You can refuse complicity where you can. You can witness. You can name. You can gather in communities like this one and say together: this is wrong, and we know it is wrong, and that knowing matters.

Not hope. Faithfulness.

I want to be clear about what I mean by that distinction, because I think it's important. Hope says it will get better. Hope requires a belief about the future. And right now, for many of us, that belief is hard to summon, and maybe it should be. Premature hope can be a way of not fully reckoning with what is real.

Faithfulness asks something different. Faithfulness says: I am committed to these values regardless of outcome. I will stay in relationship with what I love and what I believe even when the world violates it. I will not let the violation teach me that nothing is worth protecting.

You can be faithful without being hopeful. You can grieve fully and still show up. You can be broken by breaking things and still, deep in your bones, know that your love matters, what you hold as sacred matters.

Not in my name is an act of faithfulness. It doesn't fix anything. It names what you hold.

I was talking with my husband recently, turning over all of this, the weight of it, the question of what we're even supposed to do. And I said, maybe the question is: what would Mr. Rogers do?

He thought about it for a moment. And then he said: Maybe we are Mr. Rogers.

I've been sitting with that ever since. Because he's right, isn't he? Fred Rogers was a person who looked at a frightened, fractured world and decided his job was to be a safe place in it. To say, over and over: you are worthy of love. You don't have to be anything other than what you are. There are helpers. There is goodness. I'll be here.

He couldn't fix the world either. But he was faithful to what he believed about human dignity, every single day. And dang, but his act of loving his corner of the world faithfully made a difference... a difference that resonates through the years.

The baton has been passed. Not just to us as individuals, but to all of us who believe that every person is worthy of care. Who believe that parents should be able to send their children to school without fear, no matter where in the world they are. That no one should be disappeared. That families should not be separated. That killing should not be done in our name.

We can carry it with honor.

Not because we know how it ends. But because we know what we love. Because the wound we're carrying today is the proof of it.

May you let your fracture be witnessed today. May you find in your injury the shape of your integrity. May you be faithful, not hopeful, but faithful to the work that must be done, to what you love, to all you hold holy. And may you know you do not carry it alone.

Grounding meditation that goes with this homily: https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2026/03/grounding-meditation-fracture-that.html