Anxious Experts: Disaster Response and Spiritual Care from 9/11 to the Climate Crisis 9780812298437

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Anxious Experts

CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND DISASTER Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological, and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in different contexts. Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes in the series examine the ways that planning, science, and technology are implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including analysis of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare, conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.

ANXIOUS E XPERTS Disaster Response and Spiritual Care from 9/11 to the Climate Crisis

Joshua Moses

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moses, Joshua, author. Title: Anxious experts : disaster response and spiritual care from 9/11 to the climate crisis / Joshua Moses. Other titles: Critical studies in risk and disaster. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Critical studies in risk and disaster | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031891 | ISBN 9780812253825 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812225136 (paperback) | ISBN 9780812298437 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Disaster relief—Psychological aspects. | Crisis management—Religious aspects. | Disasters— Psychological aspects. | Disasters—Religious aspects. | Mental health counseling—Religious aspects. | Disaster victims--Mental health services. | Expertise—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HV553 .M6696 2022 | DDC 363.34/8±dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031891

For Amber Huntley, Talya Mae Huntley Moses, Lita Moses, Daniel Moses, and for the memory of my father, Stanley Moses.

What will you forsake? I’ll forsake everything but the tree. The pilgrims call it the tree of life. —Alice Notley (In the Pines) . . . no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become. —Toni Morrison (“The Dead of September 11”)

CONTENTS

Introduction. “There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad”

1

1. A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise: A Brief Genealogy

24

Interlude. “Talking to the Dead”

46

2. Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response: From Anxious Individuals to Anxious Organizations

54

Interlude. “The Wisdom of the Body”

86

3. Mechanics of the Spirit

93

Interlude. “God Speaks Through Me”

114

4. From Neuro-­Spirituality to Global Transformation of Trauma

124

Conclusion. The Ends of Anxiety

150

Notes 163 References 171 Index 181 Acknowledgments 189

INTRODUC TION

“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad”

To add your own disorder to disaster Makes more of it. —Wallace Stevens (2015:326)

In September 2001, I embarked on my doctoral studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. About a week after the semester began, as I was exiting the F subway stop on Houston Street and Second Avenue, I was nearly hit by a minivan racing downtown at top speed, sirens wailing. I stopped at the corner, cursing the driver. It was then that I noticed dark smoke rising from downtown. Several people were gazing up intently. “What building is that?” I asked with mild interest. “The Trade Center,” the man next to me responded. Minutes, maybe seconds later, with a flash and ground-­shaking boom, the second tower burst into flames. I stood on that corner for what seemed like an hour, but may have been only fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave the small group of people that had formed. We gazed dumbfounded—until a wild-­eyed man covered in ash, like a grim messenger, made his way toward us. He maniacally said that he had seen people flinging themselves from the burning buildings. “They were falling to the ground in flames.” Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. I made my way to my friend Marc’s apartment in the West Village. Luckily, he was home, and we went to a nearby café, where we ate apple pie and whipped cream—in retrospect, an appropriate choice for a day that has come to simultaneously represent both U.S. vulnerability and fortitude.1 In dazed silence, we watched the television coverage with the other anxious-­faced customers. That day, I was forced to

2 Introduction

confront a new understanding, one that expanded the very possibilities for what could be real in the world I inhabited. I do not remember much of what happened later that day, or the day after. I am not even quite sure where I slept that night. I do remember that there was a sense that the world had shifted in ways that I felt unprepared to navigate. Like a legerdemain, the world had played a trick and swiped away the narrative I had previously inhabited. Two days after the towers collapsed, I found myself ill-­equipped, wearing sandals just blocks from Ground Zero, as I volunteered with the Red Cross, handing out masks and water bottles to rescue workers and other officials. The site was mayhem—gray and unrecognizable. At that point, the officials had not established control of the area, and as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing, you could walk down to the smoking pit and catch a glimpse of the smoldering heap of what had once been one of the tallest buildings in the world, wade through the miasma (which later was found to cause cancer in many rescue workers), feel the heat of the flames, and, with an odd sense of knowing that you were part of history, envision what you might say to your grandchildren when they came to interview you about where you were on 9/11. It was one of those moments when crises of the self and history collide, where what was taken to be real shimmers, flickers, and transforms, becoming bodily felt (for those of us lucky enough to avoid a direct hit). Twisted stomachs, tightened chests, and racing minds create an unusual sense of awareness. Such feelings are a kind of prolepsis that indicates how anxiety operates— where time and events seem to threaten the coherence of the self and where awareness (and awareness of awareness) flutters and buzzes. Anxiety can be experienced as a slow-­motion, filmic, out-­of-­body sensation, where one can see oneself from afar, amid a swirl of events, a minor actor in an ungovernable world—a vertiginous self. Disaster, as the epigraph by poet Wallace Stevens suggests, occurs on different scales, from the psyche to the entire planet. These scales are not unconnected. One of the tasks of disaster spiritual care and mental health response is to limit the reverberations. But the world being what it is and humans being who we are, such a task inevitably meets with obstacles—and one’s own disorder may become the disorder of the world and the world’s disorder may become one’s own. A hazard not only for disaster experts but for anyone possessing a body and mind. I am keenly aware that the 9/11 attacks were not among the worst tragedies to befall humankind. They pale in comparison to the horrors of colonialism,



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 3

slavery, imperialism, and white supremacy, whose lasting legacies we are still grappling with, as well as other disasters around the world that are increasing in frequency and intensity. Yet, it was the most dramatic experience of my life. It is not every day that one walks to school on a late-­summer day only to watch as two towering columns of steel are vaporized, along with the people inside them, followed by a near-­military occupation of Lower Manhattan and subsequent invasions of two countries, resulting in a violence that persists now, twenty years after the attack. While it is often difficult to date the beginning of a long-­term research project on spirituality, expertise, and disaster response—where the actual interest began, where the questions came from, how circumstance led to circumstance, leading to a more defined path—I trace the origins of this book to that now-­infamous day. After all, without the attacks, I might now be in India, studying local participation in politics in the nascent state of Uttarak­ hand—my original graduate school project. Instead, like those with whom I have worked, forces in New York City, caught in the shifting patterns of history, moved me along beyond my control. A chance encounter that led to a research job working with the New York State Office of Mental Health provided me with entry into the research that would become this book. But as I went deeper into the topic, the questions surrounding disaster spiritual expertise increasingly became my own. Disasters make apparent many things that are otherwise only intimations in our daily lives; they reveal where psyches, communities, economies, and physical infrastructures have frayed or been worn down and decimated in ways that are often concealed in the day-­to-­day (Barrios 2016). Disasters also clarify how implicit ideas of selfhood have critical practical consequences, not only for healing fractured spirits and psyches but also for imagining and enacting forms of communality. They illuminate connections and disconnections in striking and sometimes painfully jarring ways. As Brecht (1965:30–31; quoted in Hewitt 1983) hauntingly observed, “We only dimly realise how dependent we are in every way in all our decisions. There’s some sort of link-­up between it all, we feel, but we don’t know what. That’s why most people take the price of bread, the lack of work, the declaration of war as if it were phenomena of nature: earthquake or floods. Phenomena such as these seem at first only to affect certain sections of humanity, or to affect the individual in certain sectors of his habits. It’s only much later that normal everyday life turns out to have become abnormal in a way that affects us all.”

4 Introduction

Normal everyday life. The steadying intricacies of worlds we take for granted. How we expect planes, more or less, to run on time and seasons to follow predictable patterns. When the creeping recognition that the dependable quotidian may be no more than tenuous human fantasy finally becomes real, we have come to inhabit anxiety as a way of life—or anxiety has come to inhabit us. Anxiety creates entire social worlds, and is not simply an individual psychological state of unease. From our individual psychological experiences to the explosion of experts and organizations meant to quell this anxiety, we live in a world where anxiety provides a primary hue of experience—of a world limned with the sense that something else is about to happen. The attacks of 9/11 opened a passage into a New Age of Anxiety, a period characterized by a deep and disruptive sense of uncertainty about a way of life and its future—the onset of which intensified preexisting dynamics in how expert knowledge was forming around disaster religious and spiritual care. The disruption has increasingly become characterized by a sense in which the safety associated with progress and the progress associated with safety (for particular kinds of people in the United States) appears increasingly battered. The ability to imagine a world where things continued in familiar ways (let alone continued to improve) became, like houses built on the edge of an Alaskan sea cliff, less tenable. I argue that this anxiety acts as a constitutive force, creating new kinds of expertise and ways of acting in the world, new sets of relationships and organizations. September 11 was a pivotal moment, catalyzing an existential unease already prevalent, even though some of us had only partially acknowledged it. There is a common American techno-­optimist line of thinking in response to the unknown. Science and technology, like a prince in a fairy tale, will rescue us from the uncertainties we face. We are just around the corner from a striking new discovery that will make everything okay. Those in charge, those with expertise, will figure it out. Experts (engineers, biologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists) have their steady hands on the tiller. Disasters can— or should—be addressed through state policy. But as Grewal (2017:43–44) writes, “If the much vaunted superiority of the Western liberal welfare state was, in some part, based on its claim to provide security to its populations and its ability to enact humanitarian rescue, the Katrina images signaled that the US state could not or would not fulfill this task.” In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and in the face of mounting threats of the climate crisis, it has become harder and harder to imagine that things will simply be “figured out,” and faith in certain progress—or the belief that things will continue on in predictable ways—acts as a form of theological-­magical thinking in itself.



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 5

While a world at any time is raveling and unraveling—and for many marginalized peoples, the world has long been riven with spectacular, quotidian forms of violence and dispossession that render illegible many of the navigational capacities associated with living—we (in the United States at least) are in an intensified period of disruption, one with a persuasive cultural narrative of collapse. Currently, the United States is anxious about almost every dimension of its life, from its founding principles to the tenability of its previously taken-­for-­granted daily-­ness, anxious about its own ability to persist (Lear 2007)—and in some cases, wondering about its own value. For many, myself included, 9/11 marked an entry into a world where an old order began its dissolution—of both the sense of American dominance and the sense that the world was ordered in ways that were predictable. September 11—and subsequent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina— were products and intensifiers of a “culture of calamity” (Rozario 2007), where large-­scale disaster has become an increasingly prominent component of American life. The historical moment that began this work continues to tell us something important about our understandings of the murky terrain of spirituality, trauma, and anxiety more generally—and may even gesture toward possibilities for a different kind of politics of the self, an uncertain sustaining communality. By this, I mean that the moment was not just a moment. It continues to echo into the twenty-­first century and may have set the stage for the seemingly permanent Age of Anxiety many of us find ourselves in. At the very least, the moment provides insight into a turning point in U.S. history, which has significance for this seemingly interminable unsettling planetary time. In this book, I look at the ways individuals and institutions embody contradictions surrounding mental health and spiritual care—as well as their views on disaster-­related distress—as they craft professional identities and create new forms of knowledge and credentialing following disasters. I worked with mental health professionals and people from religious backgrounds involved in disaster response—from clergy and chaplains to social workers, psychiatrists, and first responders. These individuals inhabited and embodied a long history of ideas and practices of how people understand and respond to distress. Ideas from previous eras, sometimes supporting practices antithetical to their original intent, have forged novel ecological niches for the application of expert knowledge today. Those I worked with, some knowingly and others less so, drew on an array of scientific and religious tropes to support their claims to expertise. In particular, they emphasized their claims to be experts in meaning. That is, spirituality was often framed as the universal human need

6 Introduction

for meaning, and disaster spiritual caregivers as experts in helping to provide meaning for those who had lost their way. At the heart of what I argue in this book is that a politics of the self plays out in real time in stark ways during and after disasters. By “politics of the self,” I mean the ways our very ideas of what comprises a self, which we take for granted as the underpinning of our identities, are tightly interwoven with histories, politics, and structural conditions (Taylor 2007; Williams 1989). What we take to be our intimate feelings and psychic and spiritual experiences have histories and are inevitably political. I argue that by studying this intersection of mental health and religion in the context of the New Age of Anxiety, we learn something critical about a world-­ending structure of feeling that continues to echo throughout the United States and beyond.2 We learn something about the role of particular forms of expertise in defining meaning and the consequences this meaning may have for how we imagine contemporary politics of the self and our relations to the larger world. However, this focus on “meaning” is only one possibility for imagining how people might live within and against the psychic fragmentation of disasters. In other words, such an expertise implies a politics that seems natural, where meaning is construed as the inevitable basis of spirituality and disaster-­related mental health. This book provides some insight into how psyches, selves, therapies, and spirits are part of histories and thus can be transformed, as well as insight into how we might imagine new languages, tool kits, diagnostics, and anti-­manuals for futures where humans and nonhumans can thrive (Ray 2020; Myers 2020). What I learned during this time has become increasingly relevant for this current moment of upheaval. We need to understand these different forms, and formations, of expert knowledge—and possible alternatives to them—to aid us in grappling with the urgency of the climate crisis and other global threats, which demand new ways of understanding our place in the world.

Disaster Care Before and After 9/11 The literal meaning of the word “disaster” is “ill-­starred,” a clear reference to how human fates are tied to the otherworldly (Knowles 2013). In my fieldwork, “disaster” was typically used in its conventional meaning: a large-­ scale catastrophe with a discrete beginning and end, conforming to specific criteria of response and recovery.3 As Horowitz (2020:3) writes, “disasters



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 7

are less discrete events than they are contingent processes. Their causes and consequences stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine. Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility.” Clergy and religious organizations have served in disaster response throughout U.S. history, and religion has long been a crucial framing device of disasters.4 However, religious groups only recently gained a formal role in disaster relief. The American Red Cross was given a charter in 1905 by Congress to respond to disasters by providing shelter during famines, fires, and other catastrophes, but it was designed as a neutral organization, remaining independent of religious groups and politics. Before the mid-­1990s, there was no specific faith-­based organization mandated with providing spiritual care in disaster settings. This changed after several airplane crashes in the 1980s and 1990s led to congressional hearings over the responses of the National Transportation Safety Board and the Red Cross. Chaplains from several accrediting organizations were called upon to create the Spiritual Care Aviation Incident Response (SAIR) team, marking the novel formation of a dedicated spiritual response to disaster (Sutton, Graham, and Massey 2006). The SAIR team, however, was designed solely to respond to airline and transportation disasters. The original policy indicated that families had disapproved of the way airlines had handled the remains of victims and of perceived insensitivities toward families of survivors. It did not explicitly mandate religious and spiritual care, though many of the clergy I interviewed claimed that this legislation did, in fact, provide them with a legal and moral mandate. Mental health professionals have been responding to disasters in ways that parallel spiritual responses. Military psychiatry and psychology have long served as training grounds and laboratories for theories of stress and trauma (Shepherd 2003). However, despite the long history of military psychiatry, a unified field of disaster mental health has only recently emerged (Halpern and Tramontin 2007). As with its religious and spiritual counterpart, the field of disaster mental health comprises several different, sometimes competitive, forms of expertise.5 Organizing (sometimes) antagonistic experts under one roof results in inevitable chafing. September 11 provided the impetus for the interprofessional collaboration that was amplified by funds from the Homeland Security Act. These funds helped to create graduate programs and

8 Introduction

professional training in disaster mental health, consolidating this emerging expertise (Halpern and Tramontin 2007; Goldmann and Galea 2014). But what happened after 9/11 does not have a clear precedent in the history of disaster response. “Not only were the events of 9/11 beyond the reach of everyday language,” writes Seeley (2008:12), “but their psychological consequences also defied classification in the specialized categories of the mental health professions.” If the supposed experts on distress were inadequate, who then could be trusted? Who might have answers? The religious community was poised to seize the cultural moment and assert their historical claims to jurisdiction. And following 9/11—and later, Katrina—faith leaders intensified their efforts to systematically combine secular modern psychological techniques with religion and spirituality. The key difference in the way things were conducted pre-­and post-­9/11 lies at the level of organization and attempts at bureaucratic codification and systemizing. Previously, one could always have gone to a church for counseling following a disaster, and many organizations had chaplains associated with them, including the Red Cross and fire and police departments. But few trainings that dealt specifically with the needs of clergy working in disaster settings were available. After 9/11, clergy created disaster-­response modalities and organizational structures to support interfaith work. Following the attacks, the SAIR team was mobilized, and chaplains from around the country arrived in New York City to oversee the provision of spiritual care. The SAIR team screened more than five hundred chaplains between September and December 2001, after which the regional Red Cross office took over. Many of those involved with the original SAIR team have since become local and national figures in disaster religious and spiritual care, authoring books, heading organizations and departments, and providing training for clergy around the United States and beyond. A great deal of attention was paid to the mental health of firefighters and rescue workers, resulting in the Fire Department of the City of New York opening up a counseling department to respond to the mental health needs of their employees.6 As one of the commissioners of the fire department told me, “While they have often relied on chaplains, 9/11 showed the need for integrating chaplains and mental health and took away some of the stigma associated with firefighters using mental health services.” However, these new relationships were idiosyncratic and not easily tracked by government and social service agencies. Many faith leaders had training in psychotherapy and degrees in psychology, social work, or pastoral counseling (an expertise combining psychology, social work, and practical theology). But



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 9

there was no identifiable professional body nor an identifiable disaster spiritual care codified expertise. Ministers tended to know the individuals in their community who needed special care and could reach out to them during a disaster or could send community members to visit them when in the hospital. For at least several years following 9/11, government agencies and religious nongovernmental organizations tried to trace this burgeoning field of disaster religious and spiritual care. For example, in 2007, New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS), one of the organizations involved in preparing religious communities for disasters, sponsored a project to map all of the houses of worship in New York. “We’ve needed HOWCALM [House of Worship Communitywide Asset and Logistics Management system] for thirty-­ five years,” said Ken Curtin, a FEMA voluntary agency liaison, in a news release from NYDIS. “For disasters small or large involving the faith communities is essential. They hold valuable information. . . . Local faith organizations—churches, synagogues, mosques and temples—are an indispensable element in relieving peoples’ disaster distress. HOWCALM will bring practical information to people, through their houses of worship, both before and after disaster” (De Meglio 2007). The efforts to codify expert knowledge and professional identities related to disaster religious and spiritual care embody questions that go to the heart of a politics of meaning, which centers on questions of anxiety, spirituality, and discourses on trauma (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). These efforts also reveal critical knowledge about the self and our ideas and practices of reconstituting what we take to be disaster-­fragmented selves. By unraveling the development of this patchwork of expertise by understanding its threads in a historical and anthropological light, we can see how historically embedded ideas of distress contain tacit ideas of selfhood, which are undergirded by a politics that shapes how we organize responses to disaster, particularly their “psychological” and “spiritual” impacts. We are also able to see the ways in which ideas of selfhood and distress chafe against and reproduce forms of bureaucratic spirituality.

Bureaucratic Spirituality and Patchwork Expertise The formal research for this project began when the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the New York State Office of Mental Health hired me—under the direction of anthropologist Kim Hopper—to

10 Introduction

conduct interviews with religious leaders on post-­9/11 referral networks.7 How city, state, and federal agencies became interested in the importance of clergy in disaster response is an ethnographic story in itself. During my fieldwork, I attended conferences and trainings on religion, spirituality, and disaster (mostly in New York City); meetings of local organizations involved in disaster planning; and six training courses on spiritual care and disasters, each ranging from one to four days. As part of this research, I also entered a training program in hospital chaplaincy that consisted of clinical time with patients and classes in chaplaincy with Beth Israel Hospital North’s (now closed) Department of Spiritual Care. Because of ethical considerations, none of that material explicitly appears in this book, but the experiences have immeasurably informed my understanding of religious and spiritual care.8 Since many of the concepts and practices that underlie disaster religious and spiritual care were developed in hospital settings, the time I spent with chaplains and patients provided me with an enriched sense of the development of chaplaincy as a field. I participated in group exercises on diagnosing spiritual problems, learned the theory of chaplaincy work, and received direct supervision of my clinical hours with patients as a chaplain-­in-­training by a supervisor certified in clinical pastoral education. I conducted rounds and spent time with cancer patients and in the neonatal intensive care unit and went on to become a founding board member for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which developed training for end-­of-­life care. I also gained insight into the architecture of disaster expertise through the manuals, workbooks, and conference pamphlets I collected during fieldwork. In the disaster-­response world— both secular and religious—these documents are seemingly ever-­present, edited frequently and updated by national teams of experts. Of course, expertise is frequently defined through the codification of knowledge, and in practice-­oriented professional contexts without a manual, it is almost as if knowledge does not exist. Throughout the research for this book, I accumulated boxes of such documents. The Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience manual, described in Chapter 4, provides an example of such a sprawling document, contained in a three-­ringed loose-­leaf binder. It provides a template of knowledge for expertise in action—that is, a way to incorporate a whole set of principles into one’s professional apparatus in order to act “appropriately” in a given situation. Because the document deals with so many different issues relating to spirituality, trauma, disaster, and mental health, the text is frequently in a state of tension with itself. Everything from acupuncture to how to identify survivors of torture, from meditation and



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 11

trauma therapy to restorative justice, is included, representing a patchwork of ideas and practices that inform the disaster and trauma professions. Over the years that I have worked on this project, the research questions have changed. Initially, I was interested in interpretations of distress in a moral clinical sense—understanding the way clergy viewed disaster-­related suffering compared with that of mental health professionals. But as time went on, it became clear that I was seeing a change in how the relationships between religion, spirituality, and mental health were being framed and understood by those creating a new expertise—and that these changes were part of a much larger historical and cultural landscape. It became clear that what I was seeing was embedded in a very complex history of ideas about the body, self, and suffering, as well as in changing narratives about how distress is to be treated. This new expertise was shaped by what I call bureaucratic spirituality, a process whereby spirituality is morphed from a critique of techno-­rational interventions into its opposite: something not only legible to bureaucratic organizations, but part of their very structure. Institutions that are meant to be secular demand a particular kind of spirituality, one that at least rhetorically offers an alternative to the logic that governs these same institutions—but not too alternative.9 In the contexts where I worked, bureaucratic spirituality was embodied by a tendency toward spiritual diagnostics that drew from psychiatric nosology, the branch of medicine that deals with the classification of disease. Experts in this arena aimed to maintain this minimum spirituality to distinguish themselves from other cognate forms of expertise while at the same time trying to not look too different, too spiritual, or too unmodern. Spirituality, which was meant to provide an alternative to what people frequently described as the fragmented or mechanized versions of care, frequently resembled that which it aspired to provide an alternative to. However, as readers will see, this tendency belied a much more complex reality, where other forms of religious and spiritual expression were frequently present. Put differently: one of the key themes I discovered in my time with disaster and spiritual care responders was that they wanted to provide an expertise that looked different from secular mental health to make a claim for their role, while not being so different that it wouldn’t be recognized as a necessary form of expertise. They usually articulated this difference as their ability to provide meaning to victims of disaster. The combining of religious and secular psychological discourses and practices into a specific expertise on disaster—a bureaucratic spirituality— marks an attempt by clergy to reclaim their erstwhile historic jurisdiction

12 Introduction

over disaster-­caused distress, which they began to lose in the nineteenth century. But more recent scientific attempts to prove the health benefits of religion have offered a way for religion to regain some of its previous dominance. Adopting the language of science, ironically, has been one of the key tools that religious experts use to justify a role for spirituality in medical and other institutional contexts (Harrington 2005; Rosenberg 2007). What were once considered by many to be competing frameworks of religion and science now coexist in seemingly commodious ways—with boundary lines that are not so easily drawn in practice. Throughout this book, I use the term patchwork to describe what appears to be unlikely juxtapositions between these different vocabularies and practices—and to describe the central tension of bureaucratic spirituality.10 The expertise of disaster religious and spiritual care finds its niche amid these intersecting historical practices of religion, science, spirituality, mental health theory, and American tropes of optimism. Embedded in these various conversations are emerging ideas of selfhood. Novel scientific viewpoints, for example, have allowed for the coupling of religion and stress studies, and more recently have forged connections among resilience, optimism, and spirituality, stitching together a patchwork of knowledge and practices.11 This patchwork will be tested in new waters as we face growing threats from climate change and other global perils. But it’s not clear whether it will hold up—whether or not the particular kinds of meaning we have managed to patch together have within them the resources we require—or if we will require an entirely different sort of psychic apparatus.

Disasters, Resilience, and U.S.-­Style Optimism U.S.-­style optimism has played an important role in framing disasters, providing scaffolding for a variety of religious and psychological frames for experience. Since the early colonial days, people in the United States have seen in catastrophe and suffering a road toward salvation; struggles, in the view of European colonists, were considered blessings and an engine of both religious and material progress. The idioms that frame our lives reach back to times when religion was the dominant matrix in which suffering was experienced, working their way into secular settings as well as influencing religious narratives of disaster-­related suffering and redemption. Phrases such as “this is God’s will” or “a blessing in disguise” (Rozario 2007:33), though perfunctory



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 13

and hackneyed, point to the intertwining of the psychological and religious in the U.S. psyche. Contemporary views of disaster as a chance for emotional growth have close connections to biblical themes that find their way into self-­ help literature, which has been shaped by nineteenth-­century American religious movements, including New Thought and Christian Science. “Positive thinking” also has a peculiarly American history, one with roots in colonial American religion. The cult of positivity is intimately connected to conceptions of virtue and worth, as well as moral, spiritual, and economic growth.12 The contemporary interweaving of biology, religion, and positive thinking makes for a powerful combination when ignited by disaster. The compelling American vision of disaster as a chance for growth—be it religious, psychological, or economic—has widespread cultural resonance.13 Herb Trimpe, a chaplain and former comic-­book writer I interviewed, wrote a book about his 9/11 experiences called The Power of Angels: Reflections from a Ground Zero Chaplain (2006). An example of the kinds of religious and spiritual transformations that are perceived to emerge from disaster settings, this book charts his journey, Dante-­esque, as Trimpe developed a new relationship to his Christian faith and points to how people might view the “positive” side of disaster. What’s more, the idea of seeing the Earth as a larger Ground Zero is a compelling religious and ethical statement, an observation that has become more resonant as the climate crisis magnifies. “What if people addressed all of our current social problems with the urgency that they addressed Ground Zero?” writes Trimpe. He responds to his own query: “I think I saw religion at its best at Ground Zero, doing the thing it knows how to do best, working in total cooperation across theological lines. There were no programs or committees, just people for people. If we could only see our Earth as a larger Ground Zero, where tragedy happens daily, where the pieces of broken lives have to be put back together again, we might go a long way toward understanding and peace in the world. We are here on Earth for one another” (18). Many of the chaplains I interviewed echoed this kind of positive statement, while others highlighted the acrimony and conflict they experienced working in 9/11 recovery. Still, I found that religious people today are often prone to see disasters in light of what can be learned and as vehicles for moral and spiritual transformations. While Trimpe advances a progressive understanding of Ground Zero, his view resonates with a widespread style of American spiritual reasoning, one that bears a family resemblance to ideas of psychological resilience frequently found in disaster response. George A. Bonanno (2004), a well-­known

14 Introduction

researcher, defines resilience as the “ability of adults in otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, such as the death of a close relation or a violent life-­threatening situation, to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning.” There has been a massive growth in research on different aspects of resilience in recent years, including the relationships among the spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical, and community levels (Pargament 2001; Barrios 2016), and climate crisis has spawned new expertise that focuses on physical and human resilience. The move to the study of resilience was at least in part a corrective to what many critics saw as the over-­pathologizing of mental health researchers (Kirmayer et al. 2011). Much of psychological research, in other words, has focused on pathology, or defects, exposed by extreme events rather than the strength of communities and individuals. It is not a long distance from this view to linking spirituality and resilience with the physiology of human stress (Jackson 2016). Research on religion and spirituality easily blends with research on resilience because of the ways the concept of resilience scientizes ideas that have historically valued religious or moral characteristics: courage, hope, positive thinking, and belief in something greater than oneself. Many people I spoke with invoked resilience to argue for the positive impacts of religion as a way of coping with disaster or as a “protective factor” against post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or more enduring disaster-­related distress. The concept of resilience, in contrast to deficit models of human behavior, suggests a self that can recover—or even grow stronger—after disaster or loss without the aid of experts. It taps into a powerful and compelling discourse around American optimism, giving the concept widespread appeal in the disaster religious and spiritual care world. Clergy often used the term “resilience” to point to the utility of religion and spirituality in preventing psychological problems and allowing people to get through trying times. And studies of the benefits of religion and spirituality in the context of disaster mental health and recovery from traumatic experiences often cited them as factors in buttressing psychological resilience. One disaster chaplain explained, “Prayer creates resilience. It centers people and calms the stress response. When the body is stressed, it loses equilibrium; prayer and meditation can bring back homeostasis.” If extreme life events cause stress, and religion and spirituality reduce stress, it follows that to reduce stress one would do well to find a home in religion or spirituality. Prayer and resilience are linked through both psychological and physiological processes.



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 15

The existential questions that were so much a part of mid-­nineteenth-­century literary, philosophical, spiritual, religious, and psychological ruminations (Greif 2016) are transformed to more of a side effect than the existential abyss-­ gazing forces they once were. While the concept of resilience remains a powerful trope in disaster contexts, it has increasingly been critiqued for placing an undue burden of responsibility on individuals and communities (Barrios 2016). If conceived as “the ability to bounce back,” the concept of resilience reinscribes the essence of morally laden American ideals: the virtue of individual fortitude and related ideas of community self-­reliance. This particularly American sense of optimism can turn the concept of resilience into another form of bootstrap grit, one that places the burden of survival and well-­being on the individual rather than larger social structures. In doing so, it obscures the historical and structural dimensions of inequality. The concept can act as a smokescreen, concealing the true causes of American violence and anguish. For instance, communities that have experienced deep poverty and ongoing police violence are less equipped to deal with hurricanes than communities that have access to financial and political resources. A focus on resilience can elide the historical inequality and violence that fray the individual and community-­ level resources to handle more discrete disasters. The focus on resilience training, in other words, can act as an “anti-­politics machine” (Ferguson and Lohmann 1994). Neocleus (2012:192) writes, “For the one abiding political purpose of the culture of anxiety is to function as a police power par excellence in closing down alternate possibilities: we can be anxious about what might happen, but our response must be resilience-­training not mobilized politically.” Clarifying and ultimately unraveling these politics are critical for these radically destabilized times.

Climate Change and an Endless Age of Anxiety Creating prophylactics against the unknown, whether through ritual, prayer, or technology, is a pervasive characteristic of human social life. In the United States in the twenty-­first century, expert knowledge and expertise are the dominant ways we attempt to bring the inevitable unruliness of life under control. But our attempts are necessarily imperfect. Medicine cannot cure all diseases; psychiatry cannot medicate away all suffering; psychotherapy, whether cognitive behavioral, existential, or relational, does not dissolve all

16 Introduction

anguish. We cannot control storms and earthquakes, or even predict them with great assurance, and we cannot prevent violent attacks. Religion and spirituality pose questions about ultimate ends: Why are we here? What happens when we die? Why do we suffer? (Lurhmann 2000). These questions, a common argument goes, often become intensified during times of distress. The technical-­rational discourse of secular experts is not up to the task of dealing with ultimate questions (Giddens 2013), leaving an “existential deficiency,” a lacuna in expert knowledge (Harrington 2008:17). Spirituality and religion promise a different kind of experience, tied to a sense of wholeness and frequently tied to a sense of the past when things were better. In Max Weber’s foundational “Science as a Vocation,” meaning is famously separated from the fact-­driven pursuit of science. Weber, and the many who followed his lead, placed meaning in the ledger column of subjective experience, while science was viewed as the inevitable factful force of the modern era (Latour and Porter 1993) that would cow the old gods, and with their demise a reason-­filled world would follow. In Weber’s work, there is both lament over a loss of “meaning” and celebration of a heroic narrative to see the world as it clearly is—without the naive need for gods and “superstitious beliefs.”14 The struggles over spirituality, secularization, and mental health that I describe in this book are vital arenas of cultural and moral conflict. Indeed, these struggles will continue to intensify as the planet warms, disasters increase, and politics reflects the chaos of the weather. Studying disaster response has become an increasingly urgent task, as hurricanes, forest fires, and pandemics rapidly increase, filling the daily papers with images that stymie the mind’s ability to assimilate. Disasters produce novel organizational arrangements and structures that allow for a clearer view into the workings of the state, its relationships with expert knowledge, and the roles of religious and spiritual organizations both in daily life and during and after disasters. What I witnessed during the years following 9/11 and then Katrina (and continuing with more recent climate crisis events) was a sense that available forms of expertise were themselves unraveling. Perhaps this is always the case, but the intensity of this unraveling has become more apparent. Here, I argue—and will attend to these issues at greater length in the Conclusion—that we require an entirely different sort of response, one that forces a rethinking of the fundamentals of our orienting concepts, and even the layers beneath those: understanding the complexity of cultural processes—the layering of concepts such as spirituality and mental health, the lifting and folding and sedimentation of beliefs and practices over



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 17

time, opening up alternative paths. Such alternatives would not rely upon the diagnostics associated with mental health professions, or the quick-­to-­find-­ meaning versions of spirituality, but would look toward emerging versions of communality born of catastrophic politics but not subsumed by it. A kind of psychic tool kit for a new civilization is required. In recent years, mental health and spiritual experts, particularly in the United States, have increasingly and anxiously—if initially reluctantly— focused their work on the climate crisis. Experts continue to draw on historical precedents and past work in disaster settings to understand and treat climate change–related distress.15 But even more so than discrete disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the attacks of 9/11, climate change stretches diagnostic grids and mental health theories; even a superficial glance at news articles makes apparent that the crisis upends the very conditions that have supported particular forms of life on the planet, forcing an examination of fundamental beliefs about our world—and where it might be headed. In 2007, The Age of Consequences, a terrifying document coauthored by John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a controversial political figure, was released. Written in typical, bland think-­ tank prose, the report outlined three scenarios for our climate future: best case, likely, and worst case. It presciently declared that in the worst-­case scenario, we would see increased militarization of borders and disregard for the oceanic tide of future climate refugees. When I read the report, I figured that the worst, science fiction–type scenario would arrive toward the end of my life, or possibly soon after. This was among the many ways that I have been wrong. Looking back, I can see that I had the luxury to imagine there would be a time when we would figure something out, that someone would fix this problem. Though I believe that I had a fairly clear sense of enduring tragic disruptions following 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the reality of a warming planet took me years to assimilate—and I continue to struggle with admitting to the full reality of the climate crisis. I am struck anew almost daily by the demands of climate change—intellectually, psychologically, and ethically. I hear friends and colleagues ask, anxiously, “How did we get to this point?” Their sense of confounded fear and vulnerability is apparent in their voices and on their faces. And I am struck, too, by the ways in which many Americans have been living— the very idea of American prosperity—produce particular narratives of collapse (and anxiety) that obscure their own culpability in planetary destruction and violence. So perhaps the “how did we get to this point” question, when posed by more economically secure Americans, asks something more than I initially

18 Introduction

recognized, and some of the anxiety—some of my anxiety—has to do with the unraveling of a narrative about the very structures that made my life possible in the form that I have been living. In this sense, the ethnographic material here can be read through the lens of someone now in midlife approaching an earlier period in their lives with an altered sense of history and present. There are different forms of vulnerability, not solely threats to one’s physical body. A sense of vulnerability may not be exclusive to awareness of physical frailty. The ballast afforded by concepts, too, can turn out to be more ephemeral than one had imagined. A way of life can become anxious about itself, about its ability to persist, about the solidity of the concepts that govern its daily life (Lear 2008). These concepts can become ghostly more quickly than many of us would like to acknowledge. September 11 did not render the concepts that governed my world illusory, but it did open a crack in the edifice that I took to be reality. It opened up possibilities for an understanding of a “peculiar vulnerability” (Lear 2008) in ways that I had previously not experienced. In the early 2000s, I was only vaguely able to articulate the ways disasters were increasingly intertwined with climate change. For the most part, the conferences and trainings on disaster religious and spiritual care I attended back then, as part of the research for this book, only gestured toward this still vague and distant threat. It was still possible for someone to be dismissed as anxious or catastrophic for talking too much about climate change. But now things have changed. As we come to terms with the situation of a planet scorched for baubles and conveniences, many of us continue to rely on experts to soothe nightmares, provide ballast, and solve the problems we face—from cracked levees to battered psyches. Expert knowledge is devised to provide answers. Religion, spirituality, and mental health professions articulate ways to restore selves, sometimes from the edge of dissolution. But what if the readily available narratives provided by experts are inadequate and the experts themselves do not have the adequate expertise?16 Sometimes it becomes clear that the world one inhabits and the orienting signposts one imagines are rendered illegible. They are shown to be part of a mutually semi-­agreed-­upon conspiracy to make a world seem natural and immutable. What if, as I discovered in my travels in the post-­9/11 years, the experts are also baffled in ways that make their own unraveling apparent? And what if this recognition points to a deeper crisis in the kinds of available vocabularies of distress? What then? To whom does one turn? This pervasive anxiety is a defining psychic struggle of life in the long climate crisis. The surprise and anxiety associated with the loss of security for



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 19

those who had it in the first place (many of course did not) is the defining psychic problem in the time of climate crisis, adumbrated by previous disasters and their responses. When I began this project in the early 2000s, there was still some sense that what I have been calling the New Age of Anxiety was just another cycle within the broader historical pattern of ups and downs in the national (and global) mood.17 It was the end of the “dot-­com boom,” and it was possible to imagine—at least at times—that those of us in the educated middle class were just experiencing a momentary sense of unease and that we would somehow figure things out: that it would be okay in the end, that someone was in control, and that 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and climate change were anomalies on a trajectory toward a better future. Progress would be made. It had to be—because that’s what’s supposed to happen. The world would come to its senses, eventually—and would make sense again. The daily life I had grown up in—reliable and safe—would continue on indefinitely, with only slight adjustments. Crocuses would predictably arrive in March, and there would be frost on Halloween, or shortly after. But now it seems ever clearer that the world we took to be the world isn’t a world meant to last (as with any world). We require new ways, and new languages, to live with the realities of the climate crisis and what now appears to be an endless Age of Anxiety. The climate crisis poses very different narrative challenges than many other catastrophes. And this requires a different kind of poetics, perhaps a different sort of spirituality, if in fact this lexicon has within it resonant resources. Experts in the modern era are tasked with solving problems, with making the unruly legible and manageable. Anxiety, by definition, eludes decipherability and a clear path through brambles of uncertainty. Anxiety drenches, overwhelms. The vertiginous sense that experts themselves may no longer have the tools to address the very problems those tools are meant to address is a peculiar form of modern anxiety—when the sense of predictions, control, and solutions promised are outstripped by reality. In other words, is it possible for the language of mental health—or spirituality—to allow these inextinguishable terrors to exist alongside tools for living with them?

Anxious Experts Some attempts to answer the question of how to live in and through disaster—as well as the limitations that arise from bureaucratic spirituality and patchwork expertise—can be found in the work I did among disaster spiritual

20 Introduction

care responders chronicled in these chapters. The chapters describe how different people tried to navigate these issues, drawing from a wide and disparate range of orienting concepts and practices. Each of the chapters suggests a different pathway into disaster expertise and the ways individuals integrate scientific knowledge, spirituality, and religion to understand and treat disaster-­related distress. They show how the patchwork nature of expertise is embodied and stitched together in the lives of practitioners. They also depict how individual biographies, particularly as they relate to life traumas, play a critical role in claims to expertise. Traumatic experience was often transformed into a form of expertise in ways analogous to forms of religious and spiritual suffering, found particularly in Christian narratives. The interludes comprise mini-­chapters that describe different disaster-­response practitioners I encountered. They provide a sense of how individual biographies intersect with disaster and ecologies of knowledge and expertise. The interludes, then, connect to the other chapters through the theoretical concepts that the individuals embody. While linked to the chapters, they provide a bridge between and among them. Chapter 1, “A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise: A Brief Genealogy,” tells the story of disaster religious and spiritual care and the different streams of knowledge and practices that led to its current development as a discrete expertise. The intensifying connection between religion and medicine has emerged from both scientific sites and narratives in popular culture over the last sixty years or so. This chapter asks how spirituality and trauma were reshaped in the post-­9/11 years and embodied in expertise. It also tells the story of how a particular group of people embodied historical conversations about what it means to live in a world of instability—and what kinds of expertise are most suited to putting people back together. The chapter provides the theoretical and historical framework for understanding how disaster spiritual care weaves together scientific and religious discourse to create a new form of expertise. It provides a framework to understand how individuals and organizations make use of a wide array of metaphors, modalities, and vocabularies to organize their efforts and provide an account of themselves and their importance to disaster-­response efforts. The first interlude, “Talking to the Dead,” focuses on Frank, a fire department chaplain involved in 9/11 recovery work. Frank employed a therapy called induced after-­death communication (IADC), which combined psychological and spiritual concepts into a technology of trauma healing. His work represents that of a contemporary disaster expert, a “healer for a new



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 21

age.” Frank points to the ways in which various forms of spirituality are integrated into mainline Protestantism in the context of disaster response. His use of IADC also articulates both the integration of “science” and spirituality, and some of the theological and organizational tensions that adhere to these hybrids. IADC sits in a long tradition of divinations for contacting the dead, but is clearly representative of its historical moment, with its particular religion-­science hybrid. Chapter 2, “Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response: From Anxious Individuals to Anxious Organizations,” focuses on the development of organizations involved in disaster religious and spiritual care in New York City. These include NYDIS, Church World Service, Disaster Chaplaincy Services, and the Red Cross. I show how individuals and organizations weave together in the context of disaster spiritual care careers and how the experiences of individuals shape organizational dynamics. Integrating spirituality and bureaucracy in disaster made for tensions on the individual and organizational levels. I witnessed conflicts centered on questions of professional boundaries, access to resources and power, and theological differences. The chapter argues that anxiety and trauma played an essential role in the formation of disaster spiritual care, linking individual experience to the creation of organizations and structuring the political dynamics among individuals and organizations I spent time with. The chapter highlights the tensions that many of the people I worked with experienced as they navigated the requirements of bureaucratic organizations and faith and spirituality in disaster response. The second interlude, “The Wisdom of the Body,” follows Rose, a bodyworker involved in disaster response, and provides an example of what I call minimal spirituality. Her work was not framed as part of a particular religious tradition but rather combined contemporary visions of trauma and healing framed by a broad spirituality rooted in body-­centered therapies. Rose’s embodiment of minimal spirituality offers one key way in which mind/body medicine becomes a fellow traveler with disaster religious and spiritual care providers. In other words, her invocation of the spiritual to define her work in disaster contexts, and its relationship to twentieth-­century mind/body medicine, shows the malleability of “spirituality” and its efficacy in providing a justification for many different forms of expertise under one roof. Chapter 3, “Mechanics of the Spirit,” focuses on my fieldwork experience in trainings for disaster chaplains, including the pastoral crisis intervention (PCI) of critical incident stress management (CISM). CISM has strong ties with fire departments, police departments, and the military, and it has been

22 Introduction

at the center of debates over the efficacy of disaster and trauma debriefing methods. This chapter shows how a training philosophy designed to meet the needs of large bureaucracies melds mental health practice with theology. These trainings embody tensions between religious and spiritual perspectives on the one hand and secular models of crisis care on the other. CISM, like my experiences with Frank in Interlude 1, points to the mercurial boundaries—how “rational” facades of religious-­spiritual expertise, attempts to justify secular-­oriented disaster spiritual expertise, frequently mutate into that which they seek to distance themselves from. The third interlude, “God Speaks Through Me,” tells the story of my conversations with a woman who identified herself as “the Prophetess.” The Prophetess provided one of the most forceful oppositions to the bureaucratic techno-­rationalist vision of disaster response that I encountered. Her vision of herself as a healer, a conduit for God, and a designer of trauma trainings was unique among those I encountered, because she made no attempt to conceal a form of religious practice that was antithetical to the bureaucratic settings that she worked within. Whereas others might have moved back and forth between bureaucratic spirituality and other “less rational” forms of expression, the Prophetess was clear that she was invoking the spirit. Further, as an African American woman, the Prophetess clearly saw traumatic experience as historical, bodily felt, and intertwined with her sense of spirituality rooted in historic experience of slavery and white supremacy. Chapter 4, “From Neuro-­Spirituality to Global Transformation of Trauma,” focuses on two trainings that I attended that drew on different theories of mental health, religion, and spirituality to envision forms of expert knowledge and training, and each provides an example of how spiritual practices and trauma are interwoven. These trainings portray a range of possible patchworks for relationships between mental health professionals and faith leaders and the defining of spiritual expertise. Unlike CISM’s PCI training described in Chapter 3, the trainings in this chapter point to less “mechanistic” approaches. Both trainings, in different ways, wrestle with the needs and requirements of meaning in spiritual expertise and disaster mental health response. They also show how expert knowledge, through trainings, spreads throughout the United States and beyond. The Conclusion, “The Ends of Anxiety,” draws together the central arguments of the book while confronting the currently unfolding climate crisis. I look back at the years that have followed my initial research, reflect on the forms of disaster spiritual response that I encountered, and grapple



“There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad” 23

with possibilities for a different kind of spiritual politics. I argue that disaster religious and spiritual care exemplifies a key tension that persists in the way many of the attempts to deal with climate-­related anxiety are structured. While there is much to be learned from previous disasters, it has become increasingly urgent to think in radically different ways about the kinds of spiritual mental health modalities that are being offered—and the kinds of political work they do to structure meaning within frameworks that are usually conceived as belonging to the realm of secular mental health. What forms of emerging ecological-­psychic-­spiritual hybrids might offer sustaining tool kits for psychic communality?

CHAPTER 1

A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise: A Brief Genealogy

A new science of disaster relief must include treatments that go beyond the current models pitting one set of needs against another. Instead, new models must link the mind and body, recognizing that the resilience of one affects and depends on the resilience of the other. —M. Laurie Leitch, New York Times, May 31, 2005

Adam, a Russian Orthodox priest in his thirties, worked at Ground Zero as a chaplain, providing spiritual counseling to 9/11 recovery workers. He had a short beard and wore dark robes and a large silver cross, characteristic of his faith. When I asked him about the difference between trauma and religious and spiritual problems, he said, “Oh, it’s very clear. There’s a line where something moves from a spiritual crisis to trauma, which is in need of mental health treatment.” I was surprised to find this sense of confidence and seemingly exaggerated clarity about how to distinguish between religious/spiritual distress (questions of faith or loss of faith) and trauma (the realm of secular mental health theories and practices). But the more I talked with clergy, the more I heard similar sentiments. A common narrative of modernity suggests that humans have become increasingly disenchanted. Scientific reasoning has vanquished the old gods and spirits (McCarraher 2019).1 We have lost a connection to nature, to community, to a world where humans could converse with stones, animals, and spirits—an interconnected way of being and understanding that characterized what many understand as dominant beliefs in premodern human communities.2 As Josephson-­Storm (2017:304) dramatically narrates, “The age of



A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise 25

myth is allegedly over, the gods have died, and vibrant nature has been subjugated, and instrumental rationality and mechanistic materialism rule in their place.” But if this is so, how to account for the persistent needs of the spirit, particularly when the reliable sources of everydayness fragment? One can think of what I describe here as an example of the ways expertise draws on different kinds of knowledge to justify its role, including disparate historical sites that often appear contradictory, and, tied together, how such expertise can assume the aura of coherence—and possibly authority. What I have come to call the patchwork of expertise (Harrington 2009) points to how these seemingly disparate forms of knowledge can be housed within a shifting edifice. This patchwork view belies a progressive, linear narrative of knowledge, where humans are moving from the fog of irrationality to the rational.3 Instead, much like a quilt made from pieces of fabric from different times, the patchwork of expertise does not follow a clear, linear logic but instead links together what fits the needs of expertise in particular historical moments. Thus, forms of expert knowledge jump across time and professional fields in unexpected ways that shape institutions, identities, and experiences. Disaster spiritual care is not just a religious adjunct to mental health. It has an awkward history, entangled with disaster mental health expertise—and the history of mental health practices more generally. At stake with patchwork expertise are the ways shifting boundaries and reworkings of older concepts with new and emerging assemblages expose critical issues about social understandings of shattered selves, souls, and psyches, and provide for their restitution—and go to the very core of what it means to make meaning. Patchwork expertise is not without its tensions, as experts attempt to mark boundaries and uphold forms of authority. Many of those I spoke with seemed to be trying to preemptively counter any suggestion that they were encroaching on the “turf ” of mental health professionals, yet they also seemed anxious about being perceived as ignorant. They embodied a history of struggle between religion and mental health professions, one where the former was seen as “losing” the fight over definitions of suffering, distress, and even disaster and death—a shift from the cure of souls (the province of religion) to the cure of the psyche (the province of psychology; Ellenberger 1981). Also, for many religious experts, spirituality represented a form of wholeness and care that had been marginalized, particularly in disaster response. Mental health had become firmly rooted in science and medicine, the realm of modern, rational experts who were to banish the “child-­like illusion” of religions to a prior developmental stage, where they belonged.

26

Chapter 1

Humans would face the sobering reality of a world without gods, but at least they could take solace knowing they were marching forward toward a world where technology and predictability would improve their lives. This struggle had put faith leaders on the defensive, explaining a sense of insecurity that I often encountered, particularly in regard to questions over how to “diagnose” and treat disaster-­related distress. But disaster religious and spiritual experts had also developed their own answers—drawing, in some cases, from the discourse and practices of secular mental health. I trace this knotty history back to the end of the nineteenth century, outlining the kinds of expert knowledge—including neurosciences, biopsychiatry, and psychodynamic therapies—employed to establish disaster religious and spiritual care as a legitimate expertise. This historical path reaches back to narratives that frame ideas of self, suffering and distress, secularization, and what has been called resacralization or re-­enchantment: the reemerging forces of the sacred, spiritual, and religious. As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-­first century, spiritual-­scientific hybrids continued to morph in response to shifting scientific, cultural, and historical landscapes. While institutional religious practice continued to decline (Wuthnow 2005), evidence for the mental health benefits of spiritual practice amassed: “Reducing stress is a kind of spirituality,” one minister told me. For the practices I observed to have taken root, and for statements such as this to become common, a new assemblage of the scientific, religious, and spiritual was required (Harrington 2009). Religion, spirituality, and health have become increasingly connected in the public imagination and in scientific journals at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-­first century. This is partly the result of widely publicized scientific research on the benefits of religion conducted at prestigious universities (Lopez 2010; Proctor 2005). Secularization and disenchantment were not the inevitable, uniform processes that many imagined them to be. The so-­called resacralization that we are seeing today is the product of a diverse set of actors in institutional settings often working unbeknownst to one another toward ends that are dissimilar on the surface but end up reinforcing each other’s agendas (Smith 2003). The creation of disaster spiritual expertise is one such example. Historian of medicine Anne Harrington (2008:246) writes, “a belief or practice that is a secularized version of an older religious tradition is not the same as a belief or practice that never had any kind of prior moral or religious



A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise 27

meaning. This is because we can almost always discern an echo of the original religious message in the new secular story.” Secular “idioms of distress” such as PTSD suggest departures from religious views of suffering while still maintaining traces of those same views (Young 1997). In other words, secular stories are frequently characterized as making radical breaks from previous generations’ misunderstandings and ignorance. And while trauma provides one of the most important secular ecumenical languages of suffering, it was clear to me from spending time with clergy that the language of trauma frequently fit well with religious narratives. It could be deployed in ways that paradoxically both supported religious practices and distinguished religious practices from mental health. For example, clergy would say things like, “You can pray but also take your Prozac,” suggesting that they saw no conflict between religion and mental health practices. This sort of argument points to an opening for the expertise of spiritual care, but one with a delimited domain. In fact, the disease model of mental health provides spiritual care providers with an even greater opening for their expertise, at least on the surface. Defining mental health problems as malfunctions of the brain moves them out of the realm of the existential and theological—at least rhetorically—and into the realm of medicine, leaving questions of meaning to spiritual caregivers. Many faith leaders I spoke with cited psychological literature that associated meaning with psychological resilience. Invoking tropes of holism was another way that spiritual disaster responders had of suggesting that the mental health professions often neglect what people truly need in times of crisis—that people do not require diagnostics but rather need spirit, prayer, and meaning. The sensibilities implied by holistic views nearly always harbor a skepticism, or downright rejection, of the “mainstream.” As psychotherapist and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch calls for in her vision of disaster response (from the epigraph in this chapter), mind and body must be integrated in new models of disaster relief. This sensibility was repeated throughout many of the conversations I had and provided a key trope for how the people I worked with envisioned the integration of mental health and spiritual disaster expertise, but this sense of resilience-­inducing integration often seemed just beyond grasp. What I describe here does not fit neatly into a simple narrative of progress, where secular rationality muscles out faith, values, and meaning, but rather a patchwork that offers a window into vital concerns over modernity, progress, the nature of expertise, and the politics of selfhood.

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Disenchantment: Secularization and Expertise The narrative of disenchantment has been a persistent orienting theme for both inventing and explaining the defining vocabulary of the era we inhabit: modernity, progress, science, and secularization. In this story, humans, led by “the West” have steadily marched toward a future where superstition, religion, and magic were to be replaced by science, rationality, bureaucracy, and secularization (Josephson-­Storm 2017; Chakrabarty 2012; Weber 2020). Those who believe in spirits, rocks, bears, trees and other nonhumans as persons came to be seen by “moderns” as remnants of an infantile past. This narrative offers one of the distinguishing features of the much-­celebrated (by some) Western Enlightenment, which claimed for itself a singular vision of certainty rooted in scientific rationality. Max Weber, whose work has dominated conversations about secularization, disenchantment, and re-­enchantment, famously wrote: Increasing rationalization and intellectualization does not, in other words, mean a greater general knowledge of the conditions we live under. Rather, it means something else: the knowledge, or belief, that we could find out if we wanted to; that in principle there are no mysterious incalculable forces intervening in our lives, but instead all things, in theory, can be mastered through calculation. It means the disenchanting of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such mysterious forces existed, we no longer need to adopt magical means to control or pray to the spirits—we make use, instead, of technology and calculation. (Weber et al. 2020:18) This deep sense of loss, a grieving for a time when the world was enchanted, coupled with a sense of techno-­rational triumphalism, echoes throughout cultural spheres from spirituality and medicine to environmentalism (McCar­ raher 2019). Spirituality, many have argued, provides an antidote to this sense of disenchantment. Bringing the spiritual back into our understanding of mental health is one example of attempts to “re-­enchant” arenas that have been seen as secularized (Taylor 2007; C. Smith 2003b). Since disasters bring to light fundamental questions about progress, technology, community, care, and healing, how we frame the needs of disaster-­shattered selves shapes our politics. Put another way, the unraveling caused by disasters provides a view into the workings of the systems that govern our lives. Disasters allow us to see



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ourselves more clearly—to see the ways governing structures interact with individual and communal acts. Starting in the mid-­1990s, there was increased interest in providing spiritual care following disasters, w­hich rapidly grew following the attacks of 9/11 (Sutton 2002). This is significant because it suggests that the push toward further inclusion of spiritual care in disaster response predated the attacks but received significantly increased attention in their aftermath, contradicting the dominant narrative of modernity, which anticipated the fading of our religious and superstitious past in the face of ever-­increasing scientific rationality (Josephson-­Storm 2017). It is a story that frames how many religious professionals understand their own life narratives and how these fit in with history (Harrington 2008). It is a story that also frames the loss of religious professional jurisdiction (Abbott 1988). The more I examined this history, the more it struck me that the battle lines drawn by this narrative of disenchantment belie a much more complicated picture, with moving territorial markers, blurry practical lines, and theoretical murkiness (Asad 2018). The discourse of holism was another subnarrative in the story of disenchantment and re-­enchantment. I was frequently told restoration of wholeness was one of the hoped-­for outcomes of disaster religious and spiritual care—or any spiritual care. At times, “wholeness” was used to suggest restoring a sense of stability in the context of tragedy and disaster, and at other times there was an implicit (or explicit) critique of the mental health professions: while they employ therapies that rely on mechanistic diagnostics, religious leaders and chaplains trained in spiritual care are uniquely suited to offer something different, a form of care that is more authentic, integrating the spirit with the psyche to create wholeness and heal. Invocations of holism—or lack of wholeness— almost always imply a time when humans were more whole, more spirituality centered, less fragmented. In contrast to the expert language of therapeutic culture, the vocabulary of holism maintains an anti-­expert sensibility, or at least a suspicion of the fragmenting forces of modern expertise. One of the fundamental stories our society tells about itself involves this struggle between the forces of holism and the forces of fragmentation. This is an instance in the long ebb and flow of tensions between holism and mechanization, which is intertwined with secularization, the rise of experts, and ideas of distress and the self. Or, put differently, the narrative of modernity assumes a movement from an irrational world, governed by spirits, gods, and the supernatural, toward a rational universe governed by science—that is, impersonal and unresponsive to the prayers, incantations, and divinations.

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This sense of loss is rarely more intensely reported than during catastrophic events, where tropes of holism and healing go hand in hand to succor wounded psyches and souls. Ideas of holism are part of an intellectual tradition and sensibility that sees the success of reductionistic/physicalist medicine as partial at best (Rosenberg 2007; see also Harrington 2008), reflecting unfounded confidence in technology and an emphasis on breaking wholes into parts. These historical developments are seen by critics as antithetical to spiritual and other “holistic” therapies. However, “because ideas of holism are elastic, they can be deployed by the left as well as right, the defender of status quo as well as its would-­be antagonist” (Rosenberg 1998:349). They tap into an aspect of antimodernism that runs deep in Western thought and can be found in the rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s Volkgeist and of the hippies of the 1960s, where calls for holism became a mass movement, linking a wide variety of practitioners together under the “banner of holism” (Harrington 1999; Whorton 2002).4 As a component of the “master narrative of anti-­modernism” (Rosenberg 2007), religion and spirituality play a key role, as mobilizers of affect, in critiquing what have been seen as the alienating forces of modernity. “Holism,” writes Rosenberg, “has been a specter at this self-­congratulatory feast [of progress], warning that progress has incurred costs as well as provided benefits. Holistic ideas have found their social meaning in antagonism to bureaucracy, specialization, and fragmentation as well as the (related) reductionism that have come to dominate twentieth-­century medicine” (140). Much of what I write about below is embedded in this longer history, and many of the disaster spiritual experts I spoke to mobilized these historical tropes, knowingly or not. The interlacing narratives of disenchantment, therapeutic culture, and holism frame many of the tensions and conflicts embedded in the creation of disaster spiritual expertise. The valorized narrative of modernity and its attendant disenchantment was only half the story. The tragic sense of loss and lamentation over a more meaningful past was the other half. Max Weber (1946) described what he saw as the bleak augury of modern medicine, which continues to resonate into the twenty-­first century. His view finds echoes among a wide range of voices, including advocates of New Age healing and the religion and health movement (Harrington 2005; Koenig 2008), who cast the rise of the “medical model” of care as a pernicious force of modernity. Weber argued that rationalization—the process by which human action comes to be dominated by efficiency and means-­end calculations—would ultimately result in a painful



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loss of meaning: “Whether life is worthwhile living and when—this question is not asked by medicine. Natural science gives us an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to master life. This means the medical man preserves the life of the mortally ill man, even if the patient implores us to relieve him of life, even if his relatives, to whom his life is worthless and to whom the costs of maintaining his worthless life grow unbearable, grant his redemption from suffering” (Weber 1979:144). Loss of meaning: the phrase comes back again and again, echoing through the twentieth century as an idiom to describe experiences associated with defining human catastrophes. It fostered research and artistic representations on fundamental questions of meaning fragmentation, ranging from Franz Kafka (whose nightmarish depictions of bureaucracy defined an era) to T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, and with them the technological terrors following the emergence of the atomic bomb and W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety—untethered and insignificant in a vast and indifferent cosmos, a world characterized by bleakness, illegibility, and a crisis over the very possibility of humanness (Greif 2016). No anchor in the drift of the world.5 This epitomized modernist Euro-­American anxiety and contributed to a sense that the human universe had been scrubbed of religion, which could no longer provide needed ballast. But, of course, the problems of living continued and new forms of suffering were invented, which required new vocabularies and treatments.

Holism, Mental Health, Spirituality, and Meaning in Disaster Response

Many recent critiques of medicine draw on tropes of holism (Harrington 2008; Rosenberg 2007). The reaction against the “dehumanizing forces of technology” that dominate modern medicine invokes ideas of holism and provides a critique that resonates with spirituality and religion—playing on their shared dissatisfaction with solely material or biological views of the human self. The language of holism plays a central role in the narrative of disenchantment and enchantment. Disaster religious and spiritual care often stakes its claim to professional jurisdiction on the belief that disasters inherently raise questions about meaning, and that questions of meaning are innately spiritual, the sphere of clergy rather than mental health professionals. “After 9/11, mental health professionals,” one Lutheran minister declared triumphantly, “we finally saw

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belief in God wasn’t a hallucination or something to be afraid of, or avoid, but essential to the growth of clients and patients.” After all, what better place for the holistic sensibility to flourish and find renewed support than when people see levees break or planes crash into buildings? Modern medicine often frames death as at the edge of its expertise. Analogously, 9/116 (and disasters generally) raise questions about the limits of the language of trauma, suggesting that the diagnostics reached their limit and sufferers required a different kind of care. Thus, trauma and spirituality can be seen as two sides of the contemporary approach to addressing disaster-­ related distress.7 The religious leaders and disaster responders I worked with were required to engage with different ways of speaking about distress and trauma. They had to be conversant in the language of their faith groups, in spiritual discourse, and in the language of trauma and mental health. This required a very different sort of expert knowledge, one that draws on the language of psychology and spirituality to create hybrid therapies where “a spiritual cry of distress” requires a return to “homeostasis,” combining the spiritual and secular, according to the Pastoral Crisis Intervention Workbook of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. As the “secular language” used to describe various forms of emotional distress came to increasingly dominate daily life in the United States, faith leaders needed to redefine themselves in the context of modern expertise in order to find new ways to maintain a place for themselves and adapt to changing historical circumstances. Scientific discourse allowed for a reclaiming of expert jurisdiction.

Expertise and the Problems of Everyday Life In nineteenth-­century America, a person experiencing difficulties in work or marriage, or other life crises, had few options for advice other than to turn to their clergyperson. What today we might label psychological distress of various kinds was described almost exclusively in religious terms (Abbott 1988). By the early twentieth century, this situation had changed. Large-­scale social changes, including the rise of factory work, urbanization, and increased industrialization, gave rise to novel problems that became defined by the newly emerging mental health professions (Abbott 1988). Clergy began to lose jurisdiction over the “problems of everyday life” to neurologists and psychiatrists (Abbott 1980; Ellenberger 1981). Problems once the quotidian



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work of clergy—including listlessness and mental distress of various kinds— rapidly became defined as pathologies to be dealt with by newly emerging experts. This now largely taken-­for-­granted shift amounted to a revolution in understandings of selfhood (Rose 2019; Taylor 2007)—one tied to vast social, political, and economic changes. Building on earlier nineteenth-­century analogies of machine-­like human functioning (Harrington 1999), this view of the self was accompanied, and amplified, by the rise of experts meant to treat distressed humans who were no longer seen as primarily comprising souls. As the twentieth century continued, mental health professions splintered into a multitude of factions, spawning recondite debates about diagnoses, etiology, therapies, and pharmacology that filled both academic journals and popular publications. But before World War II, few people would have sought out a professional for what we now call “mental health problems.” It was only after the war that mental health professions rapidly expanded their work outside the walls of mental institutions, pushing clergy further to the sidelines and claiming jurisdiction8 over a much broader range of the problems of daily life (Merry 2016). It would be difficult to exaggerate the social and cultural consequences of the expansion of mental health expertise in the daily lives of Americans. Therapeutic lexicon now plays a determining role in everything from the language of intimacy and debates about how we raise our children to the very framing of what it means to be a person and have a good life. It is here, in the interstitial spaces of therapeutic and spiritual language of distress, that disaster spiritual expertise inhabits (Gorman 2011; Star 2010). “Therapeutic culture” (Rieff 1966; Rakow 2013), a key subnarrative to disenchantment, and fundamental to understanding spiritual expertise, refers to a broad redefining of distress that took place largely after World War II. Therapeutic language came to occupy an increasingly central place in the everyday ways Americans described their inner lives and sought solace from experts. Many theologians (Shuman and Meador 2003) and social critics (Lasch 1991; Rakow 2013) have criticized the impact of various incarnations of therapeutic culture on the moral lives of Americans over the past seventy years. In particular, they describe an impoverished sense of the self, which they associate with a culture that values personal and psychological growth and fulfillment above all else (see also Foster 2016; Lears 1981). These critiques suggest that an exclusive focus on individual fulfillment and growth reproduces a bounded self (Taylor 2007) peculiar to modern Western psychology, finding its ever-­more-­insatiable form in the United States in the decades following World War II. This characterization of the therapeutic self

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has no larger sense of moral narrative, instead offering a solipsistic existence with no ends beyond itself (Lasch 1991; Aubry and Travis 2015). The expansion of mental health professions meant the retreat of other vocabularies and forms of expertise. “The clergy,” writes Abbott (1988:308), “were in fact the heaviest losers from the creation of the new psychiatric jurisdiction,” as they lost their role as the primary experts in “the problems of living.” Marital problems, disagreements at work, “the dark night of the soul” (James 2008), and what we now call depression and trauma increasingly became defined by professionals other than clergy (Abbott 1988). At stake in this struggle was the very idea of the self, and the composition of something as intangible and abstract as the idea of a self—whether spiritual or psychological—continues to haunt questions about what kinds of therapies work and what constitutes “working.” By the post–World War II period, the growing numbers of mental health professionals had seemingly solidified their control over interpreting the problems of everyday life. The contest over who was best suited to treat disaster-­related suffering, who had the skills and capacities to bring people back from the brink of psychic and spiritual collapse, and who had the ability to distinguish between the two, seemed settled—at least from the point of view of the expanding numbers of secular mental health experts (Herman 1996).

The Birth of Stress The story of how human distress, the problems of daily life, became disenchanted does not neatly follow the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the human body. The concept of stress, which has come to occupy a central role in modern life, has both explanatory power and a curious history critical to understanding mental health and disaster response (Becker 2013; Jackson 2016). Since World War II, “stress” has become one of the key “idioms of distress” in the United States,9 providing a language for secularizing day-­to-­day “personal problems” (Abbott 1980), invoked to describe everything from mild states of dis-­ease to incapacitating emotional and physiological shock. Various stress-­related diagnostics, including PTSD, have become so pervasive in describing experiences that it is difficult to imagine a time when we did not speak of our struggles this way. But there was indeed a time before the concept of stress. The word has a history, one that simultaneously helped provide a widespread language for the secularization



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of suffering while paradoxically laying the groundwork for religion, spirituality, and scientific knowledge to recombine in new ways.10 In particular, the stress concept offered a physiological explanation for a wide array of human experience that broadly falls under the category of things that we’d rather not experience in our lives. The stress concept and its relatives connect a variety of disaster-­related mental health, spiritual, and religious forms of expertise. For this reason, I spend some time articulating its winding history and the way the concept engages and intertwines with scientific research, appearing and reappearing in unexpected places.

Muddling (Dis)enchantments

In 1942, the physiologist Walter Cannon was trying to determine whether it was possible to die from a voodoo curse and a belief in the power of sorcery (Dror 2003; Cannon 1942a).11 While his colleagues thought he might have gone mad, his conclusions about human stress, born of this seemingly far-­fetched initial research, have proved remarkably influential to ideas of human functioning over the past sixty years. One of Cannon’s key concepts, homeostasis, which describes the return of physiology to a pre-­arousal state after a stressful incident, has spawned voluminous physiological research and whole subfields of medicine throughout the twentieth century, providing the basis for much of the research on stress that was to follow (Harrington 2009; Cannon 1989).12 Most importantly, the links between mental and physiological states that Cannon proposed allowed scientific studies to draw connections between health and religion (Harrington 2005). By demonstrating a physiological link between feeling states and hormones, Cannon laid the basis for now commonly held beliefs about the benefits of prayer, meditation, and other forms of spiritual practice. His work provided a lexicon, a kind of trading zone (Gorman 2011), that bridged the worlds of science and spirituality, and meaning and health, for a modern world. Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, researchers increasingly studied the ways religion and spiritual practices might be associated with stress reduction (Benson and Klipper 2000; Harrington 2009), opening the door to new understandings of the concept of belief (Ogden 2018) as a salutogenic force and spiritual “irrationalities” as a problem of meaning management in the service of an all-­encompassing search for health. Religion came to be seen by some as not only good in itself but also good for you (Harrington 2005).

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Questions of morality and theology were increasingly transformed into questions of physiology, inscribing aspects of belief, healing, and suffering into the workings of neurological and hormonal systems. During the 1960s, these ideas were incorporated into the rhetoric of mind/body medicine, which resonated with the cultural moment and its turn toward spiritual experimentation and questioning the virtues of modern industrial life. In important new ways, the language of faith, belief, and spirituality intertwined with the language of science. What might have once been considered heretical—to think of belief as merely a “pill” to cure ills—became increasingly commonplace. Prayer, meditation, and other “spiritual” practices became biologized in new ways. Meditation retreats, for example, were said to not only offer spiritual enlightenment but also boost the immune system, improve memory, and decrease stress, according to an ever-­growing body of research (Harrington 2009a; Lopez 2010; Moses and Choudhury 2016). Indeed, Esther Sternberg (2001:87), professor of integrative medicine and author of The Balance Within: The Science of Connecting Health and Emotions, writes, “The missing link . . . is an understanding of what controls the hormones and nerve chemicals of our brain’s stress and relaxation pathways. If learning, conditioning, ritual, prayer, and meditation downshift the stress response, decrease stress hormones, and allow enkephalins, endorphins, and other immunosuppressive molecules to play a greater role, then such molecules might also shift.” The fact that prayer can be said to “downshift the stress response, decrease stress hormones and allow enkephalins” is a radical statement, written in a language that would have been unrecognizable to past generations of researchers and religious adherents. The connections between mental states and physiological states, following Cannon, provided scientific arguments connecting belief and prayer to ideas of health, and thus a whole new way of framing the importance of religion and spirituality. Psychoneuroimmunology, a field of study that has its roots in Walter Cannon’s work, deals with interactions between psychological states and the immune and nervous systems (Sternberg 2001). This body of work has increasingly included studies on the impact of religion and spirituality on physiological processes (Koenig 2008). Sternberg’s strikingly biological description not only takes distress, anxiety, and suffering out of the realm of religion and spirituality. It places these experiences within an individual neural or hormonal circuitry rather than in idioms of religious and spiritual experience, and echoes many conversations I had with disaster spiritual responders. They frequently employed this very



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vocabulary from the brain sciences, including references to neurons and the amygdala, which struck an odd chord when juxtaposed with theological and moral questions of healing and meaning—or images of tsunamis, explosions, earthquakes, or rising seas. Implied in this vision is a particular politics of the self, one that supplies compelling responses to questions of suffering, pointing the way toward what appear to be effective therapies for a wide range of anxieties and distresses. But its reductive formulation of human distress, which by its very reductiveness may comfort some, highlights an absence, one that anxiously haunts late-­industrial American life (Fortun 2012; Cvetkovich 2012; Lasch 1985; Case and Deaton 2020): isolation, lack of communality, the seeming psychic-­political cul-­de-­sac, which results in the narrowing of possible visions for futures where humans continue to thrive. Biological explanations for stress are particularly potent for those who can’t seem to find external reasons for their suffering (Karasz 2005; Vidal and Ortega 2017). After all, what better way to explain ongoing psychological unrest when one has a secure home and a decent income and one does not live with a sense of physical threat than attributing it to the all-­encompassing idea of stress (“anxiety” and “stress” are frequently used interchangeably in daily life)? One need only stop and think of the many times you hear stress invoked as both cause and consequence of underlying dis-­ease in American middle-­and upper-­class milieus. Stress has become a way of inhabiting the world, a self-­style that produces endless products and therapies and has the aura of being a “natural” and inevitable aspect of modern human living. Problems in relationships, confronting the apocalypse, and lost cell phones cause stress. These major and minor catastrophes are framed in terms of individual psychological and therapeutic needs, a subspecies of what Rieff (1966) and others have called “therapeutic culture” (Aubry and Travis 2015; Salmenniemi 2019), with neuroscience an increasingly powerful force in defining distress and its treatments. Cannon’s work fundamentally rewrote modern understandings and experiences of distress. To establish the singularly contemporary justifications for disaster religious and spiritual care, it is important to have a sense of how they fit with a longer history of religion, health, and science. Contemporary religion and spirituality, in other words, have made use of the very tools that were said to be their undoing in order to justify their role in people’s lives. This move has far-­reaching consequences that unwittingly limit possible ideas of selfhood, providing constraining vocabularies in ways that to continue to echo through our contemporary politics.

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Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder and Neuroscience

Throughout the twentieth century, trauma diagnostics morphed in response to each new large-­scale catastrophe, including World War I, World War II and the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, 9/11, and the war on terror (Shepherd 2000; Young 1997). But much of it has focused around one diagnosis: PTSD. While nascent diagnostics for PTSD have been around since at least World War I, its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-­III) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 fundamentally lay the groundwork for several trauma-­associated forms of expertise, including disaster mental health (Halpern and Tramontin 2007:73). Discussion of disaster-­related distress often centers on the complexities of how to diagnose PTSD—how to distinguish pathological and normal responses to events. Many of these conversations include questions about spiritual and psychological responses. As part of the research for this book, I attended many trainings focused on defining the difference between spiritual and religious distress and PTSD. As one priest said, “It is our job to figure out when someone needs to be sent on to a mental health person. But I think PTSD has been far overdiagnosed. Sometimes people are still just in shock, and that doesn’t mean that they need shrinks.” The ability to understand PTSD was considered essential for both faith leaders working in disasters and mental health professionals. This knowledge was one of the clearest markers of having the requisite expertise. The interpretation of distress by these professional groups defines, to a large degree, their professional jurisdiction. Psychiatrists’ adoption of neuroscientific research strategies over the last forty years has increased (if only slightly) their status vis-­à-­vis other medical subspecialties, giving psychiatrists a renewed sense of power and authority (N. S. Rose 2019; Harrington 2019). Much of the current research on PTSD, and mental illness in general, has moved toward explanations of disorders that rely on brain scans and the measurement of chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. The neurosciences also presuppose a very different kind of therapeutic culture, one that, as I have been suggesting, paradoxically opens up a larger space for religion and spirituality of a particular kind—the religion of health (Harrington 2005). Unlike psychoanalytic theory, the neurosciences, at least on the surface, leave questions of meaning alone, which provides an opening for religious and spiritually based therapies to fill. Neurosciences do not typically focus on one’s relationship with God, nor do they offer normative



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descriptions of how one ought to live. They may focus instead on the impacts of belief on the brain or the parts of the brain believed to be engaged in religious practices. But these are altogether different kinds of questions. The historical role of religion is transformed by neuroscientific studies from seeking salvation to healthy brain functioning (Vidal 2020). In some secular scientific research, and to the layperson, brain scans of religious belief look much the same as brain scans of people thinking pleasant thoughts or eating chocolate. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the consequences of this symbolic metamorphosis. Repairing selves and souls from the impact of disaster, in this view, has little to do with exploring the mysteries of God or Jobian faith in the face of God’s ineffable fickleness. Reframing religion and spirituality as primarily biological transforms the social and communal aspects of suffering and the possibilities for a different kind of collective experience. A focus on individual psychological meaning as a primary form of restoration has hazardous consequences for disaster response—and beyond. Religious and spiritual care providers I worked with frequently cited data from brain sciences or offered metaphors drawn from their understanding of neurons in the amygdala and the hippocampus. This seemed, at least in part, to be an attempt to gain legitimacy through scientific language. But there was something else going on: this language also seemed to provide a sense of comfort, concreteness. It was frequently invoked as a kind of grounding rational discourse, one that intermittently made people uncomfortable but also lent a link between science and religion that somehow provided an aura of decipherability, even if fleetingly. Moving back and forth between the language of science and spirituality, a wide range of human experiences and needs for explanations could be covered in a few words or phrases, which I will describe in later chapters. As research on PTSD has become dominated by questions of biology, the questions of where we place the locus of suffering and how we understand the needs of distressed bodies and minds have increasingly become contested. Biopsychiatry, in contrast to the dynamic psychiatry that dominated the first two-­thirds of the twentieth century, offers little to those who are trying to piece together meaning, an existential narrative, from their experiences. Instead, the meaning largely adheres to biology, providing a narrative framework rooted in the technical language of brain sciences (Luhrmann 2000). In this sense, there is always meaning. But meaning as a therapeutic goal is displaced. These different ways of understanding distress have determining impacts on the treatments we develop for those who are suffering, what kinds

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of selves we envision, and what sorts of salvation and restoration—religious, secular, or a hybrid—are to be found. In short, implications for the worlds we can imagine and enact.

Restoring Meaning and Making Whole After Disaster Disasters create a demand—sometimes a desperate need—for meaning experts. And religious and spiritual caregivers are well-­positioned to provide this expertise, especially in the United States, where, in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, spirituality has often become synonymous with meaning.13 This version frequently has close ties with traditions of self-­improvement and ideas of happiness.14 Framing spirituality and meaning as synonymous is one of the key ways disaster spiritual care patched itself together, a tentative sort of resacralization. If disasters fragment meaning, and all people require meaning, then everyone may benefit from disaster spiritual care. In recent years, there has been a movement both within medical circles and beyond to “re-­enchant” health care in the United States (Harrington 2005). Medical treatment, the argument goes, is alienating, which not only is a moral failing but also leads to poorer health outcomes and burnout among medical professionals. Care does not include the needs of the whole person, the spirit, and treats people as if they were unfeeling machines. Some medical schools now require mindfulness meditation courses for students (Liben and Hutchinson 2020), and a steady stream of books and articles argue that the spiritual has been lacking in medical settings. Spirituality is said to be on the rise—in popular magazines, yoga studios, mindfulness practices, and the growing numbers of Americans who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (Pew 2016)—and the conflict between spirituality and science has found rapprochement (Bender and Taves 2012; C. Smith 2003a; Wuthnow 2005). Bill Moyers’s 1993 PBS series Healing and the Mind (Moyers, Flowers, and Grubin 2002), which documented the impact of popular Eastern meditative practices largely shorn of religious ritual,15 marks one important example—perhaps a turning point—in the history of mind/body medicine in America (Harrington 2008). This is particularly true in disaster expertise, where many of the calls for spirituality in the contexts I worked in emphasized meaning and holism, not religiosity, and where practices such as mindfulness meditation, yoga, and



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massage were viewed by many as forms of spirituality. More than seventy years after Cannon published his work on voodoo death (Cannon 1942b), his influence could be found among the clergy I worked with. In many conversations with disaster responders, I heard Cannon’s language for an acute stress response—“fight-­or-­flight”—as an explanation for responses to disaster. The unwitting invocation of Cannon’s work—knitting together emotion, belief, and health—threaded through many of the events I attended and the ways disaster spiritual care providers framed their own expertise. For example, I attended the “Five Years After September 11th” conference, which was designed to bring together a variety of religious and mental health workers who participated in recovery work. The event had a wide range of speakers, including imams, rabbis, psychiatrists, and other therapists. Massage, acupuncture, and other stress-­reducing alternative practices were available for participants, who spent the day discussing the lessons they had learned since 9/11. Prayers of mourning for those lost in the attacks of 9/11 provided solemn moments throughout the day. But what, I wondered, did Christianity, acupuncture, massage therapy, Buddhism, psychiatry, social work, and trauma therapy have in common? What kinds of scientific and spiritual assemblages allowed for this seemingly unlikely convergence of beliefs and practices? The conference pointed to the ways that the concepts of stress, anxiety, and trauma provided a common language and a common sense of purpose—at least on the surface—for attendees. The scientific study of various forms of extreme emotional states created an ecumenical space for religious leaders, “alternative practitioners,” and mental health professionals to be in the same space and feel, at least briefly, that there might be a fleeting possibility for a common project. What allowed for this sense of common purpose, this seemingly paradoxical need to stitch together a justificatory language that employed scientific discourse while critiquing its own claims? For many of the disaster responders I spoke with, a return to wholeness (or homeostasis) through a restoration of meaning was their key aim. Disaster spiritual expertise is formed around the notion that meaning and spirituality are synonyms, or at least tightly linked. The idea that disasters threaten to undo the sense of meaning required to live provides one of the core claims for why disaster spiritual care responders are necessary, distinguishing them from mental health professionals. While the latter also “prescribe” meaning, their professional status does not have the same resonance, does not typically claim specialized knowledge about spirituality as the basis for expertise.

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This encompassing language also allowed for disparate expertise to engage with each other. Meaning provided neutral territory, language that religious, spiritual, and secular experts could engage in, without sliding beyond their professional boundaries (Star 2010; Bowker and Star 2008; Gorman 2011). Perhaps counterintuitively, it was particular forms of scientific language that allowed for this framework to gain force. But meaning was in many ways the glue that brought together religion and health, holism, spirituality, and disaster expertise. Disaster religious and spiritual care experts typically argued that psychology, psychiatry, and allied professions associated with a medical model were not fully equipped to deal with the essential human needs of finding meaning or a spiritual connection in the world. Mental health professions must be respected, many of those I worked with acknowledged, because of the biological and cognitive nature of traumatic experience, but such expertise only went so far. Religion and spirituality needed to play a greater role. Psychiatrists in the biological model (Luhrmann 2000)—those who see their expertise as analogous to physicalist medicine—were able to restore the brain to healthy functioning, while disaster spiritual care workers could provide meaning. And clearly, when the world unravels, people require this restitution. This provides, at least on the surface, a clear division of labor. None of this may seem surprising. But the argument takes a peculiar turn: because meaning has been shown through scientific study to be a protective factor, essential for healthy human functioning, experts on meaning are required (Koenig 2006; Koenig, King, and Carson 2012; Pargament 2001). This meaning expertise is one of the key areas for skill development that disaster spiritual care provides, as well as one of the criteria for judging successful work. Meaning as the meaning of spirituality was also further naturalized, by many spiritual experts I encountered, as universally necessary. “Without meaning, why would you get out of bed,” I was told with a sadness-­tinged intensity by Mary, a white woman in her fifties and a United Church of Christ minister. Echoed numerous times by faith leaders I spoke with, this sensibility is likely familiar to many. Meaning provides the engine, the architecture, for a life to continue. Meaning, then, has become widely taken for granted as a fundamental part of being human (Frankl 2006)—but this has not always been the case. As Charles Taylor suggests, placing meaning at the center of religious and spiritual practice is a modern development and obscures the historical relationships to what we now call spirituality.16 Viewing the idea of meaning from



A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise 43

a slight distance and seeing that meaning itself has a history is crucial. How can anyone live without meaning, one might ask? Perhaps there are other ways of understanding a self.

Unmanageable Expertise and the Contradictions of Bureaucratic Spirituality In the days after 9/11, researchers mobilized to study the psychological impacts of the attack, and therapists descended from all parts of the country. New York City was inundated with brochures and public service announcements about how to identify PTSD, the prevalence of which was at the center of debates around mental health following the attack (Lowell et al. 2018). Religious and spiritual care credentialing bodies were required to educate chaplains to distinguish PTSD from other forms of distress, particularly religious and spiritual distress. At the same time, they were often critical of the perceived overdiagnosis of PTSD, the tendency to pathologize what previously would have been seen as normal suffering or a condition more closely associated with religious and spiritual distress. This was a fine line. If they pushed their criticisms too far, they risked confirming many of the suspicions that mental health professionals already had of clergy—that they did not have adequate knowledge of mental health issues and might in fact be dangerous to those seeking help. The ability to demonstrate knowledge of mental health diagnostics was one of the key ways clergy could demonstrate that they had the credentials to work in disaster contexts. But there was a paradox. While they were offering a specific kind of religious and spiritual expertise, they had to display expertise in the very kinds knowledge they had historically critiqued and which had been meant to render them obsolete. In the spring of 2006, I attended a conference for religious leaders involved with disaster work in New York City. The director of a large religious organization gave the opening address in a large conference room filled with priests, rabbis, imams, government officials, and representatives from social service agencies. In high oratory, he declared, “Wholeness and hope need to be present for people we serve. 9/11 impacts humanity. We are in the business of redelivering that humanity and wholeness and calling it back to being. Not just for ourselves but for Israel, Madrid, and other places around the world.” This universal mandate for spiritual care was like a rallying call for religious and spiritual caregivers. It provided the motivation and rationale for disaster

44

Chapter 1

spiritual care—bringing wholeness and hope (or meaning) to those whose lives have been fractured, anywhere in the world. Integrating various academic disciplines, including the body of research on the relaxation response that was spawned by the work of Cannon, a key figure in defining and popularizing the concept of stress, the religion and health movement has received a great deal of attention in the popular media (Harrington 2009).17 This is where meaning management, religion and health, and disaster spiritual response expertise move from larger abstract social processes into the daily lives of people confronting disaster-­related distress. The stakes of conflicts over meaning are considerably amplified in the context of disaster. Some of the most highly valued tools of modernity, of science and medicine—the ability to manage risk and predict and prevent calamity— meet their own limits (Rozario 2007). Religious leaders frequently told me that there wasn’t sufficient organizing before the 9/11 attacks, that they were unprepared, and that they needed to do better in the future. “Before 9/11, we understood the emotional impact of disaster, but not the spiritual. After 9/11, there was an enormous amount of understanding of the emotional and spiritual impact of disaster,” a director of a large interfaith organization that provided training for clergy told me. But the vocabulary for these conversations would not have been possible outside the revamped and intensified intertwining of religion, spirituality, and health coming from disparate cultural arenas at the turn of the millennium. Again, through scientific studies, spirituality is said to lead to better health outcomes, making it seem almost natural, self-­evident, an inevitable aspect of human experience (and even biology). How could authorities deny people a service that provides meaning and restores healthy functioning, after all, and at little cost? It is into this thicket of mercurial expert and scientific discourses and practices that the response to the attacks of 9/11 took place, and it is in this context that it becomes possible to argue through the marshaling of data that, for many, spirituality is a necessary component of recovery. But the patchwork results in a contradictory and tension-­filled form of bureaucratic spirituality—a meaning-­focused expertise that has just enough spirituality to look different from secular mental health practices but not too much. Spirituality in these contexts must remain within a frame that makes it legible and safe. But, inevitably, the frame does not hold. These tensions animate much of this book and continue to occupy a vital place in current attempts to grapple with a world that seems ever more unlikely to conform to the predictions of models or desires for control.



A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise 45

Conclusion The schematic story I have told here unravels and weaves together the historical strands that supplied materials for the disaster spiritual expertise I encountered, which inevitably takes us into ideas about science and deeply rooted notions of progress that undergird the structures of selfhood and politics. The patchwork of expertise I describe provides only a recent and brief history of the messy genealogy of disaster religious and spiritual expertise. In order to enter into bureaucratic contexts in the United States, spiritual care must justify its expertise through scientific research, particularly work that has its basis in what has come to be known as mind/body medicine. Disaster spiritual experts defined themselves as experts in meaning, a territory that was increasingly (at least on the surface) vacated by mental health expertise as the field shifted increasingly toward biological and neurological explanations for various forms of human distress. These moves lead to a bureaucratic spirituality. This spiritual-­scientific hybrid must answer to multiple gods—a form of polytheism, perhaps—including obeisance to the deity of bureaucracy. It is a form of expertise that morphs to fit the requirements of bureaucratic disaster organizations, from the New York Office of Emergency Management (now New York City Emergency Management) to FEMA (as well as a variety of nonprofit organizations). Meaning became the religious and spiritual caregivers’ greatest claim to expertise because everyone is said to need meaning after a disaster—and because meaning provides a neutral framing for spirituality, one that meshes well with psychological theories. But this is a particular kind of meaning, and one not without political and theological implications. While mobilizing scientific arguments that both implicitly and explicitly critique “mechanistic” forms of mental health may be the best way for clergy to gain a seat at the disaster-­response table, the bureaucratic rewriting of spirituality forces them into a rhetorical position that, as we shall see, undermines—or at least complicates—some of their claims to expertise.

INTERLUDE

“Talking to the Dead”

On an early spring day in 2005, I boarded the Long Island Rail Road Babylon Express train. I was visiting with Frank, a Lutheran minister and disaster chaplain. Frank practiced something called induced after-­death communication (IADC). During our meeting, we were going to try to contact the dead. The day before, I had been talking to a Christian friend about my planned second meeting with Frank. He referred me to a particularly grim passage in the Book of Isaiah, where God condemns and forbids the practice of magic. Though at the time I did not believe in otherworldly forces, I still felt a bit uncomfortable with troubling spirits. An excerpt from my fieldnotes describes this experience: “I lost my notebook on the [train] transfer and, already being in a superstitious frame of mind, considered that maybe there was some kind of supernatural force stacked against this journey, that I had embarked on a sacrilegious excursion to Babylon and might be punished. The loss of the journal, I imagined, might be a sign. But when the doors finally opened onto Roslyn platform, I stepped off onto the train platform and resumed my anthropological stance of curious remove.” A large, white bald man in his fifties, Frank was friendly and had an easy smile. He had the disposition of someone who was accustomed to working with many different kinds of people. Born and raised in the Catskills, where he worked for years in a local church, Frank later trained as a seminarian in New York City, where he had moved in the late 1980s. Frank had recently finished a master’s degree in social work, which he said was a good thing because the Lutherans were rapidly closing churches. His office had a large wooden cross and was filled with bookshelves, chimes, and a stereo with headphones—which I later learned was for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and IADC. He was widely read in theology, New



“Talking to the Dead” 47

Age healing, and spiritual care. His master’s degree was from Yeshiva University, a Jewish institution, though he referred to a wide array of influences in his thinking, including a Catholic priest who had taught him about Buddhism. He was also a chaplain in the local fire department and had certificates from different trainings on disaster and trauma hanging on his wall, including from the pastoral crisis intervention training that I had attended. Frank told me that his interest in IADC came from his experiences in working with highly traumatized firefighters and disaster responders. I decided that I would take Frank up on his offer to undergo IADC. The method emerged directly out of EMDR, a trauma therapy developed in the 1990s by Francine Shapiro that had gained some acceptance at the margins of mainstream medicine because of claims about its effectiveness in treating trauma (Solomon, Solomon, and Heide 2009). The therapy views trauma as residing not in intrapsychic spaces but rather in the “physiologically-­based information processing system” (EMDR Institute). Such modalities have become increasingly central to the treatment of trauma survivors, especially as alternatives to traditional talk therapy (Rogers and Silver 2002). Before my visit, I did some reading on IADC.1 The founder, a psychologist named Allan Botkin, from Chicago, wrote extensively about IADC, including a book titled Induced After-­Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma.2 Botkin spent many years working with veterans, and after he began using EMDR he noticed that many of those he treated reported communications with deceased friends and family. These communications, Botkin noted, had dramatic healing effects on his patients. In many of the visitations, the dead gave instructions to the living, advising them on how to live or how to make amends and live more moral lives. Botkin documented the beneficial therapeutic impacts of these encounters, which Frank echoed in our conversation Frank began our session by moving a long metal pointer back and forth in front of me while I sat in a chair listening to the alternating sounds of the ocean and seagulls through headphones. He told me to follow the pointer with my eyes and to relax and pay attention to my body. After a while, he asked me who I wanted to contact. “Imogen,” I immediately replied. She was a friend who had unexpectedly died the previous year. Frank went back and forth between having me visualize my friend and using the pointer. I felt relaxed as I listened to the ocean and pictured the waves going in and out. After several rounds of trying to contact Imogen, he asked me if I felt the presence of any others. I had drifted into thinking about some of my older dead relatives and

48 Interlude

said that I could see my Aunt Sylvia, and then her siblings Sophie, Yudell, and Libby. Frank asked me to welcome them in and see if there was anything they wanted to tell me. He asked if I had “unfinished business” and if there was anything I wanted to know from them. It was pleasant to imagine my dead relatives in detail and spend some time thinking about what I might say to them, and I did enter a state of relaxation, but I could not discover otherworldly presences or manage to have a conversation with the deceased. I could clearly visualize them sitting around a table, talking and eating, as they had done in life. Time seemed to pass quickly, and the process, which felt like it lasted about half an hour, had actually lasted about two hours. Overall, the impact was pleasing, and I could easily imagine how somebody could feel as if they had really spoken to the dead, but I did not feel any sense of resolution or lightness. Frank and I spoke for a while afterward. He emphasized that it was my experience, and though I did not have an after-­death communication, this didn’t mean that the process was unsuccessful. “The people who you contacted, your deceased family,” he explained, “know that you would have been skeptical of any dramatic experience and so probably didn’t want to give it to you.” In this way, he left the door open for me to continue to believe that I was communicating with the dead. After IADC, Frank gave me a brain-­spotting treatment, a process that claims to access traumatic experience through the subcortical brain (Grand 2014). He had me think of something stressful and locate the feeling in my body. He passed a wand in front of me and asked if the level of stress diminished with different wand locations. While he said that he didn’t really understand the theory, the idea is that eye movements correspond to different parts of the brain, and you can help get rid of stress by changing eye positions. I didn’t feel much, but he said he had seen positive results with others he had worked with. Frank clearly believed in IADC and related methods. I wondered about some of the ethical issues surrounding the “treatment,” which left me uncomfortable. Using such procedures on vulnerable people in mourning, who might want nothing more than to contact a recently deceased relative, seemed dubious. On a later visit with Frank, he revised his phrasing on the supernatural associations with IADC, instead emphasizing the importance of how people interpret their experiences. He continued to hint, nevertheless, that his own beliefs veered toward the supernatural. “I’m not going to say



“Talking to the Dead” 49

that people are definitely getting in touch with the dead,” he said, looking up thoughtfully, “but something is happening that I can’t explain. Botkin says the same thing—that he tends to think that something is happening beyond people just imagining the dead.” Frank continued, “There are charlatans in every business. I approach this stuff with a lot of caution. ‘Do no harm’ is the main thing. I don’t care if it’s weird, as long as it doesn’t harm.” Frank’s use of IADC is an example of how scientific and religious discourses and practices find a place in disaster spiritual care. IADC provides a kind of techno-­spiritual psychopompos, a guide for souls visiting the world of the dead, one that allows participants and practitioners to dwell simultaneously in secular psychological and spiritual worlds. It provides a perfectly Janus-­faced practice for the syncretism I have been describing, a modality covering transcendent and earthly forms of healing (Josephson-­Storm 2017), the technological and the spiritual (Farman 2020). When I asked him why he got involved in disaster work, Frank explained, “My mother was an alcoholic, and because of that, I have a sense of hypervigilance. I have panic disorder; my sister has and my mother probably had it.” Like many others I interviewed, Frank spoke about his own traumatic experiences and how they drew him to disaster work. His relationships and early life experiences, his identity, and his professional choices were repeatedly narrated as intertwined with disaster spiritual response expertise. It was clear from our conversations that Frank’s own anxiety helped him frame his relationship to his professional identity. Anxiety, stress, and his spiritual “journey” provided him with a core sense of his expertise and his ability to help others. Thus, the concepts of anxiety and stress provided a way of living, tying subjective experiences and narratives to expertise. Frank’s professional identity was rooted in “working through” his distress, along with the distress of those seeking help from him. In other words, his experiences of trauma and anxiety provided the narrative form for his professional identity and the niche for his expertise. “A lot of personal work needs to be done for anyone who puts themselves in harm’s way,” Frank explained. “If you want to put yourself in a situation where you encounter death, destruction, and grief, overwhelming your senses, you are going to need backup. You can’t tell me you are going to see death and destruction and not be affected—a deep understanding of self should be required of you. Before you send someone into the battlefield, you need to prepare them.” Frank highlighted the intensity of disaster work

50 Interlude

and how it requires self-­examination, or therapeutic or spiritual “personal work.” Like chaplain training, disaster religious and spiritual care, as a form of expertise, is built on this process of reflection, centered on therapeutic views of the self that sees encounters with death and destruction as opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth. When asked about disasters changing the relationships between religious and spiritual care and mental health care, Frank responded, “Disasters call into question a lot of things. They make us acutely aware that we are finite, physically, and you know, it’s a whole shock to the system, it’s a shock to the emotional system, the physical system. And what it can do, you can go two ways, and sometimes it goes back and forth. Sometimes there’s more openness to the spiritual realm, and sometimes there’s a block.” Frank echoed a common belief about disasters, one that I heard from many clergy: disasters cause questioning of fundamental aspects of their lives. He continued, “People can be drawn to faith and spiritual issues during disaster, but it can quickly fade away after the disaster subsides. My experience is that in times of crisis, people turn to faith communities. That’s just a fact. And so, the frontline people are going to be congregations of all faiths and clergy of all faiths. That’s why I think it’s really important that clergy know about disasters and its effects on people.” Frank clearly articulated the ways disaster contexts create fertile ground for merging mental health and religious and spiritual practices. He also echoed something I heard many times: people flock to faith communities after disasters. “Do you think disaster encourages syncretism among clergy, closer working relationships, or recognition of others’ expertise?” I asked. “I think it’s probably fairly new,” he responded, “and the reason I say this is that I have other colleagues that have gone down this route over the last ten years. I think there’s a greater awareness of what healing is and what spirituality is, and so I think my own expansiveness has come by being around people of other faith traditions, other religious traditions, but also other avenues of how to heal. It’s a true holistic approach; it’s a mind/body/spirit approach.” Frank invoked the language of holism and mind/body medicine. He also spoke at length about the value of incorporating different religious perspectives and other healing modalities into his practice, emphases of interfaith chaplain work. He described ways his professional position as a chaplain working in interfaith settings taught him to incorporate multiple forms of healing. Disasters, at least from his experience, were settings where



“Talking to the Dead” 51

professional boundaries become more permeable and where the ground for developing novel expertise becomes fertile. The intensity of emotion and the need to work with other faiths and professions increase communication across professional boundaries, causing a shift in personal relationships, organizational dynamics, and theoretical or abstract knowledge (Abbott 1988). For example, Frank had learned about Buddhist practice from a Catholic priest. “I’m reading a lot, Stephen Levine and Jack Kornfeld, those out of the Buddhist tradition,” he recounted.3 “And I think that there’s a lot to offer, that the Buddhists have a lot to offer in terms of meditation and mindfulness, you know, our focus inwards. When I go back and read the Gospels and what Jesus says, and a lot of what he says had to do with going inside you. Don’t look for God outside in the sky somewhere, God is also within.” The emphasis on turning inwards, on buttressing individual selfhood as opposed to a communal politics, was a critical feature of many forms of spirituality that I encountered (Helderman 2019). The traumatized psychological self as the true self in need of succor was frequently seen as the “natural” self. When I asked him how these practices fit in with his Lutheran faith, Frank replied, “There’s the immanent God and the transcendent God. You know we live in both of those worlds. There have been teachers along the way for me.” He went on to describe the influence that John Shea,4 a Catholic theologian, had on his thinking about spirituality and mindfulness. Mindfulness approaches to spirituality, Frank continued, allow for a personal relationship with God. He was talking a lot about these issues in his writings. He spoke of this kind of mindfulness approach to spirituality and the sense that there’s that personal relationship with God. “It is inside; it’s something that is not just for the fundamentalist Christians on the right wing to talk about. That’s been my journey over the last ten or fifteen years,” he said. “Would you say that the emphasis on disaster has intensified these kinds of convergences?” I asked. “Yes, there’s certainly some good that can come out of some horrible experiences,” Frank replied. “So, when you have a 9/11 or Katrina, you have people who are for no other reason forced to come together and work together, you begin to see you have a common purpose to help our fellow human beings, our fellow brothers and sisters of the creator. You know, let’s work together, and let’s find a commonality that we can best approach, that healing that happens for people.” Frank emphasized that responding to material needs of housing, food, and medical care was essential. He went on to highlight how

52 Interlude

clergy are uniquely positioned to provide “holistic” care, as well as how religious groups have specialized over time. “Not everyone can do everything. Some folks will do things really well. Mennonites, Lutherans will do things well. Everyone has their niche.” Frank spoke of how 9/11 increased the connections between spirituality and medicine. “There is greater awareness,” he said, “of what healing and spirituality is, there’s an expansiveness, an understanding of other avenues of how to heal, a mind/body/spiritual approach.” The language of holism supplied clergy with one of their most important rhetorical claims to professional expertise. Holism, as set against the fragmenting forces of modern disasters, suggests a different moral claim to healing relationships and claims for expertise and professional jurisdiction. Frank viewed his social work practice as part of his ministry. All of his work was in the service of the spiritual. While he distinguished between his roles, he viewed his spiritual beliefs as the motivating force for his work. “As a pastor, I’m mostly concerned with the spiritual,” he insisted, “and that’s my function. And as a social worker, I’m concerned with the emotional and physical that goes with it. So, I think that there is more of a trend for that. I think you have more faith traditions that are communicating with each other— denominations that are seeing more what they have in common.” Disaster religious and spiritual care—because of its newness as an expertise and because of how disasters foster improvisation—creates novel openings where experts like Frank may find it easier to fit in.5 The emerging expertise provides a space for those who might not readily find acceptance or be allowed to hold positions of power in more established fields of expertise or organizations. More than any of the other of the people I spent time with, Frank exemplified the seeming contradictions embodied in disaster spiritual care. He worked with mainstream bureaucratic organizations (the New York City Fire Department) and was a minister in the Lutheran church, yet he practiced a form of séance. His commitment to working through trauma—his own and that of others—unified many of his efforts, providing a narrative for his life as well as his professional identity and expertise. His sense of his own expertise was built on trauma, a reflection of his own life narrative. Toward the end of our meeting, Frank spoke again about the need for emphasizing self-­care in disaster-­response organizations. “Some form of spiritual or psychological processing is needed. How about those who work at the morgue?” he added. “I worked there. I was there at the coroner’s.” He paused, looking up thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “I am a disaster junkie,



“Talking to the Dead” 53

no doubt about it.” A disaster junkie, he seemed to be saying, requires intensity to find meaning. He suggested a psychological quirk that was referenced by others I spoke with. Someone who, due to background or disposition, was drawn to the intensity that one finds where death, upheaval, and uncertainty are pervasive.

CHAPTER 2

Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response: From Anxious Individuals to Anxious Organizations

A tangle within, a tangle without, people are entangled in a tangle . . . Who can untangle this tangle? —Jata Sutta (Thanissaro Bhikkhu 1988)

“You’ve probably heard a bunch of bad things about us,” Rabbi Naomi told me. “Well, they’re not true. Those other guys are trying to squeeze us out. They want to control access to disaster sites; they want to have the main connection with the city and federal agencies. And they are predominantly Christian.” We were sitting in a small Manhattan office. The rabbi, a woman in her fifties, seemed anxious, as if she were reliving a disaster as she spoke. She was clearly distraught over the destruction and death she had recently seen following the attacks of 9/11, as well as what she saw as the destructive politics of religious disaster response. People I spoke to recounted many times the struggles over control, power, and resources in disaster-­response efforts—often accompanied by strong emotions and a sense of tired frustration. A while after we spoke, when I tried to contact the rabbi again, I discovered that she had left New York City for somewhere out west. Arizona maybe. She was burned out, others told me, traumatized, and could no longer stay in New York. This was a common narrative: after 9/11, clergy had to leave New York because of what they



Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response 55

had experienced. They were haunted by death and the remains of the collapsed towers. I can still clearly remember the emotional intensity in how she described her conflicts with other clergy at Ground Zero. Her shaky voice and eyes close to tears. It seemed as if her very sense of religious and ethical identity was threatened, that she was somehow in a struggle for psychic and spiritual survival. Organizations that were active in developing disaster religious and spiritual care had to navigate a thicket of organizational political tension. They faced questions like: Why do we still require spiritual care in a “secular society,” and how does it differ from what mental health professionals do? In response, disaster spiritual caregivers made specific claims to professional jurisdiction that rested on a particular idea of meaning. But for spirituality to have a place in disaster organizational settings, spiritual disaster response had to conform to the needs of a variety of bureaucracies and their credentialing and organizational requirements. To create a place at the table with federal, state, and local bodies, disaster religious expertise needed to offer a kind of minimal spirituality.1 That is, proponents had to distinguish the expertise from other expertise, but not too much, or in the “wrong” ways. Spirituality could not become too religious or rigidly doctrinaire, or it might alienate gatekeepers, who were frequently suspicious of particular kinds of religious expression. This minimum spirituality sometimes took the form of what I call bureaucratic spirituality: the rejigging of spiritual language to fit the needs of bureaucratic settings. Bureaucratic spirituality refers to the ways spirituality is forced to conform to organizational and bureaucratic contexts. Spiritual care often had within it a critique of conventional mental health practices, which nodded to historical narratives about the absence of meaning and more holistic and authentic forms of care in modern settings (Harrington 2009). But these critiques frequently ended up adopting the various languages of bureaucracy, thereby undermining, or at least obscuring, their own justifications. In other words, the concept of spirituality was often mobilized as a criticism of “mechanistic” and exclusively secular care (Taylor 2007; Farman 2020; Hewa and Hetherington 1995). But when spirituality is reworked to make itself legible to bureaucratic organizations, it often begins to resemble that which it set out to critique. It must adopt the language of expertise and bureaucracy, frequently in the mold of mental health professions, with references to the diagnostics of PTSD. While it may appear that a historical language of morality and faith has entered into conversations about caregiving, that spiritual language was frequently translated into a secular vocabulary (Asad 2018). These

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dynamics played out at an individual level and organizational levels.2 The simultaneous movement—toward bureaucratization and toward spirituality—creates its own form, a stretched patchwork, threads fraying, requiring ceaseless recrafting One of the topics that frequently arose with organizational leaders in disaster spiritual care was fear over the possible damages caused by underqualified practitioners. Rabbi Peretz explained to me early on that “after 9/11, we started screening clergy who wanted to provide care at Ground Zero and at the rest stations and found many people were not appropriate. We found their knowledge of mental health problems to be inadequate. We even screened out bishops, which became very unpopular.” This incident illustrates the long-­standing tensions and sometimes acrimonious conflict among faith groups and some disaster-­response organizations over theological responses to disaster, political power, and access to governmental and nongovernmental resources. Questioning the rights of a bishop to minister at Ground Zero amounts to a significant exercise of authority and boundary policing. I describe how individuals interact in organizations in the context of the shifting terrain of bureaucratic spirituality and how these forces shape personal career trajectories, which in turn shape the organizations themselves. I also show how anxiety shapes the roles of spiritual expertise, disaster-­related distress, and the kinds of organizational dynamics generated by the intensity of disaster work. I focus on two key organizations: New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS) and Disaster Chaplaincy Services (DCS). Because disaster recovery spans a wide range of organizations, particularly after an event such as 9/11, I also include experiences with several other organizations that played important roles in disaster religious and spiritual work, including the Red Cross, the Council of Churches of the City of New York, and the New York Board of Rabbis. I demonstrate how individual anxieties and struggles animate the structuring of organizations, and how such struggles embody many of the conflicts associated with developing the expertise of disaster spiritual care. Disagreements over credentialing, the boundaries of expertise, and professional jurisdiction (Abbott 1980b) were highly charged, often filled with rancor. To this day—as if the wounds are still felt—bringing up these topics prompts emotional responses. The seeming impossibility of creating a tent for an array of faith groups and spiritual practices, while weaving in and out of mental health language, lead to a kind of bureaucratic spirituality. These strains, like a patchwork quilt stretched to the point where the seams reveal the batting, were ever-­present in the trainings and meetings I attended,



Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response 57

as well as in individual conversations, though not always fully articulated. But there was a persistent sense that something was not quite fitting together, coupled with an unwieldy, tenuous, and temporary agreement to live with these undercurrents.

Anxious Organizations and Their Dynamics Spiritual and religious disaster response has been rife with conflict across religious and sometimes racial lines, as well as over the boundaries of expertise, prestige, and reward. By November 2007, I had been working in the disaster and spiritual care world for three years. I had attended many meetings for faith leaders involved in disaster response and could recognize many of the regulars at the various events I attended, and many had come to know me. I had even been given the title of “house anthropologist” by NYDIS, one of the larger religious disaster-­response organizations. When I arrived at the Goldman Center of the 92nd Street Y for a large disaster-­response event, the elevators were filled with rabbis, imams, Buddhists, and Russian Orthodox and Catholic priests. Two screens in the large conference hall projected multifaith, multiethnic photographs of Ground Zero, with police, clergy, and firefighters prominently displayed. The room was partially filled with nearly two hundred people, including Joe Bruno, the commissioner of the New York City Office of Emergency Management (currently New York City Emergency Management), and the deputy commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who gave a peculiar speech about his experiences in Rwanda as the head of the Red Cross. The United States “needs to develop a culture of preparedness,” he repeatedly proclaimed to what appeared to be an approving audience of technocrats and clergy. Prior to the attacks of 9/11, such a meeting would have been highly unlikely—and would surely not have been very well attended. An organization such as NYDIS would not have had a four-­million-­dollar budget or attracted the attention of then–New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Disaster response received a tremendous boon following 9/11 (and subsequently Hurricane Katrina), including President George W. Bush’s faith-­based initiative, which made federal dollars available for religious-­based social services, massive post-­9/11 disaster funding, and the increasing recognition that more disasters were on the way. Gary, a director of a faith-­based disaster organization, pointed out that disasters had brought about novel forms of

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government alignment with religious organizations, including memorandums of understanding between governmental organizations such as the New York City Office of Emergency Management. The faith-­based initiative was underway before 9/11, but outreach from government agencies to religious organizations intensified following the attacks, expanding the support for spiritual disaster-­response expertise. Before the attacks, there was only one organization in New York City attempting to represent religious groups during disasters: DCS, which had begun meeting in 2000 to design training for clergy providing care in disaster settings.3 But by 2003, NYDIS and DCS were the two main religious organizations involved in providing training and disaster-­relief services in New York City. Following 9/11, the Red Cross provided office space for DCS, but because of their mandate to remain secular, the Red Cross eventually asked them to leave. Though the Red Cross does not have a religious affiliation, they have close collaborations with faith leaders and religious organizations working in disaster settings. Because the Red Cross has such an important global position, collaborating with them imparts legitimacy. DCS hoped to maintain direct ties with the Red Cross after they were asked to move, but the Red Cross felt that allying with a religious organization could compromise their work. “We have had good working relationships with the Red Cross, but we had to move because they didn’t think it was a good idea to house us. It was potentially problematic, compromising their mission,” said a rabbi who was working for DCS. NYDIS, an umbrella organization that continues to coordinate local religious responses to disaster, arose shortly after the 9/11 attacks and became the most well-­funded and well-­connected religious disaster organization operating in New York City. They offer an array of direct services, outreach, and training activities for New York congregations. Their main goals, as stated on their website, are “to facilitate the delivery of services, resources, and information to religious communities, as well as to under-­served individuals, populations and impacted communities, and to provide a coordinating function for disaster-­related planning and preparation for religious organizations.” They provide an unmet-­needs table (which continues as of the publication of this book)—a meeting of social service agencies that reviews requests for assistance—for those who have fallen through the cracks of post-­ 9/11 services. NYDIS is also actively engaged with the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD), a member organization that coordinates disaster organizations nationwide. By the time I started work



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on this project, it was clear that NYDIS had a greater organizational capacity and stronger connections to New York City government than others engaged in disaster spiritual care. The training programs and conferences sponsored by these two organizations had a broad reach. And many that I attended in New York City had chaplains coming up from the U.S. Gulf Coast or returning from Indian Ocean tsunami recovery work. I observed an emerging culture of global spiritual ­care workers—experts who knew each other from multiple disasters around the world—and a kind of “fellowship of suffering” characterized many of their conversations. Talk frequently centered on experiences of destruction and the kinds of emotional and spiritual problems they encountered in their work, providing them with a seemingly easy sense of camaraderie. Despite these shared experiences and the universalizing discourse on spirituality and suffering, tensions remained. The language of spirituality went only so far in bridging organizational, theological, and religious differences on the local level—let alone on the national and international levels (Cadge 2013; Pagis, Cadge, and Tal 2018). This universalist view of spiritual distress that I encountered—and of a “commonsense” view of meaning management—obscured many real and enduring differences among religious groups and organizations. Many I spoke with in New York City described infighting and interpersonal and organizational conflict in the field of disaster religious and spiritual care. One minister I spoke with recounted the pervasive tensions, struggles, and bad feelings—what he called the “9/11 syndrome.” “We must stop this,” she said in a sermon-­like cadence. “We can’t let ourselves be petty and backbiting. We need to work through our traumas and learn to really love each other. All of this gossip and fighting and competition, it’s like a 9/11 syndrome, and we need to stop it. Egos get in the way. Everyone’s busy keeping his or her own turf. As nasty as it sounds, it’s true. As humans, we want to protect ourselves, where we work, our families.” The “9/11 syndrome” suggested something about how the event and its aftermath had both exposed and intensified rancor among both religious organizations and individuals. While I’m reticent to attribute the organizational acrimony I encountered to individual-­level psychologies (or human nature), it was clear to me that disaster work tends to draw people who, for a variety of autobiographical reasons, have a need to place themselves in highly intense work situations. The autobiographical narratives that were shared with me by disaster spiritual care responders often included accounts of early life traumas and loss that

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supplied reasons for their career choices. In many ways, the people I spoke to described personal traumatic experience as one of the prerequisites for having the skills to navigate the distress associated with catastrophic loss. But what was clear is that the circulation of trauma and anxiety, from the individual to the organizational levels, was seen by many as key to understanding the fraught nature of disaster-­response politics. The shifting ecologies of organizations and personal relationships, threaded with mutual suspicion and a tangle of politics, as the Jata Sutta (Thanissaro Bhikkhu 1988) evokes, all but ensured struggles on different scales. The tangle within and the tangle without—“to add your own disorder to disaster / Makes more of it” (Stevens 2015:326)—the ways that people become entangled and entangle each other leave anyone hoping to untangle the tangle, whether through spiritual or psychological modes, bewildered. Attempts to untangle often result in even greater tangles. Disasters of the self can become disasters of organizations— and disasters of the world, and organizations, can become disasters of the self. Larry, a psychiatrist in his mid-­thirties who was involved in 9/11 recovery and has maintained an active role in disaster relief, recently told me, “People are traumatized and continue to traumatize each other.” A trauma narrative was continually invoked to describe how organizations themselves become sites of re-­traumatization. Individual-­level trauma circulated, creating organizational dynamics that embodied trauma in the organizations themselves, resulting in anxious organizations. For example, many I spoke with reported that NYDIS used aggressive tactics, monopolized relationships with government organizations, and forced faith communities to pass through them for access to resources and credentialing. For years following 9/11, perhaps even still, leaders of organizations refused to talk to each other because of perceived slights. Religious groups, of course, are no strangers to conflict, mistrust, or internecine animosities, both within denominations and among different religions and spiritual traditions. And the fact that each religious community has its own governance and organizational structure makes it particularly challenging to coordinate interfaith disaster response. Catholics, for instance, have a very hierarchical system of governance, as well a lot of influence in New York City due to their numbers and long-­standing relationships with government, whereas the Jewish community has no central authority. The New York Board of Rabbis has no power to make decisions on the congregational level and represents only a relatively small number of synagogues. On several occasions, city officials and spiritual disaster responders told me that the New



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York Board of Rabbis would not sign on to NYDIS unless the Muslim affiliate group signed an agreement denouncing terrorism. Individual caregivers could also produce conflicts. While, for the most part, relationships between mental health workers and spiritual caregivers were portrayed as fairly amicable, I was also often told by one spiritual caregiver that some of his colleagues were guilty of inappropriate behavior, counseling people in ways that deviated from what were considered the norms of therapeutic intervention adapted to pastoral care. These missteps included proselytizing, judgments of sin, comments about retribution, or “will of God” statements, which go against the tenets of disaster spiritual care. And, as one minister told me, some clergy engaged in “inappropriate” proselytizing at Ground Zero. I had seen firsthand some of these tensions. For example, a Seventh-­Day Adventist minister told me that he struggled with suppressing his need to turn people toward the “path to salvation” when working in hospital settings. Tensions played out privately and publicly, among faith groups, and between faith groups and governmental organizations. At a large conference for clergy on disaster preparedness held in 2004 at New York University’s Kimmel Center, the director of a disaster-­relief organization spoke passionately about the need to support the work of clergy in disaster settings. “The city needs the churches to be involved,” he said. “Disasters occur locally and people recover locally. We cannot depend on the federal government to intervene. We need to be prepared.” But many clergy I spoke with were suspicious of the city government’s intentions. Reverend Green, an African American minster in a large New York City church, did not trust efforts to bring clergy into government disaster-­response plans. “We have been terrorized for years and that’s not going to change. Now we are doubly terrorized—by the terrorists and our own government and police,” he told me in a conversation I had with him at his office. This was a stark contrast to much of the media coverage of 9/11 and presaged the now well-­known images of private militias guarding stores following Hurricane Katrina. It highlights the ways trauma and terror are experienced differently according to one’s location—geographically, economically, and racially (Carter 2019)—which has only become more apparent during subsequent disasters and pandemics. Visible, dramatic disasters attract immense philanthropic and governmental funding—particularly for those who are white and economically privileged. Poor communities and communities of color experience both the ongoing structural inequalities that characterize the United States and the punctuated destruction of catastrophes.

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Similarly, Leo, a man in his fifties born in the Middle East who worked for a large government organization in New York City, told me that he did not want to be an “emotional sheriff.” He lamented what he saw as an overemphasis on the spiritual and emotional aspects of disaster response and the kinds of pressures it put on his own job. Disasters, he said with disapproval, were increasingly being made into emotional and religious problems rather than material problems. Government should stay out of religion, he insisted. “After the explosion of a water main in Manhattan,” he explained, “the disaster mental health division received a call from the Office of Emergency Management saying that they needed mental health workers to deal with angry crowds.” Leo told them that they didn’t need mental health care but needed to give them information about how to get home and what was going on. “Of course, they are angry,” he said. “They want to get home and can’t.” Like some of the clergy I interviewed, Leo felt that the emphasis on mental health professionals was overkill: people do not necessarily require counseling or mental health interventions after a disaster. He had also been the disaster liaison to the religious community in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, had spent a lot of time educating clergy about disaster response, and had conducted his own research on the role of clergy in the mental health system. The role of government agencies in regulating disaster spiritual expertise was a fraught topic. When asked about the changing role of government in disaster response, one head of a disaster-­relief organization said that after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA hired clergy to identify bodies: “This might be the first instance of a direct hire by the federal government of clergy in disaster response.” While I was unable to confirm this story, there was a clear perception that on multiple levels, government organizations had become interested in working with clergy and in finding new ways to connect, and that clergy felt a newfound (or recaptured) importance—a sense of tentative vindication in being desired for their expertise. This revived sense of importance seemed to add to the intensity of interorganizational conflict. A sense of importance, particularly when combined with religion, spirituality, trauma, and disaster, could result in dynamics that were seen as dysfunctional. Though the intensity of individual personalities was often cited as a cause of conflict, the nature of the work provided a fertile context for intensity. “Disaster work,” Keith, a director of a disaster religious-­response organization, said, “has a tendency to create the super chaplain.” I suggested, in response, that some have argued that disaster can bring out the best in people and foster “post-­traumatic growth.” “That’s bullshit. There’s no such



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thing,” he replied. “Those people are fucked up, the ones who say they are growing from disaster. Those are the ones who you have to watch out for—the super chaplains who have found new meaning in life in disaster work.” The “super chaplain,” he went on to explain, is a type of faith leader who has found that disasters bring new meaning to their lives, who see themselves as saviors but were in his view dangerous and undermined the work of building organizations that provided a platform for disaster spiritual care. “They go to all the trainings and conferences and have become self-­styled gods of chaplaincy.” This description of the super chaplain suggested awareness within the disaster world of a professional culture that attracts people who are working through their own problems or traumas by taking on the role of a disaster caregiver. Of course, the minister describing the super chaplain exempted himself from this description. But he had a point: the level of emotional intensity among disaster workers is something I witnessed over and over again. It was characteristic of many individuals, as well as organizations. If it is possible for an expertise to have a psychological persona, one might say disaster spiritual care embodied (and perhaps continues to embody) the anxiety of its collective knowledge and experience—the stitching together of an expertise that has been stretched close to its limits. To be a professional in this context was not only to confront the limits of one’s own expertise but also to encounter complex organizational environments, often producing anxiety.

Whose Distress? The Boundaries of Disaster Spiritual Care When I began this project, I had not worked much with religious communities. I was initially startled by the high degree of animosity between organizations involved in disaster work. From my first interview in the winter of 2003, I found myself in the middle of complex relational conflicts, hurt feelings, and battles over resources and status. It was clear from the start that the conflicts extended beyond standard interpersonal and professional dynamics, going to the center of deeply held beliefs and issues of identity. Disaster work is intensely emotional, not easily set aside at the end of the day: people who spent days working at Ground Zero counseling families and rescue workers had a deep sense of personal commitment to their work and were not always able to take distance from it. I was struck by the prevalence and intensity of mutual suspicion among the different organizations and individuals. Some people refused to speak with me because they thought I was associated with

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a rival organization. Others seemed to think they could use me to represent their organizations by describing them in a good light. Many of these strains were embodied in conflicts over credentialing and establishing the boundaries of expertise. Referring to the need for credentials, the leader of a religious disaster-­response organization I spoke to said, “That group is totally incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing.” Power, politics, funding, theological differences, enduring conflicts, personality quirks, and organizational conflicts all came together in conversations over credentialing. In the years following 9/11, trainings with various disaster-­response certificates proliferated, as I’ll describe in later chapters, and organizations vied for official recognition from government bodies. While resources were always at stake, the conflicts over credentials embodied deeply held beliefs about the nature of distress, theology, politics, the role of spirituality in disaster contexts, and selfhood. “All kinds of clergy were flocking to New York, and many of them didn’t know what they were doing. We had high-­level people, like bishops, that we had to ask to leave. This created problems and resentment. [Mental health] training is necessary,” recounted Rabbi Feinstein, describing the problems she saw at Ground Zero. As one head of a religious organization said, “We need national certifications, but there’s no way we are going to get people to agree on these. We can’t even get people in our own city to agree.” Professions and different forms of expertise rely on credentialing to ensure control over a particular arena as a way to define and police the boundaries of competency. A manual published by NVOAD articulates these concerns of competency and expertise: “Spiritual Care also has the capacity to damage vulnerable persons if performed in an inappropriate way. Because of this delicate reality, it is crucial that agencies and groups providing Spiritual Care adhere to common Ethical Standards and Codes of Behavior” (Light Our Way 2006:15). As Freidson (1970:63) suggests, credentialing is never neutral and “works to produce an occupational cartel, which gains and preserves monopolistic control over the supply of a good or service to enhance the income of its members by protecting them from competition systems.” In the case of disaster spiritual care, income was not always at stake, but perhaps something that went even deeper than the need for a paycheck: the need to be recognized as having meaningful expertise, and, in this case, one that was emotionally charged and laden with the historical weight of religion. Offering meaning in the face of devastation, after all, is not a casual charge. It is no wonder that those involved felt strongly about their work.



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Due to the reluctance of government entities (at least in New York City) to regulate their activities—and to the decentralized nature of many religious organizations—disaster spiritual care credentialing and boundary maintenance pose unusual challenges. The supposed mutual obligation of religion and government to maintain their separate spheres of influence has been a defining feature of American politics (Allitt 2005). Following 9/11, government bodies, for the most part, expected religious groups to sort things out on their own, not wanting to enter the thicket of religious conflicts, though they have readily seen clergy as a potential asset in disaster response. As one government official said, “We want to include the faith community in disaster response. But we can’t get overly involved. It’s the separation of church and state. People would be outraged if we started telling church groups what to do. But on the other hand, we can’t just have anybody getting badged and coming into disaster situations.” The lack of organizational coordination among faith groups makes credentialing a morass. It is difficult enough to get multiple Jewish congregations to coordinate, for instance. But getting multiple denominations of Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus to come to the table and develop agreed-­upon protocols poses a monumental organizational challenge of a bureaucratic-­theological-­financial nature. With divisions among religious groups stretching back thousands of years, interreligious dialogue— as I was both often told of and witnessed—goes only so far in fostering successful collaboration. To understand some of the problems of credentialing associated with disaster religious and spiritual care, we must look more closely at organizations’ legitimating rationales, their claims to professional jurisdiction (Abbott 1988). These arguments point to how both individuals and organizations define the parameters of credentialing and boundary maintenance of spiritual care expertise: who should be included, why, and what kinds of work are appropriate for disaster spiritual care providers, and what skills are necessary to work in disaster settings. Individuals and organizations were engaged in defining the tools of an expertise, in effect demarcating what a person is made of—and hence what kinds of care such a being would require to be restored after explosions or floods. Do all people require spiritual care? And if not, what are the distinct contributions of disaster spiritual care providers? It was crucial for the expertise to distinguish itself from mental health professions, while at the same time not straying too far from the norms of psychological interventions. By assimilating some of the basic ideas of trauma

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associated with mental health models, combined with (at times a minimum) spirituality and meaning-­making, spiritual expertise distinguished itself from other forms of expertise. This was a narrow discursive path to tread: just enough psychologically oriented language of trauma, but not too much, or disaster religious and spiritual care responders could appear to be overstepping the boundaries of their expertise, breaking the tacit agreement of bureaucratic spirituality. The soul, meaning of a particular kind, relationships with God, and some forms of ritual, with an understanding of trauma—this was the realm of chaplains and faith leaders. To talk too much of religion and spirituality, or not have enough knowledge of mental health theories, was to risk being seen as inadequate. The result is a limited language—a vocabulary of bureaucratic spirituality—that stretches, absorbs, and sometimes breaks open to reveal other forms of religious and spiritual expression. An examination of credentialing reveals the tensions inherent in bureaucratic spirituality. The attempts to create boundaries around the exercise of spiritual expertise reveal acrimony. Clergy, mental health professionals, and policymakers had many views on how faith leaders should relate to mental health professions, how disaster spiritual care should present itself as an expertise, and how and where human distress and suffering originated. Theology, biography, and organizational positions were, of course, intertwined with how those I worked with engaged organizations, presented themselves, and viewed their role as representatives of faith groups in disaster contexts. I offer three differing views on how the boundaries of spiritual expertise were navigated and how they were structured by larger questions of theology and organizational politics. The narratives suggest a range of entry points into spiritual and religious disaster response, illustrating the different ways that religious and institutional affiliation and ethnic and racial identity shape conflicts over credentialing, boundaries, and the nature of spiritual expertise. The also offer different justifications for disaster religious and spiritual care rooted in theology, autobiography, and institutional context.

Rabbi Rubin: “When the Physical Is Waning the Spiritual Takes Over”

I had seen Rabbi Julius Rubin speak at various disaster-­related events and was told by several chaplains that he was an important figure in the Jewish community in New York City. He had long been involved with fire and police



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departments as a chaplain and was involved in Ground Zero work following 9/11. A man in his sixties, he frequently smiled and made jokes. As the director of the New York Board of Rabbis, an umbrella organization representing over eight hundred New York City synagogues, Rubin was clearly experienced in the ways of politics. His office was filled with books on Jewish topics and pictures of himself with various political leaders. I asked the rabbi about the kinds of preparation clergy should have for disasters. He replied, “Rabbis need continuing education in order to deal with people in disaster. That’s one of the challenges of working in disaster.” Responders, he continued, need to integrate their spiritual knowledge with other kinds of training. “The Bible is clear about the connection between the spiritual and physical—when the physical is waning the spiritual takes over, and the other way around.” Rubin integrated biblical ideas with ideas about mind/body connections, offering possibilities for increased collaboration between different forms of expertise. He continued, “There was a time when mental health was on one side and religion on the other. 9/11 has changed that. End-­of-­life services, too, because of the collaborative nature of that work, also has caused greater collaboration.” The rabbi pointed to institutional arrangements that foster greater collaboration between faith leaders and chaplains and other professionals, in which the problems being faced require an intensified interaction. Medical settings, nursing homes, and end-­of-­life care, in particular, are key sites where chaplains find a significant ongoing a place for their work. Rubin insisted that 9/11 intensified the presence of spiritual caregivers in disaster settings. “Before 9/11, collaboration was happening in a scattered fashion. During 9/11, we interacted so deeply that we recognized we don’t have all the answers. If we don’t have the answers, who does? For too long, religion felt it was omniscient.” This increased interaction not only clarified the need for spiritual disaster response; it also forced a reflection on the limits of expertise by responders themselves. According to Rubin, the religious leaders were humbled by what they experienced and questioned their own abilities to respond. While this was likely the case in some instances, most of the religious and spiritual disaster responders I spoke with relished the increased interest in their work from mental health professionals. Hurricane Katrina also intensified collaboration. “The tragedy continues after 9/11, the effects stayed and then Katrina came about. Katrina was positive in the sense that mental health worked with religious groups and recognized human inadequacy.” Disasters, Rubin was saying, create instability and fundamental questions about the reliability of day-­to-­day reality and

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the very limits of expertise. They also provide contexts that force individuals and organizations to work together intensely in ways that don’t usually occur. They create a kind of hypersaturation, a sense that there is too much reality of a particular kind, that one’s ability to assimilate information is swamped and requires different kinds of practical knowledge, leading to new forms of expert collaboration. This statement provides one of the key rhetorical claims that disaster spiritual care provided for its expertise: in times of catastrophe, mental health care is not enough, and religion needs to step in and deal with the need for meaning. Like fires, floods, collapsed buildings, tsunamis, and other collective catastrophes, quotidian, unremarkable, and unavoidable death, by its very nature, eludes manageability. Even disasters allow for certain knowability, and they are often followed by research, analysis, sifting, the publication of journalistic and academic volumes, and the creation of museums. But blunt death, in its stubborn and disinterested way, is a locked door. It offers little news from the other side, while for those who remain behind, the absences continue to painfully echo. For these reasons, clergy are frequently called upon in hospices (and other medical settings) where they work closely with doctors and nurses, given much greater roles than in many other professional contexts, because end-­of-­life care is an arena where medical staff often admit they are at the limits of their expertise. It is the place where medico-­technical devices are quietly put back in their cases and solemnly wheeled out of rooms, and chaplains, palliative care staff, psychologists, and social workers appear with questions about endings—and sometimes unresolved dimensions of living. Where prayer and meditation replace the scramble for medical answers. Hospices have also provided an arena where personal and professional networks form, because in a context where expert knowledge reaches its limits, and where expert anxiety intensifies, people search for knowledge and wisdom beyond their immediate spheres. Where pain—psychic and physical—is at stake, and where need and even desperation are motivators, the push for a range of responses may be greater. Theological questions in both disaster and hospice settings are rarely far off. Rubin described, with increasing intensity, his views on suffering, rooted in Jewish theology and the history of the Holocaust. “The pain of many is a partial comfort,” he told me. “The move from why me to we, like the therapeutic impact of Kaddish,4 when people get up and see that others have lost people. When Job wants to know why, the answer is that the heavens are higher than the earth. We don’t understand. Much blame was directed at God



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after 9/11, and also after the Holocaust; if God could intercede at the Exodus, why not the Holocaust, people wanted to know.” By drawing connections between 9/11, the Holocaust, and the Book of Job, Rubin made a common argument for the role of clergy in disaster settings. The reference to Job and the Holocaust links disaster work to a biblical source. Unsurprisingly, the Holocaust was central to Rubin’s thinking about disaster response. The paradigmatic twentieth-­century human disaster, the Holocaust, which produced images of heaping piles of bones and skeletal prisoners, has played a crucial role in understandings of trauma and coping and theological thinking on disaster (Lerner and Micale 2010; Shepherd 2003). Until recently, it was difficult to talk about the historical and cultural aspects of trauma without reference to the Holocaust.5 More recent catastrophes, genocides, and pandemics have increasingly displaced the centrality of the Holocaust. But the issue remains: creating an expertise and credentials for spiritual care workers through short trainings becomes a challenge when faced with the death and suffering of millions. What sort of capacities, what kinds of credentials, what sort of training would train one for the impossible, that which by its nature outstrips our skills, wisdom, and knowledge? These questions, while not always explicitly mentioned, seemed frequently to haunt many of the conversations I had.

Reverend Simpson: Mutual Suspicions and the Boundaries of Mental Health and Spiritual Expertise

Sitting in a small midtown office, Reverend Mary Simpson, the director of Disaster Chaplaincy Services (DCS), a volunteer organization that coordinates and provides trainings for disaster chaplains, told me of her involvement in 9/11 recovery and the role of DCS in preparing New York City clergy for future disasters. She was a white woman in her early forties and had a gruff yet friendly manner. When I asked her if she thought things had changed with clergy and mental health relationships since 9/11, she replied, “I do, and organizations like ICISF [International Critical Incident Stress Foundation], those groups are helping a lot because there’s a lot of cross-­training. One of the courses taught is pastoral crisis intervention and an advanced course. I believe it says that you don’t have to be clergy to take the class. For anyone interested in spiritual response or learning about it, this is good.” Simpson was pointing to the

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significantly increased number of training opportunities for disaster spiritual care, which I will address at great length below. Following 9/11, more and more courses were available for both laypeople and faith leaders. It was as if the world—or at least parts of the United States—had woken up to a terrain that was no longer legible. One solution was for this disorientation was to get more training and to import skills from different fields. But Simpson also made clear that faith leaders should preserve the distinctiveness of their own expertise. “Having organizations that do training,” she said, “and open up for clergy to take crisis intervention, not mental health courses, not so clergy can be MSWs but opening crisis intervention up and welcoming clergy in to be part of that, which is really appropriate. And giving training to clergy who have the right intention, which they don’t get in seminary. Once they are given those tools, it just makes everything work better.” Clergy, in other words, should not look too much like mental health professionals. They should not cross lines of “appropriateness,” but they should have the tools—or vocabulary—of mental health expertise. And this required clergy who have the right intention, which I took to mean those who are able to check their religiosity outside the barricades of Ground Zero—or any other disaster site. To do anything else would be to court the latent suspicion of mental health professionals and organizational gatekeepers. God was welcome, though in small, unobtrusive doses. Simpson, like others I interviewed, articulated a common perception among clergy: since 9/11, there had been more openness from both government agencies and disaster-­response organizations to clergy working with mental health professionals in disaster settings (Roberts and Ashley 2017). Highlighting the importance of systemic change rather than idiosyncratic collaboration, she pointed to the role of what she calls “cross-­training” (having clergy train in mental health) in fostering better relationships. Trainings such as those provided by ICISF provided a recognizable certification that ostensibly softened the historical mutual suspicion of clergy and mental health professionals. This was evidenced by the number of military members, police, and firefighters who were trained in these methods. But while Simpson advocated for the role of clergy, she made it clear that they did not have master’s degrees, assuring the mental health world that they would not be overstepping their boundaries, as a way of signaling clarity about roles. Simpson also described the challenges of developing relationships with secular experts. Proselytizing, she pointed out, is one of the major fears that nonreligious organizations have about involving clergy in disaster response.



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She also emphasized the importance of having an institutional affiliation with a high-­status secular organization such as the Red Cross. Many of the conflicts among religious groups that I worked with were over who would be recognized by these secular organizations. NYDIS, for instance, was in the process of establishing memorandums of understanding with the New York City Office of Emergency Management and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. These efforts to become an exclusive link between religious communities and government agencies were seen by many I spoke with to be aggressive attempts at control and power. “Do you have ongoing relationships with mental health professionals?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied emphatically. “We work incredibly closely with them. Eighty percent of our calls are from Red Cross. We have enough clergy and mental health and we try to tag team and send out one clergy and one mental health so they can really tag team.” She went on to describe their relationship with the Red Cross—despite their need to maintain some distance from religious organizations—as being highly collaborative and a good example of how mental health professionals and disaster spiritual responders can work together. “Mental health can be very suspicious of chaplains, and chaplains can be very suspicious of mental health, and there’s a learning process for both sides of that. Part of our orientation course is for referrals. If clergy are not willing to refer to mental health, then this is not the volunteer opportunity for them.” This was a theme that emerged many times in the course of my research: how to develop trust between these professions that were seen to have an uneasy history and were frequently viewed as competitors. It was the language of trauma (and meaning) that provided the meeting place. In order to have trust, a common vocabulary needed to be forged, a trading zone (Gorman 2011) of expertise where the unavoidable slippages and mutual misreadings could, at least in moments, be overlooked. When I asked her if they had problems with chaplains who refused to refer to mental health professionals, she replied, “Not for us because we screen for that. It’s part of the screening questionnaire. A number of chaplains got a bad rap after 9/11 because there were individuals that came in and were causing harm and doing things that were completely inappropriate and awful.” Simpson reiterated the stories I had heard of disaster chaplains responding in inappropriate ways. “Mental health has good reason to be suspicious in general,” she continued. “Why we are an important organization is because we provide prescreening

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and classes. The folks that show up with our badge and do that stuff, we can take their badge and have them arrested. If they are in a place they are not supposed to be, and refuse to leave, we’ll take care of it. More mental health city agencies are feeling at ease with our work because we can police our own people.” Simpson pointed to the ways her organization attempts to gain legitimacy and control access to disaster sites. But since government agencies have been reluctant to get involved with intrareligious conflict, and religious groups are nearly impossible to organize en masse, DCS did not seem to have the reach that Simpson implied, though they claim to have roughly one hundred on-­call volunteers. Their association with the Red Cross—which included long-­standing individual relationships that were in place before DCS was founded—gave them status in the disaster-­response world, but not the exclusive authority over disaster and spiritual care in New York City that they wanted. The shifting ecologies of organizations and personal relationships, threaded with mutual suspicion and a tangle of politics, all but ensure ongoing struggles.

Reverend Green: Institutionalized Racism and the Boundaries of Anti-­Expertise

I met Reverend Green on a dreary January day with intermittent snow and sun. A tall African American man, he walked into the midtown Starbucks where I was waiting to meet him. We ordered drinks and food and sat at a table in the crowded café. Green started out by telling me that his wife used to work for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and, as it turned out, the program she managed was responsible for the grant funding my research. Green was the pastor of a large church and a coach for executives. He had worked with Fortune 500 executives and top law firms. He was also a practicing therapist and had a large client base of clergy families and retired athletes. When I asked if there was a connection between the two, he said, “Yes, both were used to getting their lunches paid for, to being put on a pedestal and then have to deal all of sudden with the change, with not being seen in that light, and other people not getting why they feel bad about that. With clergy, the [New York Times] stops calling for quotes,” he said. Following 9/11, recounted Reverend Green, he saw a dramatic increase in levels of stress in people. In particular, he said African Americans were coming to him with a deep sense of anxiety about their safety and where America was heading. He brought up the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein as an



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example: “People are worried about the hanging, people I wouldn’t expect to be worried. It happened right around Ramadan,” and, as he pointed out later in the conversation, “it was a lynching, and the Black community also obviously has feelings about that.” Green was very involved in 9/11 relief efforts and spent time in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He spoke about the large number of clergy who left New Orleans after the hurricane, citing a study by Lutheran Disaster Response. When I asked if the same was true for New York City, he replied, “No, we found out that NYC is a destination city. You know the Frank Sinatra song is in people’s hearts. We found also that if clergy have new skills to meet new needs, they are less likely to be themselves disasters. Disasters require a whole new set of skills—theology and psychology were at one time under one roof.” Green spoke of an easier time when the split between mental health professionals and clergy was not so pronounced. After 9/11, Green told me, he was asked to give talks about religion and psychology. Organizations were looking for ways to improve communication between religious groups, and between religious groups and disaster-­ response organizations. He described the ways mental health professionals and city officials did not understand the role of religious leaders. “You see that guy over there who you think is ignorant,” he said. “Well, five thousand people show up to his services on Sunday. If he says the medicine is bad, people won’t take it. If he says that it is good, they will.” He went on to describe the long history of distrust that communities of color have with medical practitioners and cited Columbia University’s interactions with the surrounding African American community as an example. “We need to make clergy more comfortable. Columbia [University], initially, didn’t do that. They had the usual intellectual elitism and arrogance. They didn’t have any community input, and though they did put together a curriculum that looked good on paper, I told them that they need people who are in and understand the community to teach. They needed to pair up professionals and religious leaders.” Green echoed a perspective that I frequently encountered. Faith leaders, he said, are part of communities and have a degree of trust that doctors and other professionals do not have. Their work is rooted in a nonexpert vocabulary that resonates, particularly in times of stress and great need. For Black, Brown, and immigrant communities, this is even truer, he argued. Black communities in particular, he said, have a long and justified suspicion of the psychiatric and mental health world. “People in these communities listen to clergy,” he said emphatically, voicing one core justifications for the inclusion

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of religious leaders in disaster planning. Though Green had a doctorate, this “anti-­expert” rhetoric has a moral resonance that clergy often mobilized. They are, as this view implies, closer to both God and the people. Disasters, and 9/11 in particular, only intensify the scrutiny of expert responses. “Before 9/11, there wasn’t much going on with religion and mental health,” Green explained. “There were some institutions that incorporated spirituality, but it was vague and not real religion—flower children selling spirituality. They didn’t start where people are, as you learn in psychology. They were trying to take religion without replacing it with something.” The reference to “flower children” pointed to a cultural divide between institutionalized religious practice and what Green seemed to see as the degradation of religion—particularly through the New Age practices that came out of the 1960s. For Green, real religion has roots in established institutions, not in what he characterizes as the vague practices of the hippie generation. For him, 9/11 marked an important cultural shift that showed that faith leaders and mental health experts needed to work together but also highlighted the need for religious practice rooted in tradition. According to Green, the attacks of 9/11 ushered in a new era of understanding between mental health and religion. “9/11 force-­fed the need to have a meeting of minds between religion and mental health. The change has been significant. NYC should be given a great deal of credit—the Saul Alinsky mindset, all of our interests.” In this view, there was an increased understanding that the people had solutions to their own problems and did not require the expertise of mental health professionals. Clergy and faith leaders (though not unaffiliated forms of spirituality) were part of the people and should not get too close to mental health experts. But Green himself had multiple roles. He spoke of the highly political nature of the work of clergy in New York City. His long-­term involvement with local politics and his psychotherapy work gave him an unusual view into both city politics and individual lives and explained how he came to see spiritual care as embedded in larger social, historical, and political issues. He was also highly aware of the conflicts over boundaries and jurisdiction. “Reverend Green, but also as I remember there was a lot of conflict between mental health and spiritual care workers?” I asked. “Yes,” he responded, “there was a lot of pain. First, the people from Oklahoma [referring to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995] came to teach us. But New York City is not Oklahoma. It’s different. Larger. Then psychology



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came in not respecting the religious. They weren’t asking what people needed. We didn’t want to make a new industry of fear and panic.” Religious leaders often felt disrespected by mental health professionals, he claimed, and disasters have a way of bringing these dynamics to light. He saw this sense of disrespect as intertwined with both a long history of institutionalized racism and the political economy of mental health professions. Hurricane Katrina brought more lessons. “Katrina,” he said forcefully, “taught us that there were some basic needs that needed to be met—­people need flashlights, water. But government might not be the solution. I’m fifty-­three. I grew up in the 1960s and have the same attorney as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. NYDIS wants to be the only voice.” The reverend expressed anger over the attempts of NYDIS to dominate relationships between religious communities and government bodies in disaster response. Referencing the structural inequalities and racism that the response to Hurricane Katrina revealed, as well as his moral authority as a civil rights activist, he was clearly angry with the politics of disaster response in New York City. With a hard-­edged sense of New York City politics, Green saw himself as someone continuing the civil rights struggle. But he said his views had matured. He no longer saw himself as solely fighting. Instead he had become, he said, a coalition builder with business and government, though he saw his work in disasters as an extension of his civil rights efforts. Green clearly placed the conflicts that he witnessed in disaster religious care within the realm of politics. As an African American minister involved with Harlem political issues and with a long history of activism, Green was particularly attuned to race and inequality. He also highlighted some of the difficulties in organizing religious communities across faith lines. “Religious organizations must claim their authority,” he said emphatically “They can’t do that based on their relationships with government organizations. In some communities, that doesn’t help, and it’s not only a racial issue. The trinity is politics, religion, and business. . . . Business gets things done. We see that with Mayor Michael Bloomberg6—we needed a politician’s authority, and in disaster even atheists get religion real fast, even if it’s temporary.” Green, unlike many I spoke with, viewed much of the rhetoric on spirituality and anxiety as inadequate, lacking in a critique of institutional racism and inequality, and the material bases for distress. Disaster response, for him, demanded a very different conception of anxiety, one that foregrounded an understanding of anti-­Blackness and the history of American civil rights.

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Disaster structures much of American life; it is not episodic or an imagined ominous future. Pushing against bureaucratic spirituality and the veneration of experts, he claimed an increased role for clergy rooted in their closeness to the people.

A Niche for Disaster Spiritual Care For clergy to find a place in disaster work, to create a niche, they have to jettison much of their traditional role as religious shepherds rooted in a particular tradition. At least on the surface, they also have to maintain a division between mental health practice and spiritual care, providing an example of the ways people navigate the tensions of religious and secular divides, as described in the previous section (Oosterbaan 2017; Elisha 2017). This perspective was often repeated in interviews and training documents. As Charles, a Presbyterian minister, told me, “We’re not here to do therapy. That must be made clear. We’re here to take care of people’s spirits. While the line is not always easy to find, we have to come back to it. That’s part of the job.” In other words, clergy must not proselytize and should not even introduce the topic of God unless the person they are talking with mentions it first. It is difficult from our current historical position to understand how radically different this perspective is from the role of clergy in the previous century. “What else would clergy talk about but God in the face of death and destruction?” someone from the nineteenth century might ask. If they are not talking about God, then what kinds of expertise are clergy offering? If not a connection to the divine, by what criteria can the expertise of clergy working in disaster settings be understood and credentialed?

The Force of Presence

Disaster spiritual care providers frequently cited the ways they were able to emotionally and spiritually connect with people as one of the key differences between themselves and mental health professionals. People were less scared to speak with them than with mental health professionals. One minister I spoke with described to me the tension between clergy and mental health professionals that resulted from 9/11: “During 9/11 psychologists came out of the woodwork to help but were not prepared for acute psychological trauma.



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They were used to providing long-­term care. Many burned out. People wanted to talk to clergy. If mental health is going to be involved in acute care, they need to learn.” Indeed, many faith leaders not only felt needed but felt that there was a special demand for their services. Many I spoke with felt that there was not enough sensitivity to the spiritual needs of victims and their families, that the expertise provided was unable to address the real needs of those suffering. Religious leaders, many I interviewed recounted, were better able to understand those needs because they did not pathologize grief and provided a more authentic caring. This was a critical component in religious organizations’ claims for disaster expertise. Religious leaders, I was often told, were more accessible than mental health professionals. “People are more likely to go to clergy in the wake of a disaster because they are readily accessible within a tangible, solid structure within every community,” said Harry, a young male Methodist minister. Spirituality, Harry continued, naturally emerges in times of crisis, and humans seek guidance. “The shrines people spontaneously erected at Washington Square Park and the various firehouses after 9/11, complete with candles and offerings. These shrines were set up as places where people could commune with each other and pay their respects to the dead.” People spontaneously become religious and spiritual after disasters, Harry reported. This was one of the oft-­repeated arguments of spiritual care responders: disasters cause spirituality to emerge. Sitting in a midtown restaurant, Mary, a white female minister in her mid-­thirties, explained the key differences between religion and mental health: “Unlike mental health, we can walk next to them, they cry with you.” Defining religious and spiritual care as emotional rather than mechanistic, as addressing the whole person as opposed to pathology, Mary provided the image of journeying alongside those she cared for. Spiritual care, she seemed to be saying, was an expression of authentic emotion and was rooted in a logic that allowed for a “whole-­person” approach. Rabbi Levy, an active presence in the New York City and national religious disaster-­relief communities, as well as the founder of an organization for training clergy in disaster response, spoke at length about his view of spiritual care and what it entails: “Lots of listening, very little talking.” Active presence, which has roots in Protestant ministry, was cited frequently as one of the key capacities of disaster spiritual caregivers. “Presence” suggests a nonjudgmental, nonprescriptive way of being with someone who is in need. Presence, as opposed to imposing religious views on others, was considered the gold standard of disaster care.

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Levy went on to explain the importance of asking the right questions to get at what people were really experiencing. He emphasized the need to connect with feelings and the creation of a narrative as key buffers against PTSD. Citing psychiatric research, he said he focused on “what they are feeling so that they are not going through it alone. Somebody that’s been through, let’s say, a 9/11 experience. It’s helping as quickly as possible to relive their experiences so that they don’t end up with PTSD or other things. The person who saw people fall from the Trade Center and can’t talk about it is at a much greater risk than the person that can talk about it.” This reliving was meant to provide a clear sense of narrative that offered meaning: “Some of the meaning that we help people come to is that sometimes there is no meaning in what people see, but that meaning if you can’t even touch it begins to overwhelm the psyche. And that’s good spiritual care—helping people early on.” Levy saw spiritual care as providing an antidote to the tendency of mental health professionals to pathologize reactions to disaster. But this perspective on healing still reflects a conventional psychological belief in the need to speak about an event and to articulate a narrative—create coherence in the face of a maelstrom—to prevent normal reactions from becoming PTSD. The rabbi’s statement upheld one of the dominant religious/psychological dogmas. Meaning was seen as the most important professional offering of clergy, and PTSD threatens meaning with what is experienced as the unmanageable and ungraspable. Restoring meaning by creating a narrative directly after an event was thought to provide a pathway out of the symptoms of PTSD. A world without meaning, in this view, is unimaginable. That spiritual care can fend off a meaningless life was its greatest claim to expertise. For example, the handbook on disaster from the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster defines “spiritual care” as Anything that assists an individual, family or community in drawing upon their own spiritual perspective as a source of strength, hope, and healing. In disaster, anything that nurtures the human spirit in coping with the crisis is Spiritual Care. Religious Leaders naturally provide care for their own congregants, members, and parishioners in a manner imbued with the symbolism, meaning and resources of their own faith traditions. In fact, for individuals who belong to particular communities of faith, their own clergy and religious leaders are usually the best persons to offer them Spiritual Care in times of trouble. Disaster Spiritual Care, however, can be quite different. In Disaster Spiritual



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Care, Spiritual Care Providers may not share a religious or faith tradition with the individuals, families and communities for which they care. Indeed, the recipients of the care may not belong to any religious community at all. Thus, Disaster Spiritual Care endeavors to provide sensitive, appropriate care for all persons and to celebrate and respect every spiritual perspective. (Light Our Way 2006) This view creates a universal spirituality, a potentially endless demand for spiritual care. Anything that assists families in recovering can be considered spiritual. The particular faith of the care provider seems largely irrelevant. The quest for meaning that defines spiritual work, rather than belief in a specific deity or adherence to a religious doctrine, is what’s important. In this view, it is both trauma and meaning that hold together disaster spiritual expertise. As Mary, a white presbyterian minister, told me, “Spiritual care deals with issues of meaning that everyone has. If people were not spiritual, they would have killed themselves a long time ago. This is a very exciting time, and there are a lot of changes in how things are being done. Faiths are working together in ways they never have before. While this may have started before 9/11, it has drastically increased since.” Life, in her view, requires spirituality in order to be lived.

Carrying the Tears: Individual Motivations for Spiritual Expertise

There are many motivations for becoming a spiritual care worker. Some do it for prestige, some for income, some for a sense of religious mission, and some to work through earlier traumas, or even to find salvation. And possibly for all of these reasons. Many spiritual disaster experts do not get paid at all for disaster work, and, at least in their rhetoric, clergy are not motivated by money. Spiritual labor is built around a perception of religious altruism that differs from other forms of labor rooted solely in financial gain. It is a mission-­driven form of labor, one that deemphasizes personal benefit. Many of the faith leaders I interviewed spoke of this religious mission. “We all carry tears, and part of our work is to help others carry their tears—we all have our traumas,” said a Baptist minister I interviewed. Such statements suggest a universal sense of suffering and a conception of care that is similar to, but also differs from, secular mental health ideas. “Carrying tears” suggests a kind of moral-­spiritual load akin to shouldering the cross. This vocabulary is a long

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way from talk of the hypothalamus and adrenal glands. Disasters, particularly those with a high profile, elicit a different valuation of suffering (J. W. Bowker 1999), lending to disaster work a sense of meaning that can be seen as payment in itself—and a kind of status associated with working in well-­known disasters. Spiritual care takes place in a social field that may differ from most secular arenas. While spiritual disaster experts may be looking for “payoff,” the kinds of rewards promised by spiritual labor have more to do with a selflessness seen as an intrinsic good rather than organizational advancement or financial reward. Many disaster religious and spiritual care workers are volunteers, even at higher organizational levels. I met Reverend Simpson at a disaster conference in New York. She viewed her motivation for the long hours and difficult work as originating in her sense of connection between the traumas she witnessed as a child and a spiritual view of injustice, a calling to do God’s work. “I work in disasters,” she said, “not because I have interest in financial reward but in part because it is a calling. I know what it feels like and I know I can help others walk through it.” She found a sense of purpose in flaming buildings and flooded streets, and her experience of trauma provided a self-­validating sense of expertise. She found her calling—caring for those in the “burning pit.” The rhetoric of volunteerism appeals to a widespread American sensibility, one that sees something more genuine and “of the people” in nonpaid forms of care. The powerful claim that one is simply motivated by an urge to heal traumas or to step into a burning pit alongside those whose lives have recently been upended by disaster has moral resonance. Compensation for labor that goes into this work, its motivations, and its impacts on the workers themselves was different from those of mental health experts. While social workers, for example, might also volunteer, at least in their professional roles, they did not often invoke the same kinds of moral and spiritual language. Disaster spiritual care, then, mobilizes the language of faith, volunteerism, and mission to motivate and justify its essential role in disaster response. Mission and calling are not enough to pay rent for office space, attend trainings, or travel to disasters. Staying within the lines of bureaucratic spirituality proffered financial benefit, and establishing boundaries—the relevant forms of expertise and credentialing—was an important way to gain support. Funding must come from private donors, governmental agencies, foundations, and religious organizations. While the importance of financial support was obviously a key component of competitiveness—a subtext for attempts to gain authority,



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links to government agencies, and credentialing—such things were not always explicitly articulated. The financial success of organizations, though, could be gauged partly by the size, location, and condition of their office space. Using this as a measure, NYDIS, which had a well-­maintained and large office in the Wall Street district, was the clear financial winner.

Diagnosing Dis-­ease

Many religious and spiritual care providers were concerned that there was an overdiagnosis of conditions such as PTSD, a pathologizing of distress, which some claimed undermined the natural resilience and healing of those in distress. This pathologizing could also disrupt the “natural” ways spirituality could flourish as a force of healing and recovery. In contrast, religion and spirituality do not pathologize distress, the argument went. By tapping into the spiritual resilience that everyone already has inside them, rather than seeking to label, spiritual caregivers address the whole person. “The role of the spiritual caregiver is to be a presence of God. This presence heals,” one fire chaplain told me, and I frequently heard religious leaders and chaplains say similar things at conferences. The anxiety of mental health professionals over the ability of clergy to both put religious beliefs aside and understand the nature of mental distress is also reflected in the materials and conversations internal to disaster spiritual care practitioners. Manuals and trainings often emphasized how to distinguish religious and spiritual distress from psychological distress.7 Their effort at marking clear lines in professional expertise and jurisdiction served to allay the fears of secular professionals and to create a clear professional jurisdiction for spiritual care providers. Again, one of the challenges spiritual care providers faced was just how much to distinguish themselves. If they went too far in their claims about having distinct expertise, they ran the risk of seeming too spiritual; if they didn’t go far enough, they appeared to be little more than watered-­down, ill-­trained mental health professionals. Meaning was a seemingly neutral and acceptable form of expertise they could offer. Light Our Way (2006), a manual written by a team of disaster spiritual caregivers and published by NVOAD, lays out in detail the role of spiritual disaster expertise, providing a universal framework of spirituality built on the idea of meaning. In the clinical context, the claim for expertise rests on

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differentiating spiritual care from secular mental health expertise. The criteria for spiritual “dis-­ease” largely stay within the domain of traditional religious themes, though they could easily be translated into psychological problems. According to the manual, the symptoms of spiritual dis-­ease that may be exhibited during disaster include: • • • • • • • • • •

Reconsidering core tenets of religious beliefs Asking questions such as “Why did God do this?” Questioning justice and meaning Feeling far from previously held beliefs Feeling a need to be cleansed Closing oneself off from loved ones Feeling despair and hopelessness Feeling guilty Wondering about life and death Feeling shame

The term “dis-­ease” is used to make it clear that a medical diagnosis of a disease is not the goal of spiritual care. Instead, spiritual distress can lead to diminished spirituality, not a circumscribed pathology. Oddly, losing one’s religious beliefs, here, is included as a symptom. This list of “symptoms” constitutes a kind of spiritual disorder that imitates the language of mental health professionals, using the very kinds of diagnostics that spiritual care providers criticize. Theological struggles become lists of distress symptoms analogous to the psychiatric nosology. While the move from disease to dis-­ease—only a hyphen away— presents a clear distinction between mental health care and spiritual care, the mimicking of mental health diagnostics undercuts this distinction. One Russian Orthodox minister told me, seemingly to show me that he was educated about mental health problems, “It’s very clear when something is PTSD—and that’s a disease and I need to refer them to a mental health professional. It’s not my job. But the differences are very clear between religious problems and the disease of PTSD, which requires a diagnosis that I’m not qualified to make.” Rabbi Berkowitz, a woman who had been active in disaster response, succinctly summed up her view of the differences between clergy and mental health professions: “If they are angry with God, send them to a pastor; if they think they are God, send them to a mental health professional.” Statements such as this were made to define professional boundaries and to show that clergy were not in fact encroaching on the terrain of mental health



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professionals but were well aware of the differences in their roles. This rhetorical stance belies the messiness of clinical encounters, assuming a clear distinction among varieties of distress. Disaster religious and spiritual care organizations, like any organization, link together the beliefs, practices, and experiences of the individuals who comprise them. They also embody implicit and explicit understandings of distress and ideas about the sorts of expertise required. The tensions inherent in providing organizational structures to these questions about diagnostics and understandings of distress, spirituality, and meaning cause—it is no wonder—a tangle of anxiety. From interpersonal relationships to organizational competition over resources, a jittery sense of uncertainty seemed to characterize my interactions. In disaster-­response organizations, conceptions of what it means to be healthy, wounded, distressed, or disabled are made explicit through the kinds of care they give—the ways organizations operationalize their theories through trainings and response. Behind the easily glossed-­over corporate-­authored manuals are, of course, individual authors with real-­life experiences that play determining roles in how they write documents and run organizations. Manuals such as Light Our Way can be read, like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, as documents for what it means to be a healthy-­functioning or dysfunctional human. They are collections of concepts about the ways human life can go awry and become unwhole—and how these lives can be pieced back together. The people described in this chapter worked tremendously hard, frequently under painful conditions, to create deeper understanding and expertise that served those suffering from disaster-­caused pain. The fact that organizations—composed of individuals—struggle with human foibles does not detract from their labors. Instead, I view these very human challenges as part of the impossible tangles of living in the world—particularly a world that requires disaster spiritual experts to be both what they are and what they are not, to worry over a stretched, tense patchwork that must continually be repatched.

Conclusion The anxieties over the intertwining struggles of credentialing, theodicy, power, and prestige described here foster a particular formation of spirituality that I have described as bureaucratic spirituality. The interactions among

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spiritual caregivers—as they attempted to justify their expertise—and bureaucracies created a structural arrangement that amplified a historical narrative that at once critiqued and reinforced ideas of modernity, secularism, belief, and expertise. Bureaucratic spirituality shapes individuals, organizations, and their relationships. It morphs, shapes, compromises, and accommodates, defining spiritual expertise in a way that is acceptable to the widest range of people. The individuals described here worked to fuse their personal experiences into a kind of organizational redemption, a way to transform their own narratives into a “useful distress”—that is, narratives of distress that found redemption in work associated with particular disaster organizations. Many of those who played important roles in disaster religious and spiritual care before 9/11 rose to be heads of organizations after the attacks. They became players in disaster religious and spiritual care on local, national, and international levels. The organizations themselves came to embody anxiety, trauma, and spirituality, in turn codifying knowledge and experience and creating professional processes to reinforce that knowledge and solidify expertise (Abbott 1988). Reverend Simpson, Reverend Green, and Rabbi Rubin spoke of anxieties about the emerging dangers and the importance of collaboration between religious leaders and mental health professionals. They also pointed to the different ways that historical traumas and personal traumas informed their professional trajectories and the expertise of disaster religious and spiritual care. In the midst of organizational rancor and personal conflicts, the need for meaning and the role of trauma are the threads that hold together the expertise of disaster spiritual care. Without these, there would be little adhesive for claims to professional jurisdiction. The internal theological and psychic struggles of those I worked with—the inner and outer tangles— were refracted throughout the organizations. Put another way, the competition over funding, recognition, the ability to maintain a seat at the table, and credentialing required disaster spiritual caregivers to speak a professional pidgin (Gorman 2011), one that required spirituality itself to conform to bureaucratic grids. The spiritual treaded a narrow path—just spiritual enough, but not too spiritual; just enough mental health knowledge, but not too much. These struggles characterized the lives of both individuals and organizations. While disaster work itself can be emotionally draining, disturbing, and destabilizing, the organizational struggles to define, codify, and credential add another layer of anxiety: the sometimes-­ acrimonious struggles for resources that were interwoven with theological, psychological, and religious differences, creating a peculiarly anxious form



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of expertise, an expertise anxious about its own position and professional engagements and preoccupied with the constitution of human anxieties. Bureaucratic spirituality points to even deeper historical anxieties over how to understand the nature and origins of distress (or suffering) and how to devise adequate forms of care. Any conversation about the role of spirituality in disaster response must include the semi-­submerged conversation haunted by residual spirits that query: How do we care for other humans when the world around us unravels? Any explanation must take into account the tangles within and the tangles without, the attempts to work through meaning, trauma, and politics in the contexts of disaster response, navigating the religious and spiritual in the secular, the secular in the religious and spiritual, and the spaces in between, where these clear distinctions cease to fully make sense.

INTERLUDE

“The Wisdom of the Body”

I first met Rose in 2005 at a conference for clergy and mental health professionals recognizing the anniversary of 9/11. Many of the people I had grown accustomed to seeing were there, including some New York City government workers, a FEMA representative, clergy representing different religious traditions, and mental health workers. Rose was part of a small breakout group that I participated in. She was also offering bodywork (massage therapy and other related modalities) for conference participants as part of the organizers’ promotion of self-­care. Rose had a table set up with several other bodyworkers and an acupuncturist. After speaking briefly about her work, we exchanged cards, and several weeks later I contacted her for an interview. ​In fall 2005, Rose and I met for an interview in a coffee shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and then walked several blocks to her apartment. Along the way, we spoke about how she had first become involved in disaster work. Rose was fifty-­one and grew up in Far Rockaway, a neighborhood in Queens. She went to Hillel Yeshiva (an Orthodox Jewish school), to New York University for college, and then to law school, from which she graduated in 1984. “From a young age,” she said, “I knew I wanted to be a massage therapist. But for a nice Jewish girl, this wasn’t really a possibility. So, I went to law school instead.” Years later, after feeling trapped in a career that she felt was never for her, she returned to school and graduated from the Swedish Institute’s Massage Therapy Program. There, she studied with a Japanese shiatsu master, who had a strong influence on her view of the body, trauma, and healing. He taught her the principles of Chinese medicine, including the theory of meridians and chi and acupressure. Though she eventually abandoned traditional shiatsu, creating her own version of bodywork, her ideas about energy and healing were formed by her work with this teacher.



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Rose also trained at the NYU Trauma Center with Jack Saul, a known traumatologist. Saul taught her a great deal about trauma theory and its relationship to the body. “Trauma touch therapy releases the body,” she said. “The basic theory is animal fight-­or-­flight—numbing is one reaction, playing dead. Hormones numb and you look like you are dead, and endorphins reduce pain, so if you are eaten, you won’t feel it as much. It’s like in sexual abuse, the way people are not able to push back and their shoulders shook.” As we sat in her large living room, I noticed a book on her desk titled The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. Rose described her experiences working in disaster response, quick-­ paced and animated, with few questions from me. The attacks of 9/11, she told me, impacted how she understood her role as a bodyworker and healer and provided many opportunities for work with traumatized firefighters, allowing her to refine her ideas about how the body responds to trauma. She encountered firefighters and first responders who did not want to speak about their experiences—perhaps, she felt, because they were incapable of speaking about them. But, Rose recounted, they were pressured by mental health professionals to remember and narrate their experiences. She increasingly came to reject what she saw as the overemphasis on talking about traumatic experience, instead invoking the title of Walter Cannon’s book, “the wisdom in the body.” Cannon’s ideas about the body and stress were woven throughout many of the conversations I had, providing a key unifying frame that linked together what appeared to be disparate practices such as prayer and massage, science/spiritual hybrids. To emphasize this idea, she demonstrated a forward-­pushing motion, showing how bodywork allows one to “push” through these experiences. The idea that people become trapped in a physiological fight-­or-­flight mode further supported the view, she argued, that trauma becomes embedded in “primitive” mental structures in a very literal sense, and thus can only be worked through physically. The physical experience of sexual abuse, she explained, cannot be healed simply by talking it out. Rather—and again, in a very literal way—it needs to be reexperienced through the body. It is the body that has the “wisdom” to heal, not the mind (Cannon 1989). This view of healing, that the body needs support in healing itself, formed the core of her sense of spirituality. Rose did not consider herself religious, though she saw her work as spiritual. Her lack of religiosity provided an example of the way spirituality combines in different ways to encompass therapeutic practices that do not necessarily have a spiritual component. Rose’s experience working in 9/11

88 Interlude

and Katrina recovery helped consolidate her own spirituality, as well as her vocation—and her sense of expertise. These contexts provided her with a new vision of her place as a healer, expanding beyond particular encounters with individual clients to a more general theory of healing from trauma. Her work in disaster gave her new insight into the technique of her bodywork practice, expanding her sense of expertise beyond the confines of her training as a massage therapist to a broader notion of energy healing. Providing care to firefighters, first responders, and survivors of Hurricane Katrina gave Rose practice that exposed her not only to many people who had experienced intense traumatic events but also to other disaster spiritual care responders. “Walking around after 9/11,” Rose said, “I was devastated, though I didn’t lose anyone. I didn’t offer any services until around six months after,” she said. “When people are in the middle of trauma, they don’t need anything then, but later they do.” She went on to tell me how many firefighters were desperately in need of care. She described one firehouse that had lost seven people in the flaming towers. “I didn’t try to fix people. I showed up, but I knew my place, and that was not my role.” Rose recounted a story from her work after 9/11. She was doing bodywork with a large firefighter who had been working at Ground Zero. He must have had an anxiety disorder and started flailing around. Rose realized that she could have been hurt and “was freaked out.” She decided that she needed more training and enrolled in a course on body-­ centered trauma work, or touch therapy. Trauma touch therapy refers to a bodywork approach that focuses on using hands to provide healing for those who are survivors of trauma. “This is PTSD,” she said, referring to the firefighter’s response. “It’s like its own disease, and something I did triggered it. Trauma happens in the body and needs to be gotten out through the body—it’s in the limbic neocortex, and it’s not rational. Talking may bring peace of mind, but [trauma] is still in the body,” she told me. “The body speaks through the body—period.” Psychodynamic therapy, she suggested, does not see people as whole and has an undue focus on talk— at the expense of listening to the body. She also suggested that talk therapy could be potentially harmful, intensifying trauma by forcing people to relive experiences. Shiatsu, a massage practice originating in Japan, she explained— emphasizing the eclectic nature of her work—is perfect for this sort of work because there’s no oil involved and you don’t have to take your clothes off. Firemen, she said, were asking for help. They wanted alternative practices, something other than talk therapy, Ruth emphasized, and her merging of spirituality with bodywork was a perfect match. “But the alternative practices,” she



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said, describing the competition she encountered, “were too successful and were cut. They were cut and marginalized. All the [mental health] professionals want massages, they go to yoga, etc., but they marginalize us.” Rose had recently returned from New Orleans, where she volunteered following Hurricane Katrina for an organization called The Blessing Project. Later, she found out that the organization had connections to Pat Robertson, the famous televangelist. “But surprisingly, despite this,” she said, “they did good work and did not proselytize.” She learned a great deal from working in Katrina recovery and did bodywork on many people. The levels of stress were incredibly high, she said, but working for The Blessing Project also expanded her concept of Christianity, giving her greater acceptance and dispelling some of her prejudices. This shift in her view on religion points to the way disasters force unlikely relationships and create possibilities for new alliances. Disasters are fertile grounds for trading zones, where information, expertise, and networks are remade and flow in novel directions (Gorman 2011). But it was the overwhelming experience of trauma that stuck with her from her time working in Katrina recovery. She felt there was a deep need to expand care for those recovering from disasters. ​Rose went on to tell me about her work in Israel with survivors of suicide bombers. “I was very influenced by this work,” she said, “and I was totally shocked when I worked down south [in New Orleans] and discovered that I like to work with first responders because no one takes care of them. When I worked in the emergency room, I calmed people down, and the guard commented on how much more calm people were, how they didn’t keep coming up to see how much longer they needed to wait.” Rose spoke about the lack of long-­term care for survivors of disaster as being an ongoing problem and one of the motivations for her work. She also spoke about how trauma lingers in the body and how stories can continue to echo and retraumatize. “What do you do for people in these situations?” I asked. “What did I do for them?” she responded. “People feel forgotten after a while. The disaster is long over, but they are still in it; it’s like yesterday for them. If you tell people that you remember them, they feel like humans again . . . the hallmark of trauma is helplessness and hopelessness. I help get people back into their bodies, which often feel the least-­safe place to be when traumatized. I’m just there with them—with no agenda—to support where they are. With bodywork, there is no story attached, unlike with talk therapy.” ​Rose also described herself as a facilitator of healing and as having no agenda—emphasizing, again, the wisdom of the body and its ability to heal.

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She spoke of Bessel van der Kolk, a well-­known traumatologist who focused on the body and, therefore, in Rose’s view, offered an alternative to the traumatized. Telling one’s story, Rose said, can reenact trauma; it is only through restoring the natural connection to the body that one is led to a sense of wholeness. I ask about the future, what they are going to do, not what happened. Nonverbal therapy. A lot of people don’t deal well with verbal therapy. Like the people in the fire department. They are just not good at talking, but not about themselves. And some jobs won’t let them go to talk therapy, like the military and police. But they can go get a massage. I’ll let them call it whatever they want, but there is a spiritual component. Energy is spirituality, and that is why I do this work. I hate the term healer, can’t stand it. I’m more of a facilitator—I channel it. I believe in giving people back their strength. People lose their foundation, and I try to help them to keep moving forward and don’t let it stop you, whatever it is. I’m not a massage therapist, and I hate the term bodyworker. I call it body-­centered therapy, though it’s not really therapies. She saw herself in opposition to the conventional tenets of talk therapy. September 11 raised many questions about the overdiagnosis of trauma and the role of mental health experts in perpetuating a sense of psychological fragility. Part of the challenge for Rose and others was the creation of a new framework for thinking about trauma and healing through the notion of energy, which she invoked in a peculiarly modern way as a stand-­in for spirituality, particularly for people who may not want to be affiliated with any one tradition. Energy is a concept broad enough to encompass many different phenomena, and it is an effective metaphor for healing processes; “blocked energy channels” and “working through energy” are ways of framing problems that allow for many interpretations, and they are amenable to scientific explanations. After all, the transfer of energy occurs on almost all levels of physiological processes, so it is possible to talk about energy passing through nerve endings and neurotransmitters or through meridians and spiritual channels. Far from indicating a simple division between modern and retrograde, magic and superstition, the concept of energy in this context shows how these categories break down and are much thinner and less reliable than many commentators have imagined (Josephson-­Storm 2017; Rakow 2013). It is neither



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a simple relic of the past nor part of scientific advances; rather, “energy” generates a contextual meaning of its own. “It’s coming out of my own common sense,” Rose said. “I have a child with a disability. We all have our problems. I know what it’s like to be hopeless, helpless, and out of control. You don’t have to have the same experience as someone else to help them to heal. I have been given the opportunity to become a spokesperson for this work, and I can tell you the science, the energetic side and stories.” Josephson-­Storm writes, “We live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone. Restated, magic never truly vanished” (2017:305). Rose’s use of the word “energy” functions as a religion-­ science hybrid explanation, one rooted in pragmatic spirituality in the form of a particular expertise (Josephson-­Storm 2017). Energy has a “near-­scientific” resonance. It also suggests a kind of minimal spirituality, one not akin to bureaucratic spirituality’s diagnostic grids, yet suggesting something that could be “modern”—a meeting place where the spiritual remains. ​Rose spoke about herself as channeling energies, though not as the locus of healing power. She combined different ideas in her practice, drawing freely from traditions of massage therapy, psychology, spirituality, and her own experience. Rose cited her experience with trauma and her increased understanding of traumatic distress as the main motivations for her work. Unlike many theological critics of the concept of spirituality—who argue that, divorced from religious tradition, spirituality is essentially about self-­gratification—her spiritual understanding motivates her to move outward and heal others from their traumatic experiences. Like Frank, she had a great interest in showing that her work has some scientific basis. She also was aware of how medical professionals might view her and of how her work might be dismissed. A few months after our meeting, I contacted Rose to see if I could schedule a bodywork session. I wanted to get direct experience in order to understand her work better. I arrived one afternoon at her apartment, and without much conversation she asked me to lie down on a mattress that was on her living room floor. The treatment took about an hour, and I remained fully clothed throughout. It consisted largely of Rose putting pressure on different parts of my body and asking how it felt. She explained that shiatsu massage can be very hard on clients’ bodies, which she felt was unnecessary. She felt that she could get better results from being gentle. Overall, I thought the massage was pleasant, and was a little disappointed that I did not feel very different when I stood up to leave. But that night, I had

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one of the most peaceful dreams of my life. When I woke up the next day, I felt an unusual sense of calm and ease. I e-­mailed Rose to tell her about my experience and express my gratitude. I asked her once more in an e-­mail if she understood her work as spiritual, to which she replied, “It’s experiential and spiritual—whatever that means. What’s heaven? A place where you learn something new every day and you are curious and open.” Rose did not enter the disaster world as someone from a particular faith group. She did not go through seminary or have training in chaplaincy. She saw herself as having a particular expertise, one rooted in a “spirituality of trauma and the body.” The language of trauma provides a unifying element for many seemingly disparate forms of expertise to come together in the same space and at least momentarily find a common cause. Rose’s view of bodywork points to a kind of minimal spirituality. She does not pray to a deity and holds to no codified spiritual or religious tenets. But her practice does offer a sense of embodied transcendence. Rose understood herself as having a unique attunement to trauma, as someone with expertise in moving energy and helping people work through experiences with disaster. She saw herself as having both the manual technical training and an understanding of the spiritual-­psychological needs of those recovering from disaster. But trauma was the key thread holding this patchwork together, a unifying element of her life narrative.

CHAPTER 3

Mechanics of the Spirit

What can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-­out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life? —Max Weber (1909)

I sat in the lobby of the “God Box,” a large building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that houses a variety of Christian charities, listening to conversations about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 9/11 attacks. I could pick up accents from the Midwest and the South and the rougher sounds of various New York dialects. How, I often wondered in those days, did I find myself surrounded by priests, ministers, and reverends? Several chaplains from the Midwest were convinced that I should follow a career path as a military chaplain. It was no coincidence, I was no coincidence, I was told, that someone with a name such as mine would be called to work on questions of religion. Surrounded by the routine sugar-­ glazed Danishes and coffee, a fire chaplain recounted the shattering feeling he had when he arrived at the scene of an exploded building. Another gray-­ haired man described the pain he witnessed after a tornado in the Midwest. In those days, I spent a lot of time at trainings on disaster response and spiritual care and heard a lot about how important—and frequently inadequate—trainings were for disaster response. Faith leaders, mental health professionals, and public health workers also spoke of the urgent need for better and more frequent trainings. Preparing spiritual experts (and disaster responders more generally) for the next calamity appeared to be on nearly everyone’s mind. Trainings took me from New York City to Virginia, Mississippi, and

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New Jersey, where I met ministers and laypeople engaged in defining expertise in disaster religious and spiritual care, and provided a window onto a range of views on religion, spirituality, trauma, and the incorporation of different therapeutic modalities, as well as onto how different audiences responded. Pastoral crisis intervention (PCI), which I will discuss in this chapter, was one of the more well-­known and controversial training models. I will discuss two additional trainings in Chapter 4. PCI is a program of critical incident stress management (CISM), a model of psychological debriefing designed for interventions immediately following a crisis. The term “debriefing” in this context has its origins in operational debriefing or instrumental or after-­action debriefing, developed mostly for military and paramilitary organizations (Tramontin and Halpern 2007:257). CISM represents a movement within the first-­responder community designed to train laypeople in a structured form of processing meant to prevent the worst traumatic symptoms (Groopman 2004). PCI builds on this work and was designed specifically for the needs of clergy or lay spiritual caregivers working in crisis situations. During the early 2000s, their debriefing model was widespread, and the controversy over its potential was covered in academic journals as well as popular publications such as the New Yorker. I show how this training differentiates between spiritual and psychological distress and emphasizes a particular model of disaster religious and spiritual care expertise—one with a highly mechanistic view of human functioning (McCarraher 2019) and selfhood. I use the term “mechanistic” to describe views of human functioning that employ machine-­like metaphors, a “parceling out of the soul” in—partial—service of bureaucratic demands. Mechanistic views of human functioning are materialistic and committed to a world without spirits, where a clear and rational causal mechanism can be found for everything, and human physiology—including the brain—is seen as having essentially machine-­like characteristics (Harrington 1999). In the context of psychological interventions, experts see the mind (and body) in distress as a temporarily malfunctioning self-­machine to be set aright, realigned through a mechanical process and restored to healthy functioning by clear linear protocols. But for many, this sensibility would seem at odds with the very reason that people seek solace from religion and spirituality, belying the holistic or “enchanted” view of the self and its connection to divine filaments or earthly spirits. In the epigraph that begins this chapter, Weber points to a related reoccurring anxiety of modern life that disaster spiritual expertise is meant to remedy: the “parceling-­out” of the soul, the fragmentation of the



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“bureaucratic way of life.” CISM could easily be seen as an incarnation of this machine-­like force. I first learned about CISM from Reverend Simpson, who told me that her organization was cosponsoring training for clergy. The trainings seemed like an ideal site to gain further understanding of how disaster religious and spiritual expertise was being developed and disseminated. Several months later, I enrolled in the training, which consisted of two separate two-­day sessions. The CISM website claims that they train forty thousand people a year in PCI. The PCI workbook articulated its broad goals: “the functional integration of any and all religious, spiritual, and pastoral resources with the assessment and intervention technologies germane to the practice of emergency mental health.” It was open to anyone and conferred a certificate in pastoral crisis intervention. Most attendees were not full-­time and were hoping to incorporate the CISM skills into the work they were already doing in police departments, fire departments, and the military. Of all the trainings I attended, CISM was the most routinized and had the closest relationship to large bureaucratic organizations—emergency response, military, and medical. It exemplified one of the ways religion and spirituality are bent to adapt to a kind of command-­and-­control disaster-­response culture. But it also shows how even in the most intensely bureaucratic settings, other forms of religious expression find their way in. This training provided a key to understanding the tensions that arise in the merging of religious expertise and mental health secular bureaucratic organizational frameworks. But the story is not a simple one. Meaning management implied a bureaucratically legible view of the self. But the training revealed ruptures in this veneer, thinly veiled tensions, and knots. Critically, this training presented a reworking of the individual (self) into a manageable unit to be intervened upon by a particularly mechanistic form of expertise—one that gained widespread appeal among bureaucratic organizations because it supposes a self that is congruent with a vision of the psyche and spirit as manageable. However, the tensions between the model and other forms of religious expression unfolded toward the end of the training.

Traumatic Interventions: CISM and Debriefing Debates In 1974, Jeffrey Mitchell,1 an emergency medical services worker and volunteer firefighter, conducted the first critical incident stress debriefing. He

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described his discovery as “a method of helping first responders and others who have been involved in critical incidents that leave them emotionally and/or physically affected by those incidents.”2 CISM draws on theories of group therapy and crisis intervention to develop a kind of rapid intervention after traumatic events. The most common process consists of short debriefing sessions with a group of impacted people. Mitchell was motivated by his experiences in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He concluded that debriefing—a structured discussion within ten days of an event— could lessen trauma symptoms among responders. Nearly twenty years after Mitchell developed CISM, he created PCI specifically for faith leaders and lay practitioners looking for training in pastoral crisis interventions. Following volunteer work at Ground Zero, I participated in a debriefing session where the facilitator asked us several questions about how we felt about our experiences working there. ​PCI brings religious and spiritual care into the language of debriefing and crisis intervention. The goals of the intervention are not to address theological issues of suffering but to restore healthy functioning through clearly defined models and steps. One of the key goals of PCI is to deal with what the workbook defines as a “focus on impairment in relations horizontally and vertically”—or the relationship one has with God on the one hand, and other humans on the other. The workbook includes all of the slides from the presentation and was given to participants as a reference manual. It served as a compendium of PCI knowledge and wisdom, including academic articles about CISM,3 quotes from the Bible, slides, and disaster scenarios. The translation of spiritual and religious crises into the language of PCI provides a striking example of how bureaucratic processes absorb experiences that are meant to be their antithesis. Again, the relationship with God was considered key to psychological health, and distress was considered a possible threat to that relationship. To restore one to healthy functioning, the workbook says, the pastor must ensure that “the relationship with God remains intact.” The workbook continues: “Rather than giving in to panic, a crisis interventionist who is able to make a careful assessment and timely spiritual intervention can enable a person to regain hope and functioning in their horizontal relationships with family and friends and their spiritual relationship with God.” Emergency services require interventions to conform to language and protocols that fit a particular bureaucratic logic. Religious practice, in this context, is transformed into a kind of mechanism for restoring psychological functioning. For example, the workbook proposes that the aims of pastoral



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crisis intervention “are fundamentally the same as those of non-­pastoral crisis intervention, i.e., the reduction of human distress whether or not the distress concerns a significant loss, a crisis of meaning, a crisis of faith, or some far more concrete objective infringement upon adaptive psychological functioning.” PCI has come a long way from traditional theological approaches to crisis and disaster. It employs a technical language of utility rather than the language of faith or of opening existential questions. Again, religious practice is not seen as good in itself but rather good insofar as it might be effective in treating traumatic responses. ​One example of this technical language was PCI’s use of lists and discrete categories to document enduring symptoms of disaster-­caused distress: 1. Feeling abandoned by God 2. Finding it hard to pray 3. No yearning for righteousness 4. No spirit of thankfulness 5. No sense of hope 6. No sense of comfort from reading or meditating upon Scriptures Numbers, bullet points, discrete categories, and lists characterize the training materials—making actions legible by providing clear protocols and creating a structure for making choices in the face of crisis. This style of presentation characterized large bureaucratic disaster-­response organizations. The near-­ magical aura of PowerPoint lectures ritualized authority (Prentice 2019; Yates 2007; Knoblauch 2008) and the sense that the knowledge being presented did not come from a fallible individual but was attached to a larger and less questionable order that, in contrast to an uncertain disaster-­prone world, offered ballast, fixity. Even though CISM trainings have been well attended by faith leaders from around the country, scholars and first responders have not fully embraced the model. Disagreement over the efficacy and potential negative impacts of early debriefing interventions in both scholarly and first-­responder communities (Satel 2000; Halpern and Tramontin 2007) extends to a larger debate about the nature of psychological resilience: To what extent do people confronting traumatic events require immediate debriefing? This debate also extends to political issues and a long tradition of anti-­expert rhetoric in American culture—and whether people are able to deal with the impact of traumatic events without the intervention of experts. Are Americans so weak and vulnerable

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that they require crisis counselors? Might community resources—and even religion and spiritual support—offer something better? Conversations about resilience resonated with larger political debates about American toughness, in which experts were seen as coddling or weakening the true gritty resolve comprising American ideas of selfhood (Satel 2000). Researchers and social commentators have criticized grief and crisis counseling, arguing that by putting people with different levels of exposure to trauma in the same space, trauma may spread vicariously. In other words, those who witnessed particularly gruesome or vivid events might “infect” those who did not. Further, researchers have suggested that most people do not experience traumatic symptoms following catastrophic events (Westphal and Bonanno 2007; Halpern and Tramontin 2007). Civilians in post-­disaster settings were not originally the targets of CISM interventions; rather, first responders who had shared experiences were the original recipients. Still, over the last several decades, CISM has been used following events ranging from school shootings to hurricanes and terrorist bombings (Halpern and Tramontin 2007). PCI occupied a niche that required a complicated dance with bureaucracy, spirituality, and religion, belied by its tendency toward decisive protocols. What was needed was for PCI to make a claim for its expertise as fundamentally different from other forms of crisis intervention: that trauma, according to the PCI workbook, “represents a violation of belief ” where “one’s normal, established relationship with God and accompanying theological worldviews are violated and rendered seemingly helpless/useless” (55). The task of PCI was to help lead the sufferer back to belief, or a sense of meaning. PCI trains people, then, to be meaning technicians, but construes meaning in a highly particular way, as I will show.

The Training The participants finished their coffee and took their seats in the large conference room with tables placed throughout. Tom, the instructor, a large white man in his late fifties, walked to the front of the room with an air of authority, took his place at the podium in front of the projection screen, and introduced himself. This was going to be an important training for everyone, he proclaimed confidentially. Tom had been a Navy chaplain for many years; following his time in the service, he created a chaplaincy consulting firm that, among other things, worked on military contracts. He had an upbeat, earnest demeanor.



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He exemplified a kind of can-­do American optimism and spoke with intense feeling about his time in the military—in particular, his experiences counseling soldiers suffering from combat trauma. Tom had been wounded, though he did not say how or where. He did say that his own wounds allowed him to relate to the experiences of others who had been wounded. Watching the interactions between Tom and the other armed-­services chaplains, I noticed a sense of camaraderie and familiarity. They joked about what it was like to be in the Navy or Army, smiling and laughing. We spent some time going around the room introducing ourselves. Most of the participants were from the New York area, including Long Island and upstate Binghamton. There were also chaplains and ministers who had flown in from around the country, including Oklahoma, Alaska, and South Carolina. Many were sent by their fire departments, police departments, and military units. One Lutheran man with a long white beard, from a small town in upstate New York, said that he had paid his own way. He felt that the training was important for his work as a volunteer fire chaplain. There was one African American woman and an African American man who was a Baptist minister from New Jersey. Everyone else was white. There were only three women present, most likely because of CISM’s close association with police and fire departments, which are male-­dominated professions. This was in contrast to many of the other trainings and disaster-­response conferences I attended throughout my research, which were often well attended by women.

Crisis Intervention 101

The conference room was filled with rows of desks and had high ceilings and fluorescent lighting, giving it an institutional feeling. From time to time throughout the training, Tom raised one arm vertically and the other horizontally, proclaiming, “Disasters disrupt our vertical relations with God and our horizontal relationships with people. Our job as pastoral crisis interventionists is to restore those relationships,” in what I came to recognize as his sermonizing persona, a distinct style of speech and self-­presentation. His posture and cadence visibly changed as he invoked God and transformed into a minister, trying to inspire his audience. ​Mapping with his arms the human and the divine, the two planes of human relationships, Tom proclaimed that a rupture could occur with God and with people after disaster. To restore wholeness to a self in a state of

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disaster-­caused disarray, one has to deal with those two related issues—the vertical and horizontal. This mnemonic device seemed to work, as years later I continue to have stuck in my head an image of Tom at the front of the room with one arm pointing toward God and the other at the people in the room (somewhat like the image of a crucifix). For someone involved in disaster work, it is not difficult to imagine how this image would provide a template for action during crisis. The embodied nature and simplicity lent it a kind of natural intuitiveness that others in the room seemed to find highly relevant to their work. There were two things to focus on: the human and God. After a large group session where we were introduced to the CISM philosophy and history, the room was split into two groups: one side for secular participants and the other for clergy. We were given workbooks that included PowerPoint slides and articles about crisis intervention, as well as tables and diagrams depicting disaster protocol and intervention strategies. The cover of the workbook for the first unit, titled Pastoral Crisis Intervention Course Workbook, was illustrated with a circle containing small sketches of hands held in prayer, a cross, a moon (symbolizing Islam), a Torah, and what appears to be a Buddhist mandala. While the curriculum suggested an interdenominational view, the reality was one-­sidedly Christian. As far as I could tell, I was the only non-­Christian present. ​The first page featured a quotation from the Bible: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom Shall I send? Who will go for us?’ and I said, ‘Here I am. Send me’” (Isaiah 6:8). This prophetic biblical injunction to “go” was invoked throughout the training. Tom insisted that we were messengers of God, bearing God’s presence, walking into the “pit of destruction” as representatives of the divine. Amid the acronyms and technical language of disaster bureaucracy, prophetic tones were jarring. But judging by most of the responses, it appealed to the mission-­oriented motivation of many of the participants in the training, often eliciting enthusiastic nods of approval and exclamations of support with occasional interjections of “praise God.” In small-­group conversations, many suggested that this was how they understood they were part of God’s plan. The introduction to the text provides an example of how PCI positioned itself, blending psychological first aid with pastoral expertise: “The purpose of this two-­day training program is to prepare participants to provide basic crisis intervention services (‘psychological first-­aid’) to individuals in acute crisis using a structured crisis intervention algorithm (SAFER-­PCI). The SAFER-­PCI represents one element in the integrated multi-­componential



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Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) crisis intervention system. It is designed to blend standard psychological interventions with pastoral interventions within a context collectively referred to by Everly (2000) as Pastoral Crisis Intervention (PCI).” ​The workbook provided statistics on the efficacy of CISM. Tom was committed to supporting his statements through science, often citing George Everly. Below is one of the first slides Tom showed, which demonstrated how they code their statistics: 1. Between 7% and 35% of people are in significant distress after a trauma/disaster. 2. 94% of Americans believe in God (Tix Frazier, 1998, J. Cons. & Clinical Psych.) 3. 59% likely to seek support from a spiritual counselor, compared to 45% MDs, 40% mental health professionals (ARC, 2001, Ripple Effect). By asserting that the vast majority of Americans believe in God, that large numbers of people experience distress after disaster, and that most will seek help from spiritual counselors, this slide creates a mandate for disaster religious and spiritual care. The use of “scientific” data lent greater prestige to the training and provided a sense of authority. The data on clergy and help-­ seeking were cited ritually, followed by numbers giving weight to its meaning, as much for the actual content as for the symbolic force of the word “data.” Reciting these statistics seemed to confirm what was already known to many in the room—that faith leaders are still central—while at the same time pointing to the sense of insecurity inherent in their own notions of expertise. ​Tom argued that mental health professionals and disaster workers have often been remiss in their understanding of what suffering people need. “Most Americans are religious,” he said, “and they need clergy in times of disaster.” I scanned the faces in the audience for reactions and saw heads nodding. Instead of saying that God demanded their service, the reliance on statistics pointed to the ways religion draws on “data” to justify its place. Tom moved between invocations of transcendent religion and the use of scientific reasoning and data-­driven justifications for clergy in disaster settings. Given Tom’s experience as a military chaplain, he had learned to speak in multiple registers, connecting directly to the beliefs of religious people in the military.

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Chapter 3

The Crisis of Faith and Pastoral Intervention

​ om presented a slide on crisis, which was defined as “an acute RESPONSE to T a critical incident wherein: psychological homeostasis (balance) is disrupted, usual coping mechanisms have failed, and there is evidence of dysfunction or impairment” (PCI workbook). The concept of homeostasis—one of Cannon’s most widely cited contributions—becomes a way to unify mind/body states (Dror 2014) and, in the case of PCI, a metaphor for the restoration of normal religious and spiritual belief. Here, homeostasis is linked to spiritual and religious resolution. Doubts, questioning belief in God, and existential questions are interpreted as a disruption in the equilibrium of body and mind. Disaster-­caused crises of the spirit have a different time frame from car crashes and other more common occurrences. But spiritual distress, as the workbook makes clear, can grow if it remains untreated, and, like an infection, can damage the relationship with God: “The time frames for the onset of spiritual symptoms of traumatic stress to emerge will vary. For example, with critical incidents such as fatal car accidents, the time frame may be in terms of days. In contrast, with a disaster the time frame for behavioral and spiritual symptoms to arise may take weeks. Without intervention, initial expressions of spiritual distress may grow and fulminate to a state of spiritual impairment in one’s relationship with God.” To regain homeostasis, Tom suggested it was necessary to alleviate doubts and restore faith. The linking of psychological homeostasis and spiritual homeostasis provided one of the key arguments for PCI. In the case of PCI, belief was considered one of the foundations of homeostasis, and since crises can bring belief into question, homeostasis can be disrupted by anything that puts faith and belief into question. It follows, then, that for equilibrium to be restored, belief must also be restored. The body and the mind (and the soul?) require stabilization, a return to normal functioning. CISM did not suggest a vision of spiritual or moral growth associated with trauma. Rather, the model emphasized a mechanistic restoration to a functioning self-­system, as if one were a race car in need of speedy repair to return to optimal functioning. CISM was conceived of as “emotional first aid,” the first line of defense against PTSD, and PCI, as its religious-­spiritual corollary, was seen as the first line of defense against crises of faith. “As physical first aid is to surgery, crisis intervention is to psychotherapy,” Tom explained. Crisis, for CISM, might refer to a personal crisis, such as a divorce or loss of a loved one, or a



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large-­scale disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. But spiritual crisis, as a distinct class of crisis, requires expertise—and spiritual interventions. The PCI workbook defines spiritual interventions as: “a. unique ethos of pastoral person; b. ministry of presence; c. unique communication; d. ventilative confession; e. individual and/or conjoint prayer; f. belief in divine order or divine intervention” (75). The pastor’s very presence acts as a therapeutic spiritual intervention (Sullivan 2019). To say that God is intervening might risk the appearance of proselytizing, which could alienate secular mental health professionals. But to say that it is the ethos or the pastor’s belief that intervenes keeps the intervention at a slight distance from God, since there is no direct intervention by a divine power. The distinction is important: one validates divine intervention, while the other simply suggests that personal belief— regardless of whether God exists—has intrinsic value. Tom emphasized that there was great demand for chaplains during disasters. “They want to talk to you because you have a direct line to God—in their perspective, you’re an ‘ambassador of God’ in times of crisis,” he said in a preacher-­like fashion. He also emphasized how it was part of the chaplains’ mission to know the research in order to impart hope. The combination of scientific discourse and connection to God provided a two-­pronged expertise. If a chaplain is able to cite the data on religion and coping, they might be better equipped to instill hope in those who have been impacted. “The criticisms of CISM are not true,” he said, which include the possibility of exacerbating or “spreading” trauma by debriefing groups that include both people who were directly traumatized and people who were not. “It’s more about the psychologists wanting to keep control. We have the data to show that CISM works.” Tom described in detail the differences between crises of faith and psychological distress. The former, he said, “is one of the places where PCI can make a real difference. Disasters make many people doubt, and this can lead to a crisis of faith, which is important to prevent. Faith can be people’s greatest resource after disaster.” A crisis of faith, he again explained, was about vertical relationships, whereas psychological distress was about horizontal relations. A crisis of faith is one potential form of breakdown, and each potential breakdown requires an intervention to restore equilibrium, or homeostasis. The curriculum insisted on this distinction, invoking a common rhetorical strategy used by disaster spiritual caregivers to justify their expertise. The caregivers know enough about mental health expertise to mimic aspects of it, but not so much as to appear to be overstepping the boundaries of their expertise.

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Practitioners must also maintain a distinction between religious and spiritual expertise, though the line between the two was not so clear. According to the PCI workbook, Spiritual interventions may be thought of as nondenominational pastoral interventions which are generically applicable across most religions or faiths. Spiritual crisis interventions may commonly consist of individual prayer, conjoint prayer, and the ministry of presence, the unique ethos of the pastoral crisis interventionist vis-­à-­vis traditional crisis interventionists, ventilative confession, belief in a divine order, and belief in divine intervention. Religious interventions may be thought of as pastoral interventions based upon specific religious doctrine, belief, and/or scripture. Examples of religious pastoral crisis interventions would be specific rituals of worship, sacraments, scriptural education, interpretation, or insight, rituals of confession, rituals of forgiveness, and specific illness or death-­related rituals. (38) This quote points to the entwining of spiritual and religious language with crisis intervention, as well as a naturalized language of spiritual crisis. PCI practices were seen as “generically applicable,” a remarkable statement given the diversity of religious and spiritual beliefs. Despite the attempt to distinguish between religion and spirituality, spirituality was seen as potentially possessed by all people, thus providing the crucial justification for the expertise. ​Tom handed out an article that he had written. It included the table below, which outlines the difference between a spiritual cry of distress and a crisis of faith. Paralleling psychiatric diagnoses of PTSD, the table breaks down the “symptoms” into units of time and intensity. A cry becomes a crisis if it persists beyond cognitive impairment. A “more reflective cry” is categorized as more severe than an initial “outburst of distress.” Persistent doubt over time, after reflection, is considered more worrisome than an initial outburst, indicating deeper trouble than doubt immediately after an event. When this logic is applied to religious belief, it makes a long-­term shift from belief in God to doubt a sign of pathology. The intervention goal for a crisis of faith is to create a renewed spirit of thankfulness, to restore one’s relationship with God. Tom told us that this is where chaplains are most needed—this is the pit of destruction that pastoral crisis interventionists must step into, where they do their best work, and where their work is distinguished from mental



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Table 1. Differential Assessment of a Spiritual Cry of Distress and a Crisis of Faith A Spiritual Cry of Distress

A Crisis of Faith

Time Elapsed from Critical Incident

Occurs later after a person Occurs shortly after the impact of a critical incident has recovered from cognitive impairment A more reflective cry or An initial outburst of plea distress

Context of Prevalent Trauma Symptoms

Shock Cognitive impairment Emotional distress

Relational Focus

Focus on self and one’s state Focus on impairment in of being relations horizontally and vertically

Intervention Goal

Minimize shock and symptoms of distress and provide a concrete reminder or witness of God’s presence and love

Impairment in relationships horizontally and vertically

Promote hope and renewed spirit of thankfulness in the impacted person’s vertical relationship to God

health professionals. “You represent the presence of God,” he said. “Just by being there with your color or chaplain badge, you bring hope and provide something that psychologists can’t. Just by being with someone in the pit of destruction and walking with them. Providing hope.” Several people approached Tom at one of the breaks, and I overheard them telling him how helpful they had found this presentation. But there was a split among the participants. Some felt that Tom’s use of discrete categories gave them more clarity than they had ever had. Others felt that his placement of religion in the service of debriefing was an insult to faith and religion. There was some confusion about spiritual distress and crisis of faith, and several ministers asked Tom to explain them more clearly. “How do we know the difference,” someone asked, “and when is it okay to pray with someone?” Tom suggested that the prayer should come from the person suffering, though it was okay to ask if someone wanted to pray. He also emphasized the importance of presence: “You don’t have to do anything sometimes. Just being there as an ambassador of God can be enough sometimes. Just having a shirt that says chaplain can bring hope.” Hope, a traditional theological virtue, was seen as tied to the presence of a chaplain while at the same time framed as a protective factor. Tom framed psychological distress, spiritual distress, and loss of faith as core areas

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of intervention for chaplains, but at times it was simply the presence of the religious figure that could provide relief (Sullivan 2019; Nolan 2012). On the third day, we continued to address crises of faith. The workbook reads: “A crisis of faith is when one’s normal, established relationship with God and accompanying theological worldviews are violated and rendered seemingly helpless/useless.” Loss of faith is considered a sign of pathology or a symptom that things have gone wrong, that the self has been damaged in ways that require restoration. Faith is considered the normal state. Tom explained that those trained in PCI were equipped to intervene when a person is suffering from these symptoms, whereas a traditional mental health professional would not understand what to do and would likely see the person as suffering solely from PTSD or depression. PTSD may be part of the problem, he argued, but that could also go along with suffering from a spiritual crisis that requires pastoral intervention. He described an experience he had with a soldier who couldn’t let go of wartime memories but at the same time had stopped praying as an example of concurrent forms of distress. I spent much of my time that day with Gabe, an Episcopalian chaplain who was working in Kodiak, Alaska, with the Navy SEALs. Gabe was visibly displeased with the PCI model and didn’t like the way spirituality was being forced to fit into a diagnostic system. “Theologically, religion is being used instrumentally,” he told me, “and there’s very little emphasis on true faith.” He felt that the use of religion as a “protective factor,” as a kind of psychological tool, was demeaning and perhaps even heretical. As the training went on, he started to come back late from breaks, an indication of his frustration with the program. Gabe told me that he was thinking about converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity because they were more mystical than Episcopalians, who he thought had strayed from the roots of Christianity based on his doctoral studies in patristics—the study of early church fathers. He was looking for what he saw as a less superficial tradition of Christianity. We chatted about the monastic life and went to lunch at Tom’s Diner on 112th Street. Gabe told me about the challenges of teaching ethics to young soldiers. “Teaching ethics to nineteen-­year-­old Navy SEALs is really hard,” he said. “Do you teach them the classics like Plato, Aristotle, and Kant?” I asked. He looked at me with intense surprise. “These kids are much, much more basic than that,” he explained. “They are not functioning on a very high moral level.” He went on to say that for the young soldiers he worked with, reflection on moral issues did not come easily. They were not inclined to question their



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actions or spend time on theoretical discussions. The soldiers were on moral autopilot, he suggested, and not interested in the kinds of theological reflections that Gabe would have liked. There was not much room for building a different kind of relationship with God, and instead he felt more like he was supposed to keep things running smoothly, rather than deepen religious experience. My conversations with Gabe underscored the historical connection between the military, disaster mental health, and pastoral crisis intervention. The number of military chaplains at the training made this more evident. But the perceived need of the military for their chaplains to be trained in PCI seemed curious. I could not understand what someone who had been in the field for several years could be getting out of the training, which provided what I considered very basic information—both psychologically and theologically. Though Gabe agreed with this view, he was in the minority, judging from the seemingly enthusiastic questions from the audience. It seemed in part that many were there for the camaraderie and to share experiences. Since pastoral crisis intervention is a specific kind of expertise, the sharing of disaster experiences served as a way for people to connect with others from across the country. After our lunch break, Tom, in a sermon-­like fashion, recounted stories of soldiers losing their way because of traumatic experiences, “falling into the pit,” and finding their way back through the aid of PCI. In one example, he spoke about a soldier who had killed someone by accident and was tortured by the memory of the incident for many years. “By stepping into his pit of destruction, as a pastoral crisis interventionist, I was able to bring him out of the pit and back to faith,” he told us. Though Tom’s rhetoric suggested a kind of religious quest, one of the oft-­ repeated tenets of disaster spiritual care is the idea that any form of proselytizing in disaster settings is unethical. This forms one of the cornerstones of disaster spiritual expertise and its claims to jurisdiction, and it was designed, at least in part, to relieve the fears of mental health professionals and government agencies over allowing the “wrong kind” of religion (fire-­and-­brimstone preachers, for example) into disaster sites. The issue of proselytizing, though, is subtler than many of the texts or trainings on disaster spiritual care lead one to believe. As I discussed earlier, the often acrimonious conflicts over credentialing hinged on screening out evangelical chaplains who were deemed inappropriate, including those who were thought to be both antipsychiatry and committed proselytizers. At one point, Tom referred to “prairie evangelists” (by this, I assume he meant Midwestern fundamentalists) and their preaching about “the will of

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God” to traumatized help-­seekers. I watched two stony-­faced Midwestern chaplains’ offended expressions and tried to listen as they whispered intensely to each other. It was unclear if they were offended by his use of the term “prairie evangelist” or disturbed by his suggestion that one should not use phrases such as “the will of God” when working with people whose houses were washed away by floods or who had recently lost loved ones to bombings. Tom continued to spend time discussing the differences between people who were experiencing “an actual crisis in faith or making a cry of psychological distress using religious or faith-­based language.” To have the skills to make this distinction, one needed to be trained to have the expertise to “diagnose” subtle differences in the language and expression of distress symptoms. This expertise demands fluency in multiple discourses on distress. Practitioners must be able to listen for religious suffering and also have enough knowledge of mental health diagnostics. This was a strategy to make clear that clergy were not threatening the boundaries of mental health professionals—and to distinguish themselves from less-­educated clergy or clergy from denominations that are actively mistrusted by health professionals. Throughout the training, Sean, a Russian Orthodox priest who was involved in 9/11 recovery efforts, adamantly told me that there were no gray areas between religious distress and psychological distress. He insisted that the distinctions were very clear, something I often encountered among disaster spiritual care experts who were intent on showing that they were well versed in mental health knowledge. Correctly distinguishing forms of distress was supposed to be one of the hallmarks of a well-­prepared responder. But I couldn’t help but pick up on a sense of insecurity, even anxiety, that underlay this insistent clarity and literalism—as if one could slice open a human body and find neatly sectioned shelving where specimens of religious distress and psychological distress could be readily identified.

Mechanical Selves

PCI exhibited a highly bounded and individualistic view of the self and healing—what I came to see as a kind of “shipwreck of the singular,”4 with an emphasis on a hyperindividual notion of selfhood, a mechanical self, legible and subject to undeviating interventions. This is a compelling take on how to recover from the pain of disaster, to imagine that one can look under a hood, viewing a soul or psyche in their respective compartments, and restore



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a malfunction in either to homeostasis—to get back to faith, the relationship with God one had before, and the psyche that had dependably behaved. A training rooted in this mechanical causality envisions a world premised on a kind of manageability, a view that contradicts much of human experience. This view of the self also overlooks the tensions that persist within the patchwork expertise that I have been describing. The last segment of the day dealt with self-­care, which, in the context of PCI, was intertwined with faith. Self-­care—how caregivers maintain their own sense of balance and health—is an issue central to disaster literature and many of the trainings I attended. Disaster workers can suffer from contagion, burnout, and compassion fatigue. The “9/11 syndrome,” which one chaplain said explained the acrimonious politics among the different religious groups involved in disaster response, was one example of how those I worked with thought about the circulation of trauma and its impacts on individual relationships and organizations. I frequently heard from those I interviewed that trauma was contagious and that those who spent time with the traumatized risked vicarious trauma and burnout. Religion and spirituality were often framed as “protective factors,” drawing on the language of public health. In this view, a strong sense of meaning rooted in religious and spiritual belief buttresses the self, offering a prophylactic against calamity and the inevitable unruliness of living. PCI and other disaster modalities focus on creating a world that makes sense, that can return to a kind of meaningfulness, or homeostasis. “In the final analysis,” one of the slides read, “optimism and a unifying belief system, e.g., a religious belief system, appear to be powerful predictors of good psychological health.” The training employed scientific language to justify and naturalize religious and spiritual belief, which were seen as a “powerful predictor” of psychological health, and therefore provided a need for disaster spiritual experts. But there seemed little room for a world where things simply don’t make sense. This was not offered as an option. Unlike other therapeutic models that emphasize relationality, communality, or even an existential confrontation with death and violence, CISM epitomizes a highly mechanistic view of human psychology and spirituality. According to the workbook, the “goals of crisis intervention” are: 1. acute stabilization of symptoms and signs of distress and dysfunction (to keep things from getting worse). 2. facilitation of symptom reduction (intervene so as to reduce acute distress and dysfunction).

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3. facilitation of a restoration of acute, adaptive independent functioning (successful reduction of impairment). 4. facilitation of an access to a higher, or more continuous, level of care, if needed. The religious self that was presented in the training was no less mechanistic than the psychological self. In other words, the same logic of self and healing was applied to psychological restoration and religious and spiritual restoration: successful reduction of impairment and return to healthy functioning were the priorities. Religion and spirituality had become subsumed into a specific kind of therapeutic ethos, one with an even more plainly legible view of the self than the early critiques of therapeutic culture suggested. There was little discussion of how faith might grow or deepen following disaster experiences, or how a loss of faith might result in a transformation. Instead, the training emphasized the restoration of a machine-­like self to healthy homeostatic functioning, where belief was naturalized as biological-­religious functioning. Tom repeatedly told the class that the only thing you can change is yourself, a common sentiment in much recent self-­help literature. Oddly stoic, this aphorism epitomizes the idea of the self as a contained unit, an American self, bounded and endlessly self-­improving. “The only thing I can change is myself ” has a peculiar ring for a training that has “intervention” in its title. Who were we caring for if the only thing we can change is ourselves? This view suggested a kind of minimal self (Lasch 1985) so beleaguered by disasters (of modernity) that it fails to imagine a collectivity. Coping with life’s exigencies replaces appeals to God or the transcendent—or anything beyond the self. CISM instructs one to shore up the individual against the catastrophic stresses of life, the inevitable calamities. This shipwreck of the singular—an extreme form of American views on selfhood—transforms collective politics into problems of the individual, subject to uniform interventions. But though the trainings and official documents expressed clear lines between appropriate and inappropriate religious expressions, this was not always so in actuality.

Conclusion “I am sure we are going to be able to go out and do God’s work and to be ambassadors of God,” Tom declared near the close of the training. One of the ministers from the audience, a man with a shaved head who worked for a



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fire department upstate, stood up and said, “Tom, you are not going to have the last word. We are going to do some hands-­on prayer and anointing and send some blessings to your wife and family.” I had come in late from lunch and must have missed that Tom had disclosed that his wife was struggling with cancer. The minister took out a small container of frankincense oil, and a large group circled Tom, putting their hands on him. The minister said a prayer wishing Tom blessings from God, grace, and healing, while many of the participants circled around him, putting oil on their hands and touching Tom’s forehead. Tom was clearly moved and looked as if he was crying. Several hung back, refusing to participate, including Gabe from Alaska. “I don’t want any part of this,” he said. It was clear that Gabe registered important theological differences. He disliked what he saw as a display of an evangelical religion. The anointment stood out because it pointed to the tensions that arise in subordinating religious practice to a quasi-­interfaith (minimally secular) mechanistic view of human functioning, which ultimately clashed with something that could be described as the “irrational” side. It made clear the reality of some of the anxieties of secular policymakers who feared that chaplains were incapable of checking their religious belief, refraining from proselytizing, and providing care in disaster settings that did not impose religious views. Despite the clear protocols of the PCI training, this “other side of religion” revealed itself. The tensions inherent in disaster religious expertise were manifest in this moment. Psychological-­spiritual hybrids designed to be inoffensive to secular disaster planners were not going to be enough for many of the ministers. What, I wondered, might really be happening with some of the ministers at disaster sites when people were faced with burning houses and flooding towns? I was reminded of something a Seventh-­Day Adventist hospital chaplain once confided to me: “I don’t care if they are Christian or not— when I’m in the hospital room, it’s my job to pray for them and help them accept Jesus, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing what I’m here to do: saving people.” Spirit, trauma, prayer, anxiety, stress, homeostasis, and faith—all words found in the CISM-­PCI training materials and in Tom’s presentations—form a peculiarly contemporary patchwork of science, religion, spirituality, and disaster. Questions of faith and meaning, which in earlier eras would have been central to conversations about the aftermath of catastrophe, were transformed by PCI into a language of mental health structured by a bureaucratic command-­control logic influenced by disaster-­response and military organizations. Doubt was seen as a glitch in a self-­machine constructed for optimal functioning, temporarily disrupted by a disequilibrium brought on by a

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“critical incident, in need of restoration to homeostasis.” This was quite different from a whole-­person conception of the self that was invoked by many I interviewed, or even a religious concept of the soul. Rather, this view breaks the distressed body and mind into treatable components. To contain doubt, not to initiate a reevaluation of one’s relationship with the divine or the world around them, became the final goal. The healthy self implied here was essentially faithful and unquestioning, because to have what is seen as excessive doubt in God is to be impaired in this diagnostic framework, a “buffered” (Taylor 2007) self subject to predictable, machine-­like interventions. By constructing a rubric to evaluate healthy relationships to God, PCI illustrated an extreme example of one of the paradoxes I have been pointing to throughout this book: the use of scientific discourse to justify spiritual and religious expertise almost always ends up looking much like what it set out to critique (Josephson-­Storm 2017; Lawrence and Weisz 1998). Instead of providing a holistic religious alternative to mental health care, PCI ends up with a highly mechanistic model of human response to disaster, one that is far from the holistic ideals presented in much of the literature on spiritual care and disaster response. Further, as suggested above, by exposing the nontraumatized to the traumatized, many researchers following 9/11 argued that CISM may do more harm than good (Groopman 2004; Halpern and Tramontin 2007; Satel 2000). Unlike the long history of religious thought that addresses the ineffable problems of theodicy—how to live with the contradictions of a God that is both omnipotent and allows apparently innocent people to suffer and die—CISM turns clergy into modern technicians, representatives of therapeutic culture (Rakow 2013; Aubry and Travis 2015), manager-­ mechanics of psyche and spirit. Rather than tying their vision of the self and healing to larger questions about communality and the polis, the training prioritizes fixing and functionality. The cocktail of faith and scientific data gives PCI a powerful rhetorical claim to authority. The message was: where faith fails, data might work, and where data fails, faith might prevail. This flexibility allowed trainees to speak the language of science, bureaucracy, and religion, a synoptic view that lent greater legitimacy to the training. Tom’s merging of evangelical-­style presentation with a highly systematized model of intervention provides an example of how religion and spirituality merge with a rationalized system. The ecstatic-­ healing moment at the end of the training stood in stark contrast to the rest of the training, revealing that the format did not entirely meet the needs of the audience, who were mostly ministers. The prayer and anointment session



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showed that many in the audience simultaneously maintained different views of distress and healing, ones rooted in religion and faith. I recall what a Catholic priest said at a conference on disasters: “Religion cannot be reduced to a series of boxes. True spirituality is dangerous.” The CISM training also pointed to some of the ways mechanistic views of religion and spirituality are produced at the same time that they are resisted, another example of how seemingly contradictory views of spirituality and the self seem to coexist. As Tom stood up in front of the room with his hands in an L shape, PowerPoint slides with diagrams pointing toward celestial and earthly relations were projected behind him. I had an intense feeling of anxiety, as if I was being given tools that were fragmenting as they were being explained. I felt that if I were to rely on these methods in the face of disaster, I might only sink deeper into the pit of fire. If only I could believe that the way through catastrophe could be found by following the axis of this man’s arms. How do we make sense of the needs of a spirit or psyche? What do the different “models” of human functioning suggest about larger cultural dynamics? CISM points to a strand of mechanistic thinking about human functioning, one that offers clear intervention protocols based on a rational causal framework. Religion and spirituality are worked into views of selfhood not as ultimate ontological underpinnings of our world but rather as tools, protective factors, and curatives to be administered with means-­end rationales. At least, that is what is written in the manual. The anointment I witnessed suggested that the rational framework only sews things together for so long: when pushed to its limits, the seams come undone and another aspect of religious practice can be found beneath the surface. The incident did not reveal immutable contradictions in how people think and experience the world. It did, however, highlight the persistent tension in the metanarrative of holism versus mechanization (Rosenberg 2007), spirituality and religion versus psychology (and science). One might look for direction in Tom’s horizontally and vertically raised arms, searching for points on how to restore relationships with the divine and the human, but there seemed to be a sense in the room, among both critics and believers, that these hand directions (and PCI itself) did not supply an adequate response to catastrophe.

INTERLUDE

“God Speaks Through Me”

On a warm autumn day, I met the Prophetess in a wood-­floored office of Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) in the financial district of New York City. STAR was started by Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) as a training program focusing on trauma and disaster response following the attacks of 9/11. The Prophetess—as she referred to herself—had been involved in developing and administering the training, which clearly had been consequential for her view of disaster response and spirituality. I sat across from her while she spoke about her experiences with the program. But the attacks were largely what she wanted to talk about, and since I could see that these experiences were still very much alive for her, I let the conversation go where she took it. The Prophetess, it became clear, was pushing back against what she saw as the white-­dominated world of disaster religious and spiritual care and the related bureaucratic sensibility that she saw as narrowing possibilities for understanding and addressing suffering. A tall African American woman in her early sixties, the Prophetess was an imposing figure. She had been one of the first instructors in the STAR program, was a minister, and did consulting work on healing. Though I had once seen her at a NYDIS conference, I did not make the connection until the end of the interview. When I entered the office, she greeted me warmly and asked me to sit down across from her. Initially, she was very precise and formal, intent on making sure that I understood correctly every word she was saying, sprinkling her answers to my questions with “Am I making myself clear?” Throughout our first two meetings, I felt strongly that she was using the conversation as a way to gain clarity for herself. Her powerful voice rose in volume when she appeared to feel intensely about a topic. At times, she almost lifted herself out of her seat. Much of what she discussed was emotionally



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charged and very much felt intensely by her. Summing up the core of her philosophy, she said, “Everyone has spirit at the core. And that’s resilience. It’s hope. Resilience is hope. That’s it, that’s all.” Partway through the interview, I was reminded of a scene that had taken place during a conference in New York City on the religious community in disaster response‚ the first time I had actually encountered the Prophetess. Afterward, I found the section of my field notes where I had written up the conference scene. “I am the Prophetess,” she had said as she stood up. “God speaks through me, and he told me about the disasters, and there are more to come.” I saw how expressions in the room changed, how the bureaucratic rationalized ethos of the event was for a moment interrupted by the irrational, that part of religion that they were trying to keep out of the light so as not to ruin their image of being professional. Shortly after the Prophetess ended her speech, another woman spoke out in agreement and also with an emotional prophecy. “I am here to say that we shouldn’t succumb to the rule of science,” the woman said. “There is another chief that must be answered to and he has been insulted, the moral fabric has been broken. I am not a theologian of doom,” she said. “My children are foolish because they say there is no God. As people of faith, we can’t buy into the scientific view and say God can’t speak. The moral fabric is torn much deeper than we think.” The Prophetess and the woman who followed her invoked religiosity and the apocalyptic in a context that was presented as rational and bureaucratic and essentially secular, to the extent that questions about theology were marginalized and questions about organization and service provision were central. While this might be the best way to save lives, the Prophetess seemed to be saying, it was not the best way to care for the spirit, the soul, or the whole person. She was articulating a rebellion against strictly mechanistic views of the self. She and the woman who followed her did not want to see religion subordinate itself to science and governmental institutions—even to gain institutional power. The silence and puzzled, uncomfortable expressions that ensued implied that this perspective was not shared by most of the people in the room. When I later asked the head of a disaster-­response organization about the Prophetess, he said that she was “a bit off her rocker.” Even for those who are not prone to visions, disasters have a way of supplying fertile imaginative grounds for apocalyptic visions. The Prophetess’s speech was a reminder of a different side of religion that was frequently silenced but still present at many of the disaster conferences. This side did not easily

116 Interlude

conform to bureaucratic agendas and diagnostic criteria but rather pointed to the tensions inherent in establishing disaster religious and spiritual expertise. This version of religion and spirituality chafed against bureaucratic and therapeutic vocabulary, instead marshaling a discourse of re-­enchantment, holism, and moral authority. The Prophetess also pointed to the idea that healing, in the larger sense, takes place in the context of one’s relationship to God. She seemed to suggest that by ignoring this relationship and focusing on science, the group she was addressing was turning its back on religion. The Prophetess was very clear about the importance of her background in forming her theological orientation. “I am a first-­generation northerner,” she declared. “A proud New Yorker by birth and choice, as a young child I was baptized as a Baptist. But it is specific because we come through a geographical system. What am I now? I am multifaith. God is all—I am not concerned about race or culture, but we must understand race and culture.” The Prophetess repeatedly emphasized a universal sense of spirituality and how her own spiritual progression led her to a place where she was able to see something in people that transcended specific identities. “I must understand the way people live,” she continued, “because it impacts how they practice their faith. And since you are an anthropologist, I am sure you are clear about that. I honor all faiths that honor a higher being that honors love, that honors service. All right? Compassion and understanding.” Her original adherence to a specific faith group had expanded to include everyone, a universal spirituality with an expansive sense of mission. This, she said, allowed her to work with different faith groups. But she often reminded me that she was speaking from a particular location, impressing upon me that she was Black, had Cherokee Indian ancestors, and was from a Baptist background. This also gave her claims to several traditions that had experienced what she called “historical trauma,” which informed the way she understood the trauma associated with 9/11 and other disasters, as well as her efforts to design modalities that address multiple traumas. When I asked if she thought everyone had spirituality, she replied, “Yeah we do. Everyone . . . it’s just that survival has allowed, has forced us, and you know the beautiful thing about being a human being is that we adapt, but adapting is different from really living. You know?” Spirituality, the Prophetess believed, was a central animating force for human survival, providing the resources for moving through traumas and hardships. “And so, survival forces us to adapt,” she said emphatically, “and in adapting we adopt things that help us survive. . . . And then something inside—that spirit is there. I



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mean, when you go into things you have that love, that desire for hope. But to survive it has to get covered and it gets deeper and deeper down when you think it is not there anymore and that’s where the numbing out comes in.” The Prophetess went on to describe a recent experience that had allowed her to integrate her past in ways she found integral to her understanding of her spirituality and her role as a healer, or conduit of God. “It began last March,” she said. “All of a sudden, by the end of July, and this is going to be a metaphor, this is just an image, and I felt as though after fifty-­seven years . . . my body has landed. My spirit has landed into my body.” The Prophetess narrated an embodied mystical experience. Her sense of her body, of being present within it, was transformed. This, she said, provided her with a deep sense of her abilities and her mission, her ability to connect with people and heal. “I’m just being honest, I’m being absolutely honest. I feel like I have landed and I’m okay. I’m not afraid anymore to be here. I’m not afraid . . . that anyone will ever have the right to batter me to make me feel less than I am, to tell me that I am stupid when they are taking all of my brilliance and gifts from me. No, I said . . . I actually felt myself into my body. And I’m okay.” The Prophetess frequently referenced her experiences with STAR training (described in greater detail in the following chapter). In this model, the trauma concept was framed as both a historical and personal experience connecting to a vision of religious-­spiritual social justice. In the STAR training, this perspective was evident, and the Prophetess, at least to some degree, saw things through the lens of her experiences at STAR. The Prophetess described her spiritual journey, how she arrived at her theological perspective and sense of her power. The spiritual awakening was a bodily experience, linked to past traumatic experiences that had severed her from a spiritual connection with her body (Frankenberg 2004). The spiritual change, the Prophetess went on to explain, was this landing in her body that allowed her to have a stronger presence of love, and this experience of love shaped her view of religion and interfaith work as well as her understanding of how people heal from trauma. Critical to the Prophetess’s narrative was the trauma concept. Her sense of spirituality, the body, and ethical resonance with the world rested on “working through” trauma. And her understanding of her own expertise was intertwined with her experiences of personal trauma. She went on to say, “We all have spirit. But sometimes, some things are so difficult that we become fragmented. We all walk around like schizophrenics, afraid to merge. I have chosen to merge, and whatever comes with it, I can handle it. Do you understand?”

118 Interlude

The Prophetess’s understanding of the “spiritual body” linked to the concept of resilience. The spirit allows people to adapt and overcome hardship, and through connecting with bodily feelings, we become better able to withstand the traumas of life. People need to believe, particularly in the face of disaster, because it is through a recognition of the spiritual nature of humans that people heal and become larger, stronger, more resilient. Religion, spirituality, and resilience are inextricable in this vision. This vision takes into account questions of geography, race, and structural inequalities, but at the same time looks for a universal flame of the spirit, or God, that resides in the individual. “I’m going to tell you, Joshua,” she said, lifting from her chair, “I am coming from a pure place of love and honor, and if I come with pure love, agape, unconditional love, each and every one of us in this universe is hungry to be accepted as we are. Not for who we are for what we might be, who we were, our good, bad, and ugly . . . but just . . . just let me be. Once you allow people that it allows them to flame.” She articulated a form of spirituality that seeks not to change people but rather to uncover what is already there. The Prophetess went on to discuss the connection between spirituality and resilience and finally the importance of hope and love. “The flame is alive,” she said with intensity, “and it’s going to continue to grow in its own way, in its own time.” “That’s resilience to me,” she continued, “and resilience cannot go or evolve without hope—and here’s a clear distinction. I’m not talking about the hope where we are anesthetized—let’s say my mouth is saying I’m getting better, but I’m still in a catatonic state. I’m talking about something I believe in. Faith and hope with action. Cored right at the center is love, and sometimes it takes a lot to get to that love.” This sense of people finding their own way maps onto psychological views of resilience rooted in assets-­based approaches. Rather than seeing people as broken and needing fixing from psychological experts, in this view people have the capacities they need within themselves. She used the theological concepts of faith and hope in connection to resilience, while placing love at the center. This had a very different resonance from many of the other disaster spiritual caregivers that I encountered. Similarly, her conception of trauma was in a different realm from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association and included historical and autobiographical narrative background and a focus on identity. “That’s [trauma], it’s much bigger,” she said. People want to compartmentalize trauma, she continued. “They separate it out. We [people] want to compartmentalize. Even we want to know that in the great by and by things



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are going to be better. We are afraid to challenge the theology that we are so indoctrinated with. To me, God is an evolving God. Why do I have to think that he can only fit in one compartment?” Again, she invoked a discourse of holism to critique how medicalized versions of trauma discourse flattened experiences of moral and theologically valued suffering. In other words, the Prophetess made an explicit critique of the diagnostics of trauma, one that suggested a broader relationship with God and suffering. This was in direct and conscious opposition to what she saw as the bureaucratization of spiritual distress and trauma. Near the end of our conversation, the Prophetess said it was time for her to ask me questions. “Joshua Moses,” she said. “Your name is no joke. Who did that to you, what faith-­based tradition did you come out of?” Gesturing toward the recorder, she said, “You can turn this off, this is you and me talking.” The conversation then turned more personal. She began to ask me questions about my own background, my views of religion and spirituality, and my experiences in studying disasters. Initially, I was reticent to speak, but in the spirit of reciprocity—she had just shared a great deal about her own life—I told her about my own religious and spiritual upbringing. She was concerned with how my name embodied biblical contradictions, the religious history of my family—cautioning me against living out the spiritual struggles of my ancestors—and the role these played in leading me to the study of religious response to disaster. My encounter with the Prophetess was one of the few times in my work on this book where I felt different, an expansive spiritual sensibility that directly pushed against the language of bureaucracy that characterizes most disaster-­ response vocabularies. In contrast to the Prophetess, almost everyone else I interviewed made efforts to depict the “rational” elements in religious expression. There was something about both her and the way she spoke, something about the connection that was intangibly unlike my conversations with others. The Prophetess was invoking something different, tapping into a Charismatic tradition. She relied on a confidence in her own ability to channel the power of what she called spirit. Different from Tom’s insertion of God into the CISM training—and not without therapeutic discourse—the Prophetess was oriented toward an embodied social justice–oriented spirituality with roots in the Baptist African American church, where she had spent her earlier years. Her interfaith perspective, she said, gave her the ability to work across religions and denominations, which is how she ended up working with EMU on STAR, a program that grew out of 9/11 response, combining spirituality

120 Interlude

and trauma education in a multiday workshop. On the Prophetess’s suggestion, I attended the training, which I describe in the next chapter. She explained that she was instrumental in convincing STAR to alter their training in order to address issues of race and class. “Can you imagine someone like me at EMU?” she asked. “Can you imagine how they dealt with me?” The Prophetess was saying that as an African American woman, with a forceful New York personality, with very strong opinions, she was out of place working in a Mennonite setting, and may have caused a bit of stir. Mennonites, stereotypically, are known for their calm, nonconfrontational demeanor, in contrast to a New Yorker’s brusque bluntness. I could imagine how they dealt with her. The Prophetess had a very different theological orientation than many she worked with. She was also an African American woman working in an overwhelmingly white context. So, when she asked this question, it was clear that she was aware of her controversial impact in the world she found herself working in, and, given her smile, it appeared that she relished her position as a provocateur. A few months later, we met a second time. I hoped we would be able to talk more about her views of trauma, spirituality, and her experiences with STAR. The Prophetess greeted me warmly, shaking my hand and wishing me a happy New Year. She introduced me to Jeanie, her administrative assistant, saying, “This is the woman who keeps me on the ground. I can’t function without her.” She asked if I had signed up for the February STAR course. I said yes, and she asked about my travel plans. When I told her that they hadn’t contacted me yet about housing and picking me up at the airport, she immediately had Jeanie call the program and set up my ride and housing. We walked to a French restaurant in the financial district. Jeanie handed me the business card for the restaurant, and the Prophetess said to me, “Were you paying attention, being aware? Why did she show you the card and not me? Because when I walk out the door, I don’t know where I am going sometimes. I get involved in conversation and end up someplace else.” This style of interaction reminded me that the Prophetess seemed to be instructing me while at the same time seeing me as her chronicler. She was quite aware of the standard anthropological researcher-­researched dynamics and wanted to make sure that they were upended. We walked through the narrow streets of the financial district, engaged in conversation about religion, spirituality, and disaster, weaving our way around the many people in suits. I told her of my experience in Mississippi



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observing the Church World Service training and how it reminded me of a conversation we had had about the disconnect between what services were needed and what services had been given in the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina. “Yes,” she said. “If you understand that, you get right down to the core of what I was saying, what I experienced down there at EMU and with the STAR program.” She referred multiple times to what she felt was a lack of awareness. We entered the crowded restaurant, filled with Wall Street office workers; conversations about hedge funds, investments, and the state of the economy surrounded us. Amid this clamor, the Prophetess and I covered a range of topics, including her youth in New York City and her singing career. Through much of the conversation, I didn’t have to ask anything. She just spoke, while I glanced at my questions and saw that many were being answered without my having to ask. When I asked her if 9/11 had changed mental health and religious care, she said, “Yes, emphatically. It opened everything up. People are looking and we are going to bring things together or everything is going to fall apart. The Earth is sick.” This comment, reminiscent of her forceful interjection at the NYDIS conference, revealed an apocalyptic side that, as I have mentioned, was often obscured in the disaster religious and spiritual care world. Conversations about disaster that took place in organizational settings tended to use the technical language of risk. “Trauma,” she said, “is what we need to work out.” When I told her that I feel a lot of the people I meet in the disaster world are still dealing with the disasters they went through, and that gets in the way of their work, she responded, “That’s what I am saying. They were all traumatized. I was, too. People need to work out their trauma.” She wanted me to understand that the personal transformation of trauma was something larger than just making oneself feel better—that what she saw as the spiritual journey, coming to understand suffering, allowed one to become a better messenger of God’s healing. Speaking of how her “presence does the work,” the Prophetess said, “You could still leave here and say, ‘She’s totally crazy,’ and that’s all right. You still would have gotten something.” Her “presence” referred to a certain innate spiritual power, which she spoke of on several occasions. This power, she said, could impact hundreds of people in a room or work in a one-­on-­one setting. The idea of spiritual presence was often repeated among chaplains and is a tenet in the literature on pastoral care (Fitchett 2002). An idea with deep Protestant roots, the “ministry of presence” emphasizes the power of simply being present as a messenger of God and the ability of this presence to help

122 Interlude

heal another’s suffering. Tom, for instance, spoke of “walking with people” and the idea that giving a water bottle to someone means something very different if one is wearing a chaplain vest. But the Prophetess was suggesting something else when she referred to her impact on large groups of people, a channeling of divine energy. Our conversation that day consisted mostly of describing experiences working with the STAR program after 9/11. For our next lunchtime meeting, we went back to the same French restaurant. I had just returned from the STAR program at EMU, and the Prophetess was eager to hear about my experiences. In particular, she was interested to know how I understood STAR as a New Yorker. She also emphasized the well-­intentioned but misguided efforts of STAR to provide care in New York and the lack of race, culture, and class consciousness. She referenced trauma in several ways that related to some of the ideas from the STAR program. Most importantly, she drew connections between personal traumas and historical traumas. One of the problems she said she encountered at the STAR program was with “the fight to step out of personal and individual trauma to at least expand enough, to understand collective trauma and then generational trauma. You can’t heal if you are still saying, ‘I am in Jesus’s hands and I’m okay.’ And these are the greatest pastors.” She spoke for some time about the nature of STAR and the experience that I was going to have. She also explained the kinds of self-­interested fundraising that went on after 9/11 between EMU and Church World Service. The latter’s head was a graduate of EMU and so was interested in funneling Red Cross money to his alma mater, she explained. The Prophetess said she had wanted to make sure that money stayed in New York City. The funding for her position at STAR was to be cut shortly after our meetings, though she spoke of expanding her educational and organizational development consulting business in anticipation of this cut. “Between 2001 and 2002, I worked with over two thousand people,” she said. “I don’t like to work one-­on-­one because it is draining, but for you I’m making an exception. After 9/11, I was hurting and I went to STAR. I had been seeing all those people hurting from 9/11, and my mother had died the year before in 2000. I needed something, and that is how I ended up in STAR.” It was this need for a new set of skills that led her to the Mennonites in rural Virginia. I asked her at one of our meetings, “How do you know when your healing has been successful?”



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She smiled and said, “Joshua, how did you feel after you left our last meeting?” “Actually, to be honest, I felt oddly lighter.” “Uh huh,” she said with a smile. Months later, I tried to arrange another meeting with her. Initially, she didn’t respond to my e-­mails but later agreed to meet, and then canceled at the last minute. After several more tries on my part, I gave up. The Prophetess seemed to make decisions based on premonitions. The New York STAR office, she had told me during our last phone conversation, had closed and she was moving on to other projects.

CHAPTER 4

From Neuro-­Spirituality to Global Transformation of Trauma

But if there’s one thing I know now, it’s that anyone looking for order ought to steer clear of psychology altogether. Go for physiology or theology instead, where at least you’ll have solid backing—either in matter or in spirit—instead of psychology’s slippery terrain. —Olga Tokarczuk (2017:11)

Following the 9/11 attacks, it seemed that religion and trauma trainings were everywhere. While the training described in the previous chapter was highly mechanistic, with origins in organizational contexts of firefighting and policing, there were other trainings that offered very different ways to integrate mental health expertise and religion and spirituality in trauma and disaster response. Here, I describe two of those: Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) and a training in Mississippi funded by Church World Service for Hurricane Katrina on spiritual care and disasters. Each provides an example of how spiritual practice and trauma are blended into an expertise designed to respond to disaster and trauma. In different ways, the trainings wrestle with the needs and requirements of meaning expertise, diagnostics, individual suffering, and historical trauma and the question of how to codify religious-­spiritual distress. They have in common the intertwining of trauma and spirituality as the core elements of their claims to expertise. Through these trainings, I came to see different ways that spirituality and religion were being framed in the context of disaster mental health and trauma and neuroscience.



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The second training described in this chapter sought to provide a general training, with wide appeal, that had been developed in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings and refined following 9/11. In contrast to CISM and STAR, this training was not centered on a model that was standardized by a larger organization. It was not associated with a specific theological agenda or the perpetuation of model tied to the needs of a singular vision. It was harder to discern what the basic tenets were. Importantly, both STAR and the Church World Service training had a more capacious, less bureaucratically rigid feeling than CISM. Whether emphasizing collective healing and restorative justice or individual psychological healing, both trainings aimed to integrate spirituality with mental health models. They provided examples of the ways ideas of the self are intertwined with processes of restoring disaster-­shattered psyches, as well as the ways spiritual expertise is integrated into trainings and disseminated nationally. While the range of possibilities for integrating spirituality and mental health theory differs from the training described in the previous chapter, the trainings described here faced many of the same tensions. At stake are the varied ways mental health theory, science, and spirituality are intertwined in sometimes vexing ways to create spiritual expertise in disaster response and how these attempts illuminate the possibilities for different forms of response to catastrophe.

Eastern Mennonite University and the Trauma Journey STAR has its roots in a Mennonite religious tradition, part of the Anabaptist tradition, which is known as one of the peace churches, and they have long been active in international aid. The training was developed by The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU following 9/11, though it was intended for use in any post-­conflict or post-­violence setting. It built on many of the Mennonite Central Committee’s international development, disaster-­relief, and peace projects, as well as some of their work on restorative justice (Stutzman 2011). The Prophetess encouraged me to attend the STAR training and had said that it would give me important insights into how clergy were being trained in disaster. She had had a significant role in the development of the training model, but she told me that she had been highly critical of how issues of race and class were incorporated into the training.

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In the middle of February 2006, I flew from New York City to Washington, DC, where John, the husband of one of the women who worked in the STAR office at EMU, picked me up. We drove for three hours through rolling hills and farmland covered in snow. John, a friendly and talkative man who had grown up in New York City, explained what it was like being involved with EMU. When I asked him what the students at EMU were like, he smiled. Not long ago, he picked up some students who were returning from a trip to Italy. “You guys can play whatever kind of music you want,” he told them. The argument that ensued, he told me, was between those who wanted to listen to Broadway show tunes and those who wanted Christian rock. “That tells you something about the student population, which has 50 percent Mennonite enrollment and advertises itself as providing Christian education,” he said. After taking me shopping at the local supermarket, John dropped me off at the guesthouse, a small cottage on the edge of campus. I spent the next four days in the training. On the first morning of the training, snow came down on the hilly campus, which was mostly empty but for a few students walking quickly in the cold between buildings. The training took place in a medium-­sized seminar room in the main administrative building, which had gray, office-­style carpet on the floors and dry-­erase boards on most of the walls. While I wasn’t sure what to expect from the training, I had read the website, which stated the goals as follows: STAR expands practices related to trauma, security and shows the importance of integrating these concepts on personal, community and societal levels. “Trauma” is often seen as a phenomenon affecting individuals, and much of the trauma-­healing work has been limited to the individual level. STAR relates body and spirit to trauma healing and demonstrates that it needs to be addressed in groups and larger communities. “Justice” is usually associated with legal systems. STAR presents principles of restorative justice that require the involvement of individuals and communities. “Peacebuilding,” has in practice been most often used at the community-­level. STAR presents peacebuilding at the individual, community and state levels and integrates the importance of breaking cycles of victim-­hood and violence.



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“Spirituality” is usually disconnected from trauma healing. STAR identifies spirituality as a key component in healing trauma at all levels. “Security” is commonly seen as national security and the duty of governments to protect their citizens. STAR pushes beyond national security to look at global security including economic and human security. STAR activities honor multi-­faith participation and the important interaction of those from diverse backgrounds in the US and around the world. As this description suggests, STAR envisioned itself as a holistic system working on multiple levels—from the individual to the international—with trauma and spirituality as central components. Religious themes—hope, forgiveness, faith, and reconciliation, drawn from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—were integrated with therapeutic and biological language.

The Snail Model

Sally and Noreen, the workshop leaders, white women who appeared to be in their mid-­fifties, introduced the Snail model as central to STAR’s theory of trauma and spirituality and transforming the self and society. Designed to link individual-­level trauma to larger societal-­level trauma, the model, the trainers told us, leads to evolution and societal change and is intertwined with spiritual growth and the possibility of breaking cycles of trauma. It was possible to view it through the lens of religion and spirituality or psychology, or both, they said. In order to heal from trauma, people must learn to forgive so they can take a path of restorative justice, rather than continuing to act out repetitive cycles of trauma, both Sally and Noreen repeated throughout the training. Restorative justice seeks reconciliation and provides a process where the aggrieved, the community, and the “perpetrator” can come to a deeper understanding of the wrongdoing. Restorative justice eschews individualistic and punitive frameworks in favor of an emphasis on collective healing (Zehr 2014). Trauma, in the Snail model, produces repetitious behavior—on both the individual and group level—requiring an intervention to break free of these cycles. Forgiveness would provide a release from trauma, according to the STAR manual, in which “a relational change on the horizontal level—between

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people, and a vertical change between people and God” occurs. Much like PCI, relations are mapped onto two planes—the earthly and the Godly. However, STAR suggested a different kind of transformation of the self. Whereas CISM suggested little sense of “society,” or communality, the STAR training emphasized a need for communal, even global, healing and moral transformation (Casper and Wertheimer 2016). The trauma concept stitched together the various components of the Snail model, explicitly linking them to a moral transformation (Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007) on individual, structural, and societal levels. Suffering and trauma were presented as having clear purpose, or meaning. Psychologically and spiritually working through traumatic experience allows for healing and growth. Seeing the “trauma journey” through the Snail graphic allowed participants a way to view traumas as connecting them to something larger, a sense of collective reconciliation and forgiveness and spirituality. STAR has a commitment to justice, restoration, and healing rooted in the Mennonite tradition and apparent in their language of conflict transformation, healing, and a redemptive narrative tied to a commitment to peace and nonviolence.1 A clear orientation to a Christian-­derived notion of peace was repeated by the instructors throughout the training. This larger vision of spiritual-­psychological growth, a near-­inevitable evolution toward a more just (Godly) world, required forgiveness and reconciliation. But as the Snail image shows, there was a clear path forward. Though they both draw on trauma discourse, Snail’s language contrasts with CISM’s by offering a vision of spiritual and moral growth in the aftermath of trauma, disaster, and violence. Rather than emphasizing a return to a state of homeostasis, STAR’s language is centered on change, growth, and even a sense of mystery. It provides a moral-­spiritual-­psychological framework for working through both individual and collective trauma and looks toward a future when people are healed from their traumas. “Spirituality, faith beliefs, identity validation and the systems by which people give meaning to their world,” according to the training manual, “are key to understanding trauma and addressing the deep wounds and torn social fabric created by the traumatic events.”

The Wounded Healer and the Body’s Innate Wisdom

On the first day of the training, we went around in a circle and introduced ourselves, which was followed by a brief introductory talk by the president of



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the university and a short prayer for the success of our work. The tables were laid out with name tags and big binders with “STAR” printed on them. Sally and Noreen spoke about the different countries they had worked in and what led them to STAR. Noreen had spent considerable time in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and Sally had worked in Nepal and India and most recently had returned from Sri Lanka, where she had been working with survivors from the 2004 tsunami. Sally handed out her card, which described her as a “trauma consultant.” Both were humanitarian aid workers who, through their international work, were part of a global network of experts providing trauma care and education, frequently to lower-­income countries (Bornstein and Redfield 2011). These experiences informed their understanding of disaster spiritual care as expertise. They were able to synthesize a spiritual-­trauma discourse, built on their own experiences, into a training model designed to provide expertise for other would-­be caregivers. Noreen began by describing the history of the program. “STAR got its start after 9/11 and was funded by Church World Service and was originally called ‘Seminars in Trauma and Resilience.’ We think of the program as therapeutic but not therapy,” she told the group, emphasizing that the curriculum was designed to encourage an internal transformational process, but should not, in other words, be seen as a way to deal with serious psychological issues or be confused with therapy. Such a framing suggested that the information provided was almost “natural,” expanding the possible reach of the model. The program’s Mennonite roots were apparent in its emphasis on conflict transformation, restorative justice, and international aid work. In contrast to the CISM training, discussed in the previous chapter, the STAR program engaged history and politics to draw connections among individual-­level trauma, societal trauma, and global trauma. STAR emphasized seeing individuals in relation to larger systems. The program used a vocabulary that moved back and forth among the secular and spiritual or religious, leaving open possibilities for different interpretations. Spirituality, STAR emphasized, needed to be included in healing from trauma, though in most disaster-­recovery contexts it was left out. The body and spirit needed to be integrated for healing to take place, a view central to much of the discourse on holistic healing and trauma. As Noreen told us, “Healing includes forgiveness and trauma exists in the body.” The course had nine participants: Roberto, a Colombian Jesuit priest; Heather, a young woman working for Catholic Relief Services; Darren, a Baptist minister/family therapist; Samantha, a self-­described observant Christian who worked with drug abusers and former convicts; and Mary, an elderly

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woman active in her Presbyterian church. Also present were two students from EMU: Jen, a woman in her twenties, and Mike, a man in his fifties, who said he had been very active in several churches. We introduced ourselves at length, describing our backgrounds and why we had decided to take the course. Sally then asked us to define trauma and handed out paper and markers so people could draw how they experienced trauma. We each presented personal symbols of trauma, which included drawings of a deep hole, a bruising crater, a drop of cold water in hot oil, and open space and fog, representing confusion. We took turns describing the significance of these symbols, a process that aimed to externalize traumatic experience as a means of sharing and working through, of making the personal part of a collective. After participants presented their views of trauma, Sally described the difference between stress and trauma. “With stress,” she told us, “we quickly bounce back, but trauma can be more difficult to come back from. Trauma is from the Greek word ‘wound’—and can be a wound of mind, body, and spirit. The body instinctually wants to recover and there is an ‘innate wisdom in the body.’”2 The body, she suggested, heals because God implanted in us the ability to heal. “Innate wisdom,” she said, could also be understood in either a religious or secular sense. The biological tendency of the body to heal itself can act as a stand-­in for the divine or for a more general spiritual belief in a universal tendency toward healing. Wisdom could be attributed to either a divine, otherworldly capacity or simply to the wisdom of nature or biology. But STAR was clearly pushing against standard psychiatric diagnostics of trauma as solely individual, emphasizing the potentially destructive effects of viewing traumatic experience in this way. “Trauma and violent conflict go hand in hand,” Noreen said, and she went on to explain the different kinds of trauma that were a core part of the STAR model. These included complex, historical cumulative, continuous, chronic, societal/cultural, historical, secondary, structurally induced, participation-­induced, and plural traumas. Each form of trauma was said to interact with others, creating a model with levels ranging from the individual to the interpersonal to the transhistorical and cultural. This taxonomy made trauma fit into virtually any analysis of human suffering on any population or timescale. During one of the more dramatic moments of the day, Sally gave a lecture about what STAR calls “participation-­induced trauma.” Formerly called “perpetrators trauma” by STAR, the phrase was altered to deemphasize the agency of the “participant.” They wanted to show, Sally told us, that the



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person committing the act was not acting alone but rather was part of a larger structure. I wondered about the political impact of this altered language, and asked, “What’s gained and what’s lost by changing the words?” Roberto, the Colombian priest, also wondered about the political implications of this change, though the discussion did not go any further. The psychic and spiritual toll of working in disaster contexts or with those suffering from trauma came up frequently at meetings and trainings I attended, as it did here. “Compassion fatigue is a big problem for people involved in disaster work and is connected to post-­traumatic growth, transcendence, and resilience,” Noreen explained. “Though people can become more resilient and have experiences of transcendence working in disaster settings—what can be called post-­traumatic growth.” As I described in Chapter 1, resilience has become a key term in “proving” the relevance of spirituality to mental health—particularly to disaster and trauma work. It resonates so widely because it provides a narrative of redemption, where what some define as the ability to bounce back, a kind of fortitude, can easily be defined in spiritual terms. Relationships with others—for example, love for family and friends—can also be defined as spiritual and shown to be a “protective factor” contributing to resilience (Pargament 2001). In another exercise, we were asked to create symbols of trauma and present them to the group. We sat in a circle and Sally lit a candle, saying that it symbolized God’s light. Noreen presented a picture of a warhead with a dollar attached to it, symbolizing U.S. involvement in perpetuating global violence and the trauma it caused her. Father Roberto displayed a cross he had received when he took his priestly vows. He described a time when he was working in a remote village and shooting broke out. While trying to dodge the bullets, he had left the cross behind in a small shack that had concealed him. When he returned, the cross was broken in the corner, hit by a bullet. “This,” he said, “symbolized how trauma breaks things and cannot be fixed.” The clear association between trauma and religious suffering takes on both a material and an emotional form in this example. The very symbol of Christ’s suffering had been fractured, mirroring the internal suffering that Father Roberto had endured. Unlike CISM’s emphasis on finding solutions and restoring sufferers to homeostasis, Roberto saw himself as persisting in the face of brokenness. This view conveyed a different kind of meaning, in which ideas of meaning that have been fractured and not restored, not put back together, rest in the unfixable, a realm where fixed meaning may not be the ultimate aim. He pointed to a sensibility resonant of the Prophetess, a sense of living within

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a world where knowledge and meaning are always partial, a world without clear markers of salvation or psychological restitution. Toward the end of the day, Sally led us through an exercise she called “the river of life.” We were instructed to draw a river that represented our lives and indicate the “traumatic” experiences we have had along it and how these events formed our personalities and character. I was struck by the way we were being guided to narrate our lives as defined by our trauma. This narrative view of life (Garro 2003; Strawson 2004) was meant to connect us with our traumas to allow us to become more “effective healers” and to understand how suffering provides insight. By the end of the exercise, the walls were covered with multicolored rivers surrounded by drawings of ­people in houses or outside with hills and sky or scenes of war and death. In all cases, naming the events as trauma was meant to convey significance and to solidify an identity rooted in trauma that in turn could be transformed into a form of expertise to serve others suffering from traumatic experiences. In other words, without the religion-­science hybrid (Josephson-­Storm 2017) of trauma, the logic of spiritual growth that undergirded much of the expertise would not have been possible. Sally suggested we end with a prayer. She thanked God for giving us different resources and for being able to help people heal from trauma. “We are all wounded healers,” she said. As I have argued, personal trauma and expertise in disaster religious and spiritual care are intertwined. The idea of the “wounded healer” (Nouwen 2014) came up at nearly every conference and training on disaster mental health I attended. Tom, from CISM, spoke about his struggles with cancer, while the Prophetess and Frank both spoke about their personal narratives of trauma and how they related to their work with trauma survivors. The “wounded healer” supplied a valuable redemptive trope. It gave meaning to suffering, creating a framework to channel distress and “trauma” into expertise. Psychic distress became an asset in developing expertise, and what might have been unmanageable life experiences were woven into a discourse of expertise that valorizes these experiences instead of seeing them as vulnerabilities. In other words, the suffering of disaster spiritual care providers could itself be seen as an asset. Deaths, sexual abuse, violence: one can be overcome by these experiences and repeat them, or one can become a healer by developing an expertise that can be of use to others. Instructing the use of yogic breathing exercises designed to alleviate stress and anxiety, Noreen spoke of the innate “wisdom of the body.” “The body knows how to heal itself,” she said. “We just need to let it.”



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Grace, Stress, and Self-­Transformation

The second day began with the lighting of the candle and talk about the kinds of spiritual resources we draw on to deal with trauma. Some participants mentioned the importance of friends, while others mentioned family as part of their spiritual practice. Father Roberto talked about the importance of music and nature. Spirituality was defined broadly as that which brings personal meaning. This could include virtually anything. Noreen told us that “incorporating spirituality to resilience allows people to overcome trauma by providing meaning in the face of what could consume.” Meaning and spirituality are linked by their ability to build resilience in the face of traumatic experience. In this way, the psychic and spiritual work required for resilience must arrive at a particular kind of meaning. And being able to help people arrive at this kind of meaning is what spiritual expertise does. Resilience— fostered by meaning—is the flip side of trauma and, along with spirituality, holds together disaster spiritual care as an expertise. Resilience supplies a secular stand-­in for faith, alongside other attributes associated with religious fortitude. Resilience also shifts focus away from pathology and readily grafts onto religious and spiritual thinking. Post-­traumatic growth is a reaction against what many see as the pathologizing tendencies of trauma theory. The curriculum had a strongly articulated moral component, and it was particularly concerned with connecting the individual trauma journey to collective trauma, including what they called historical and cultural trauma. For example, Sally, one of the facilitators, described what she called the “still, small voice,” an internal orienting morality. She had come across this idea in her work in post-­conflict Bosnia. She said that most people at some point had a voice inside of them that told them not to commit violent acts, but they chose not to listen. Surfacing this small voice was one of the aims of her work in Bosnia. Whether the “still, small voice” was psychological or spiritual was left ambiguous. But part of our work was to listen for this voice. Later in the day, Sally showed us a film about a polar bear. We watched the polar bear shaking while several scruffy biologists looked on, explaining that the bear’s response was an example of stress release. Noreen asked us if we noticed that his paws were moving. “This,” she said, “showed that he was getting the trauma out of his system, and animals do better at dealing with trauma and getting it out of their system. They are able to release stress in many ways, including snorting or by sleeping it off in the case of the polar bear.” There was no discussion of the fact that polar bears have quite different

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emotional lives from humans. Why, I wondered, did it seem so important to present emotional and existential responses to stress with biological analogies? Part of the answer had to do with the legitimizing rhetorical power of science (Stehr and Grundmann 2014). The other part had to do with a need to distance the reaction to trauma from the suffering individual. If we are like the bear, stuck in a fight-­or-­flight response, then one need not look for psychodynamic causes. Instead, one need only see the responses in human evolutionary history, in the “hard-­wiring” of our brains. This view of stress goes back to Selye’s and Cannon’s work (Harrington 2009), providing a thread that runs throughout thinking about disaster-­ related mental health in the latter half of the twentieth century. Much debated, this theory takes traumatic experience from the mind and places it within the bodily memory and the “primitive brain,” or amygdala (Young 1997). But Cannon’s fight-­or-­flight idea was a clear antecedent to this concept of stress, supplying one of the key metaphors for disaster care. The biological reductionism of the polar bear example suggests a highly physiological view of trauma healing, one that seemed to conflict with some of the other tenets of the STAR training. It offered freedom from stress as a redemptive modern version of theological grace. Again, we see how seemingly contradictory discourses are readily assimilated into forms of expert knowledge for disaster spiritual care. Both Sally and Noreen had spent many years abroad, and they often referred to experiences they had had in different cultures. While they gave examples of countries where they had worked, they used the term “culture” more often to describe the various ways that stress might be manifested. “Some cultures,” Noreen recounted, “don’t have an understanding of mental health like we do, and they have a harder time with the chaos.” It seemed as though “culture” did not refer to a set of rituals and beliefs—as is often the case—but instead to a set of capacities and strengths that make a group more or less resilient, capable of responding to war, disaster, and trauma. A culture, then, could be more or less chaos-­inducing, depending on its understanding of mental health. At one point, there was a discussion about whether or not some cultures deal with stress better than others. Noreen gave an example from the Sudan, in which she told us about an older man who said that if you make people cry, then they will think you are a wizard. The “cultural” examples were used to illustrate the variety of beliefs about distress that can be found globally, but they also supported a more universal role for disaster spiritual expertise. Despite rhetoric of cultural sensitivity, their bias toward a version of American



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Christian therapeutic religion was clear (Shuman and Meador 2003). Unlike CISM, STAR drew from the Anabaptist peace churches, which, in spite of references to biological determinants, placed it in a different kind of moral framework—one that had more explicit political and collective spiritual dimensions. Analogous to international aid and global health frameworks, a sense of exporting “the right way”—in this case with religious and spiritual care—was expressed. “The people in the Andaman Islands,” Noreen told us, “believed it was devils taking over that caused trauma. It was our job to tell them otherwise.” Later, I engaged her on this issue, and she said that she tried to tell the islanders that reactions to trauma are normal and are your body and brain working together the way God created them to work. That is what she tells those who think they are depressed, as well as those around them. “Befriending symptoms,” she said, “is a sign of strength.” She seemed to be trying to shift their understanding of distress to a cognitive-­psychological model that aims for the acceptance of emotional states. “Trauma,” she said, “is isolating, and it can take acts of God to get people out. People are traumatized, and it is like being frozen in a block of ice. It is important to move them from ‘my pain’ to ‘our pain’ or ‘pain of the universe.’” Here, one of the tensions between psychological models of trauma and spiritual or more expansive religious visions of healing is both apparent and consequential. Focusing on individual pain is not enough. It may be a stage in becoming aware, but without a movement toward something larger, the “working through” is not complete. In this view, trauma and psychic distress have a narrative structure that provides a template for a kind of moral transformation. While the transformation requires the intermingling of secular mental health discourse and religion, the move toward a collective (even universal) mode contrasts with CISM. We spent a lot of time on this day sharing personal experiences of trauma. Uma, a former EMU student who worked in the STAR office, gave a guest presentation where she shared the story of how her husband had been killed in the 1998 Nairobi bombings of the U.S. embassy and spoke of her trauma, linking the psychological and theological. “We knew about al-­Qaeda there before you did in the U.S. Two hundred and fifty people were killed, twelve Americans, and five thousand injured,” she said. After the attack, she was anxious and had trouble sleeping. She didn’t know what was going on with her until she started reading and studying about trauma. It was clear that STAR’s “trauma” framework offered a narrative structure that she found helpful. Her references to God and prayer showed clearly that she was a religious person. When asked about how people are able to turn from the cycle of violence to

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the cycle of healing, she echoed the STAR model, saying, “through grace.” In a jarring and moving way, Uma narrated the ways the psycho-­spiritual narrative framework of STAR offered solace. Uma recounted how the STAR model worked. “It takes the grace of God to break free,” she said emotionally. Uma provided an example of how someone had used the STAR healing journey to work through their traumas. Her path from grief to healing and forgiveness and the recognition of God’s power and essential benevolence reflected the Snail model’s stages, creating a powerful way to form a narrative, make a world cohere, and find pathways to legible futures. STAR provided a technology for personal transformation rooted in expertise derived from disasters.

“God Flowing Through” and the Trauma Journey

On the third day, it became more apparent why a Protestant American Christian theology mapped so easily onto their narrative of trauma in the STAR model. Much of the morning was spent on “reconnecting with our bodies.” The “traumatized body” has become a key concept for contemporary trauma therapies. “Trauma work involves definite bodywork,” Sally said. She mentioned James Nelson’s ideas about theological embodiment.3 “When the spirit takes on flesh,” she said, “when God becomes body like we are, you have incarnation. Survivors of rape and sexual abuse often talk about it is as if their bodies are turned against them and are ashamed of sexual feelings.” She tells them “that their bodies are created by God and that when they are touched in those parts it is okay to feel a kind of arousal—you are supposed to.” Imagining oneself as part of God’s creation, a spiritual being, allows for recovery, for the trauma of sexual assault to heal. Touch played an important role, particularly when coupled with prayer and images of God. “I like to stand with people I am working with, my hand on their shoulder, and picture the light of God flowing through and picture myself as a conduit of God and say a prayer of healing,” Noreen said, gesturing with her hands in prayer. But prayer was not presented solely as a connection between God and humans. It also offered possibilities for transforming the brain. “Prayer,” Noreen told us, “creates new neural pathways.”4 This phrase invokes a common religion-­science hybrid (Josephson-­Storm 2017), one that



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opens the possibility for either a theological view of prayer or one rooted in techno-­scientific vocabulary. This framing offers a wider range of entry points for participants, as well as opening up different possibilities for acceptance of the expertise of disaster spiritual care. In describing how people heal from trauma, Noreen told us, “Forgive and forget—the brain isn’t made that way.” She explained that trauma needed to be transformed, not forgotten. The brain, she went on, does not allow for forgetting because memories become imprinted into the neural structure. The only way to address this neurological feature in healthy ways was through forgiveness. The “trauma journey” toward forgiveness became a biologically inevitable pathway. Not only is forgiveness a good that is therapeutically effective or of theological importance, but it is also biologically determined. The brain is structured to forgive. Thus, forgiveness, a concept given particular emphasis in Christianity, becomes a universal biological imperative. “Through mourning, and grieving,” the STAR manual reads, “the desire for revenge is lessened: trauma energy is released and meaning is given to the event over time” (22). This redemptive view of trauma, the moral transformation, distinguished STAR from CISM. There was movement toward a deeper understanding of events that was also part of the vision of traumatic experience. The religious implications were spelled out as the event went on, and forgiveness became a central component of STAR. As nascent disaster experts, we were being trained to help people go through an emotional spiritual journey where the highest state of moral, psychological, and spiritual development was the state of forgiveness. The transformation of trauma was framed as an inherently moral process. Meaning was nearly guaranteed for those who put work into “dealing” with their trauma, ruling out the possibility of a meaningless world, a world where traumatic events happen for no reason at all. And, in this case, the brain itself was seen to be wired for both forgiveness and meaning. “Trauma,” Sally told us, “becomes a gift from God because God uses all and because trauma can help us become more aware of the suffering of others.” As a central Christian idea, where the suffering of Christ redeems, the Snail model had at its core the concept of grace. This framework made it possible to see all suffering as meaningful, as part of an ordered, God-­driven universe. While the form of Christianity espoused by Snail emphasized social justice and reconciliation, its Christian narrative of redemption assumed a

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meaningful coalescence of psychological distress. The human universe was rendered legible by visuals designed to lead one step by step toward redemption, with the assumption that redemption was the end goal, both possible and desirable. At the end of the final day, we said goodbye with a concluding prayer. We thanked each other for our time together, expressed gratitude to God, and vowed to take this knowledge forward into our work. I drove back to the airport with Heather, who was clearly taken with the STAR model and was eager to get back to her office to try to enroll her coworkers in the next training. I gently raised questions about whether exporting such trainings around the world was such a good idea. She conveyed her satisfaction in having a framework that helped her to incorporate trauma into her work and said she found commonality with the STAR instructors, particularly their focus on spirituality. Demonstrating the ways trainings globally circulate expert knowledge, Heather said, “I’m looking forward to teaching what I learned at STAR to the people I work with.” She noted, “A lot of this stuff will be really helpful for when I go back to the Sudan.” Assuming universal ideas of spirituality and distress provides the foundation for spiritual expertise, allowing its circulation throughout the globe. In contrast to the CISM/PCI training described in the previous chapter, the training described here implied a different idea of the self that did not draw on the same mechanistic version of an enclosed individual, or buffered, psyche (Taylor 2007) subject to grid-­like, predictable interventions. It did not present rigid intervention protocols, analogous to those found in emergency response services. Different kinds of mental health theory are reworked into novel forms of expert knowledge for disaster response that, importantly, involve implicit—and sometimes explicit—notions of selfhood. For example, the STAR training, rooted in Mennonite theology and restorative justice traditions, suggested a self embedded in a relational world, emphasizing the capacity to love and forgive. CISM, by contrast, portrayed a self-­contained and mechanistic self, in which religion and spirituality could be employed as tools to bolster and improve personal functioning in the sequelae of disaster—with little or no vision of a larger sense of communality. Ideas about the self and healing inevitably imply a politics, with critical consequences for how we constitute and reconstitute shattered psyches and communities in the context of disaster. These therapeutic politics have only become more pressing as global temperatures rise.



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Neurons, Meditation, and Spiritual Care in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I first met Jim in a bookstore in mid-­Manhattan on an early fall day in 2005. An acquaintance at NYDIS had suggested that I speak with him. Jim was a mild-­mannered man in his early sixties, and his persona belied what I found out later was a remarkable life. A nonsectarian liberal Christian, he worked for Church World Service, a large multidenominational Christian organization, and had been present at nearly every disaster over the past twenty years or so, including the Rwandan genocide, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and Hurricane Katrina. Much later, Jim told me remarkable stories about living in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s regime and also about being kidnapped by communists in Thailand. After working for many years in faith-­based disaster response, Jim had become increasingly interested in spirituality. He told me that spirituality is a key to the way people are able to deal with trauma, and that disaster mental health needed to have a spiritual component. After e-­mailing back and forth with Jim for several weeks, I flew to Mississippi to meet him and his team of disaster spiritual experts for a training that took place several months after Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding cities and displacing hundreds of thousands. The training was initially designed following 9/11, in part by some of the psychologists and clergy who had worked in Oklahoma City after the bombing. Moving from Oklahoma City to New York to Mississippi and other Gulf areas, this training had changed to accommodate each disaster, incorporating new experiences and attempting to adapt to local contexts. It drew on a variety of modalities and religious idioms, offering a view of the self that fell somewhere between CISM and STAR in its relationships to a sense of community and structural issues. If CISM offered a rigidly demarcated religious and psychological self, subject to machine-­like intervention, and STAR presented an idea of the self connected to a global narrative of healing rooted in a trauma-­spirit journey, the Mississippi training had an “agenda” that was not as clear. It seemed to simply provide a set of tools for getting through disaster or distress without an overarching framework. Biological and neurological metaphors and cognitive behavioral psychology, with references to Job, were blended into a set of exercises and lectures designed to provide participants with basic disaster spiritual care response skills. The facilitators were contractors who had worked together before in trainings for faith leaders in disaster

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response following the attacks of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. More than the CISM and STAR trainings, this training seemed to represent a common patchwork of pragmatic American ideas about distress, spirituality, selfhood, and healing. The facilitators moved easily among references to football, neuroscience, and mindfulness mediation with a folksy way of speaking. They were not doctrinaire, but instead offered what they presented as a kind of “no-­nonsense,” practical wisdom. I took a flight from New York to Atlanta and boarded a small plane to Biloxi, Mississippi. In Atlanta, I ate catfish and collards, inaugurating my southern journey with southern cuisine. The small, cramped plane from Atlanta to Biloxi was filled with military and religious groups on their way to engage in relief work. When I arrived in Biloxi, it was clear that I had entered a different world. The airport was in disarray, with exposed wiring, raw concrete floors, and construction materials and machinery creating a maze of passages. I stood outside the airport waiting for a taxi for over an hour. The attendant explained that most of the taxis were taking people to New Orleans, which was approximately an hour’s drive. An older man with a thick southern accent finally arrived in a minivan and took several of us to our respective hotels. Somewhere outside of Biloxi, I first began—however incompletely—to understand that I was seeing the future. The washed-­up sofas in the trees and waterfronts strewn with detritus pointed to a world that was in the making but that many of us had not yet admitted to—a world of increasing climate-­ related catastrophes. It also became clearer to me that disaster experts had not yet come to terms with this new future—or even the present. Jim called to let me know that we would be going to dinner with Candice, one of the trainers, who had been working with this group since 9/11. Candice was a tall, outspoken woman from Oklahoma who seemed to enjoy testing Jim’s nerve by poking fun at him. During dinner at a chain steakhouse, I listened to Jim and Candice exchange the latest news. Candice had just come from conducting disaster trainings in rural Alabama, and she spoke about her experiences throughout the Gulf, the extreme poverty she had encountered, and the religious intensity of the rural churches. In this training, I was able to see another example of how scientific discourse was mobilized to justify expertise and views of trauma, the brain, and selfhood. But perhaps more importantly, I saw how religion and spiritual expertise was reworked from the 9/11 context for the post-­Katrina context and how this version of disaster spiritual and religious response chafed against the needs of a vastly different situation.



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For anyone who had been worrying about the mounting evidence for human-­caused global warming, that reality was suddenly yanked out of the future and placed squarely in the present. It was as if the inert data in scientific journals had been personified through grim alchemical process, transformed into images of people clinging to their roofs menaced by flood waters and armed militias guarding grocery stores. I had, by this time, been reading perhaps too much about the climate crisis. I quickly saw how, even more than the attacks of 9/11, Katrina augured the future. I didn’t really want to visit the Gulf to view the damage it caused. But when I was invited by Jim to observe trainings on disaster religious and spiritual care in Mississippi, I felt that I had to go. I wanted to understand how disaster spiritual expertise had changed and diffused in the four years since the attacks, and how knowledge derived from experiences in New York was stitched together for other contexts. What I witnessed suggested that attempts to craft a template that could work throughout the country did not always fit, or provide the expertise, the knowledge and wisdom and skills, that were needed. The training provided another example of the patchwork of expertise rooted in spirituality, meaning, and restoration of wholeness.

Neurons in the Stadium

The next morning, I met up with Jim, Candice, and her training partner, Albert, a Presbyterian minister who worked at a counseling center for veterans and had received a doctorate in family systems from a seminary. We drove together to Gulf Coast Community College and unloaded the car, carrying a projector and boxes of paper into the auditorium where the training was to take place. The college consisted of recently built one-­story buildings and was seemingly well funded and taken care of, and the training took place in a large lecture hall with tables, swivel chairs, and fluorescent lights. The room slowly filled with mostly African American women. Many were wearing Project Recovery shirts provided by a FEMA-­funded project for people who go door-­to-­door conducting needs assessments and making referrals. Candice was highly animated, projecting herself energetically across the room, walking back and forth and smiling. She was direct and frequently injected humor into her presentations. “I am a cognitive behavioral therapist,” she announced, “and I don’t mess around,” suggesting that her therapeutic

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modality was more effective at getting to the heart of the matter in ways that previous generations of psychological interventions were not. Candice was saying that, unlike other therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, rooted in empirical science, is effective in getting to core problems in ways that focus on thought errors and their behavioral implications rather than on the explicit search for meaning. Unlike psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapists are not likely to delve deeply into family history and past trauma. They are more likely to intervene on the level of repetitive thought patterns. This circumventing of ultimate meanings narrows the scope of psychological intervention, leaving more room for the meaning-­making expertise of disaster religious and spiritual care providers. Unlike spirituality and other therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy does not search for human purpose in the cosmos, but instead places the emphasis—in mechanistic fashion—on the “diminishment of maladaptive behaviors and cognition” (Consoli, Beutler, and Bongar 2017:61) and return to healthy functioning. The goals of the training were to merge spiritual and psychological care and to create a skill base for faith leaders working in disaster settings. The objectives, according to the slides, were: 1. To understand human behavior in a disaster situation including factors affecting individual responses. 2. To understand the key concepts of disaster mental health, including how community faith leaders can assist with appropriate interventions and how they can refer and seek assistance for their congregations, communities in a disaster situation. 3. To prepare faith leaders to help victims move forward during the recovery process. 4. To emphasize self-­care measures to strengthen their long-­term involvement, sustainability and resistance to overwhelming levels of stress. Candice confidently presented a synthesis of psychology and religion, relying heavily on examples from neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Playing more the psychologist than the minister, she did not directly engage theological issues, instead focusing on immediate responses to disaster settings, from individual caregiving to conflicts among competing organizations, as well as burnout of disaster-­relief workers.



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Her presentation included pictures of a stadium that she used as a metaphor for the brain and neurons, though I was not sure I understood what she was suggesting. “When someone is traumatized,” she said, “the neurons go to one side of the stadium [the brain] leaving the other side low on neurons.” Invoking the brain-­science analogies provided a sense of authority grounded in biology while also “proving” that religion and spirituality have an essential role to play. Later, in a private conversation, Candice confided that she thought psychology would move further toward the neurosciences, which are better at treating mental distress than religious expertise. This predicted future of psychology would further intensify the discourse of brain science in clinical mental health. In her view, the divisions between religious expertise and mental health expertise would become increasingly more defined as the neurosciences advanced. By claiming her allegiance to cognitive behavioral therapy, Candice offered a clear way to parse soul and psyche and a path through the thicket of conflict over the boundaries of expertise in disaster spiritual care. She clearly positioned herself as a different kind of mental health professional from previous generations. When I asked her what she thought about psychoanalysis, she replied, “Psychoanalysis has no room for God.” She argued that psychoanalysts had always been hostile to religion, seeing believers as defective and infantile. Emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between the work of psychology and the work of religion, Candice argued that the biological model and cognitive behavioral model were more appealing to religious people because both sidestep questions of ultimate truths and making judgments about faith, leaving the meaning to faith leaders, the rightful historical bearers of this expertise. They do not claim to help people analyze their lives but instead maintain a clear division of labor between religion and mental health. The paradox is that the “advancement” of therapeutic models, the move toward rationalization and scientism, allows for a greater opening for religion and spirituality. I was reminded of the reply I received from Dr. Wang, an Evangelical Christian psychiatrist, who in an interview made it clear to me that cognitive therapy was the therapy of choice for the Christian therapeutic community. “Unlike Freudian theory,” she had said, “cognitive therapy does not get into questions of motive or morality but rather limits itself strictly to behaviors and leaves problems of morality and belief to the religion.” Like Candice, Dr. Wang saw cognitive behavioral therapy as skirting questions of morality and meaning, ceding ground to religious expertise, reopening a vacated niche for the spiritual.

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Frequently citing biblical passages, Albert’s presentation referenced somewhat different vocabulary, though with clear links to the contemporary language of trauma and holism. “Job,” Albert told us, “was traumatized by the loss of his children and the other tragedies that befell him because of God’s seemingly capricious dealings with the devil.” Invoking an integrated view of disaster religious and spiritual response, he spoke, for example, of the concept of shalom as indicating a wholeness that includes the physical, spiritual, and mental. Job, perhaps unsurprisingly, was frequently invoked as a metaphor for disaster experiences, as a way to respond to loss and trauma. “You can rewrite the Bible in terms of disaster. Noah was the first disaster—then there was a settlement program,” Albert told the crowd of Katrina relief workers. “In Hebrew thought,” he went on to say, “the idea of health was not atomized into physical, mental, and spiritual. Trauma leaves us separated from God because of what happens biologically—the underlying emotion and fear. Traumatic events attack the meaning system. At times of crisis, because of neurobiological effects of trauma on cognition and emotions, your presence represents God’s presence. People experiencing trauma may experience tremendous faith regression.” Albert was referring to the belief that trauma has a neurological impact that makes people disoriented at different points on a continuum, including a biologized version of spirituality. In a peculiar synthesis of biology, spirituality, and cognitive-­psychological discourse, Albert provided another example of how patchwork expertise claims “meaning” as one of its key areas of intervention. Trauma attacks the “meaning system,” which is linked to spirit, mind, and body. It is only through a fragmented—or holistic—religious and spiritual presence that broken faith and shattered psyches can be put back together. Many I spoke with, including Candice, thought that cognitive behavioral therapy and related modalities offered more acceptable lines of professional division by leaving questions of belief to the religious, clearly demarcating the difference between psychology and spirit. Cognitive behavioral therapy, as Dr. Wang told me, does not interfere with belief in God, so long as these beliefs are not considered pathological. She had written a book about mental illness in Christian communities and had clear ideas about what constituted the difference between pathological religion and healthy religion. For her, damaging forms of belief included obsessive or self-­punishing versions of prayer. Cognitive behavioral therapy leaves the “soul” alone, she argued, focusing instead on behavior, allowing more space for religious and spiritual professionals.



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Baths, Meditation, and Self-­Care

The second day was quite different from the first. Most participants were relief workers, not clergy. Albert opened the session. “All of the work you do is ministering. Everything,” he said. There was a tense moment when Albert was describing strategies for self-­care. “Self-­care is key if you want to stay in this work. The burnout rate is very high.” He suggested that the participants meditate for an hour every day. A woman raised her hand and said, “I have three children. When will I find the time to meditate?” Albert replied, “Try locking yourself in your bathroom at night and take a long hot bath.” She replied with frustration, “We live in FEMA trailers. We don’t have baths.” Albert became defensive and said, “If you are not going to take care of yourselves, then if I come back next year, I will find that most of you won’t be working here anymore because you will have burned out.” “Self-­care” did not translate well across class and geography, highlighting some of the problems of importing training models without spending time understanding the local context. Similar to Tom, Albert was instructing the participants to shore up their inner selves without acknowledging the ongoing material struggles that were impacting their physical and mental health. Albert’s unwillingness (or inability) to examine this mismatch was telling— the assumptions about privacy, time, and even what is involved in caring for disaster-­depleted psyches point to larger challenges of importing disaster training and response models. Meditation, baths, and the kinds of middle-­ class “self-­care” tactics that Albert recommended simply were not an option for his audience (Hoffman 2005). On the plane home, I wondered how a different sort of training could be designed, one that integrated local perspectives. I thought about the misalignment between experiences of disaster and the kinds of therapeutic models designed by experts. The Prophetess had leveled similar critiques, accusing Church World Service and other religious organizations of chasing dollars, siphoning grant funds from the North while providing second-­rate services to the South. Reverend Green had also suggested that there was an unjust distribution of disaster-­relief money. And in the context of Hurricane Katrina recovery, history has only continued to reveal the severity and persistence of this structural violence (Horowitz 2020). On the last day of the training, Candice, Albert, and I drove along the coast amid the half-­washed-­away buildings and rubble, with bed sheets draped ghostlike in trees. One hotel had its side ripped off, and I could see inside the

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rooms. The bedding and lamps were still intact. The shiny but empty casinos by the water continued to advertise buffets and entertainment, while further down the beachfront houses remained. The seemingly ubiquitous Waffle Houses had somehow defied Hurricane Katrina and remained intact. Unlike STAR and CISM, the Mississippi training did not have a clear overarching moral narrative but instead relied on a patchwork of cognitive behavioral therapy, neuroscience metaphors drawn from popular understandings, and theological references to create a kind of American-­style “down-­home” religious-­spiritual self-­help training emphasizing self-­care. Because both Albert and Candice were contracted through a large organization—they had previously worked together—they could draw on their own idiosyncratic work in disaster, religion, and spirituality, with no overarching framework. Importantly, this training also had its roots in 9/11 recovery and presented another example of how expertise was formed following the attacks and moved to other regions. Both Candice and Albert had worked in New York City following the attacks and had developed much of the material from their experiences there, which did not always match with what the participants in Mississippi were confronting. Once more, the patchwork of discourses was stitched together to create an example of disaster spiritual care and its attempts to codify and diagnose disaster-­related suffering. But tensions, the pulling of the threads, were continually revealed, even more so when seen through the eyes of people who recently witnessed their homes obliterated by high winds and floods. Even the ideas of self-­care presented fell short of recognizing the enormity of the situation and the day-­to-­day lives of many of the workshop participants. Their world had been upended to the point, they seemed to be saying, that their selves were tattered in ways that eluded the tools for repair that were offered. If STAR represented a collective vision for working through trauma and fostering spirituality on global scale, then the Mississippi training offered a more common American perspective, a pragmatic mixing and matching, aiming toward a functioning self with enough spirituality to recover, though not one with any fundamental rearrangement of views about the self—or the world. The Mississippi training highlighted the mismatch between trainings developed after 9/11 and exported to other regions. It revealed the ways that ideas of spirituality—in this case, a version of mindfulness approaches to “self-­ care”—did not necessarily translate to all contexts. What I saw—smashed houses, washed-­up shores, furniture in trees—required something different, something larger, that allowed space for vertiginous grief that was experienced through, while at the same time remaining rooted in, the recognition of the



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ongoing inequalities and material deprivations of housing, food, and basic services in the Gulf region—and America.

Conclusion Through all of these trainings, I came to see how different moral and political discourses were mobilized to provide varying arguments for jurisdiction. The trainings offered various moral claims based on different visions of religious and spiritual selves—what the needs of a fractured psyche and soul might entail. For example, the language of “reconciliation,” which has become increasingly common since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the mid-­1990s (Colvin 2019), was frequently invoked as a therapeutic/political discourse in the STAR training. In this view, to move past violence and trauma, survivors need to narrate their trauma and be heard by perpetrators. The Mississippi training, on the other hand, offered a patchwork of neuroscience, cognitive behavioral techniques, and psychologized readings of the Bible. These were both very different approaches from CISM. Both CISM and the Mississippi training avoided overt political statements, while STAR drew on the peace church tradition of reconciliation and liberation theology and was explicit in its commitment to restorative justice, reconciliation, and peace. And while the CISM training was embedded in a military framework and was taught by a veteran, STAR’s vision of spirituality was distinctly linked to Mennonite ideas of justice and salvation. In STAR, there was a more clearly articulated idea of the social and of pathways for collective healing, while I imagined CISM’s pastoral crisis interventionist as a technician pulling levels and tweaking gears. Neuroscience explanations provided a particularly forceful way of legitimizing expertise—and sometimes in surprising ways. It was not enough to emphasize the importance of creating an empowering trauma narrative, in the case of both the Mississippi and STAR training. It was also critical to suggest that “new neural pathways” were created when one tells the therapeutic story differently. The image of implanting the trauma therapy process into the gray matter of our brains provides a powerful metaphor. Translating their work into scientific discourse was an attempt at a different kind of legitimacy—one that could have both spiritual and scientific resonance. Spirituality and trauma were employed alongside scientific theory to understand how people recover from world-­shattering experiences. With

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each training, one can see how expertise forms around specific ideas of the self and the ways these suggest a sense of politics (or communality) in the face of experiences that for many are ineffable. STAR reached toward a global redemption from trauma that required collective healing, while the Mississippi training did not offer a larger vision of social transformation and emphasized a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy with biblically inspired tools for resilience; CISM, meanwhile, aimed at repairing broken spirits and psyches by restoring faith and sending people back to the “front,” much like a military chaplain or psychiatrist might do. Each of the trainings drew on different justifications for their claims to expertise. Narratives of suffering and redemption, of the “secular” and “religious and spiritual,” interweaved in the views of the trainers and many participants. The tension between mental health language and spirituality was ever present, as language moved from talk of Job and faith to neurons in stadiums, from forgiveness, spirituality, and healing to fight-­or-­flight responses in polar bears. The sense that spirituality and religion offer something fundamentally different from secular therapeutics was belied by references to the science and the language of mental health. Theological questions of suffering were subordinated, and the expertise of disaster religious and spiritual care (at least on the surface) looked much like a kind of “meaning management,” with traces here and there of religious and spiritual language. The chaplain I spoke with at a training on trauma and religion at Princeton University could say, mildly, that he was happy there was more research on religion and mental health, without invoking faith or theological questions. Disaster and religious spiritual care had found a comrade in data and had entered the realm of expertise that could be substantiated by a body of research. In the epigraph that begins this chapter, Nobel Prize–winning author Olga Tokarczuk writes with some humor (I think) that psychology may in fact offer only the simulacra of order, an attempt to tame that which will always elude. Physiology—the matter of bone, blood, organs—can be felt, and theology has the backing of the divine. Psychology requires reliability and replicability, a semblance of certitude, that turns out to be “slippery terrain”—at best. Despite important differences between the trainings, there were some key similarities that reflect the need to provide a justification for disaster religious and spiritual care. Trauma, neuroscience, evolution, clinical psychology, and physiology were all present within the spiritual and religious expertise described here. Looking back, I also learned a great deal from these trainings about how spiritual expertise grapples with modern forms of stress and



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anxiety in disaster contexts. At the same time, I began to see how the climate crisis presented a very different kind challenge. This way of understanding resilience, meaning, and ways to grapple with the truly world-­ending possibilities of the unfolding climate crisis needed a different lexicon of emotions and psyches, built on what has come before, though moving toward a different kind of psychic-­planetary politics. Looking back, I can see myself fleetingly able to absorb the future the furniture-­laden trees portended. Like the day the Twin Towers came down and I found myself volunteering for the Red Cross at Ground Zero wearing sandals, I could not steadily face this emerging reality. In Mississippi, my growing sense of unease, recognition that the world was changing in ways that I struggled to imagine, lent the trainings an uncanny feeling, a prolepsis, as if the world I was viewing was tenuously tied to the real. The spirits and therapies proffered spectral vocabularies from a world partly fixed in the past—and with a future that was at best alarmingly hazy.

CONCLUSION

The Ends of Anxiety

Every day things that have never happened before happen. —Disaster expert at a conference

Sometimes one comes to accept ruptures in their understanding of the world in a moment of dramatic recognition. Other times, one requires a slower sedimentation of time, experience. Still, there are instances when all of this is at work—the winces and the slow recognitions taking turns and spiraling together, maelstrom-­like. Outrage and the adjustment. The car crash and the interminable replay of shattering glass and sounds of crunching steel. As with the death of someone you love, where months and years later you continue to reach for the phone to call them, only to remind yourself in surprise that they are gone, what we call the real lives side by side with our inhabiting of an otherwise. Three disparate moments stand out for me in my coming to recognize that the world I inhabited was not the one I had imagined. In the months after 9/11, I imagined a model of a human-­powered amphibious vehicle that, in the event of a large-­scale disaster, would get me across the Hudson River, the East River—or any river. I pictured myself as a self-­powered mobile human unit frantically pedaling my bike to the Brooklyn Bridge, transforming it into a boat, and paddling it to safety north of New York City, where I would rendezvous with friends and continue to the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Canada, or maybe Long Island, where I could paddle across the sound to Connecticut and make my getaway. I even e-­mailed a small boat company in the Adirondacks to run my design by them. I sent them several messages and never received a response. Some time later, I met a woman at a party who turned out to be the one who had read my anxious



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dispatches. “Oh, that was you?” she said. “You’re that crazy guy?” Yes, it was true. I was that guy. In an anonymous-­looking warehouse in Brooklyn in 2005, Joe Bruno, the stern-­faced commissioner of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (currently New York City Emergency Management), dismissed the threat of dirty bombs from the top of his list of things to worry about. “Hurricanes and floods in coastal New York,” he told me without changing his facial expression, “that’s what I worry about, that’s what keeps me up at night.” Back then, I already had a sense for what he was referring to, but in retrospect, his candor was admirable. The conversation occurred during a time when many New Yorkers (and others) were more terrified of the threat of foreign terrorism than of flooding, an attitude that unfortunately continues to this day. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, which ripped through coastal New York and New Jersey, confirmed the commissioner’s chilling prescience. In July 2015, I was in Kotzebue, Alaska, for work. As I was leaving, I gazed out over the spit north toward Kivalina, watching waves on the shore, sensing how the village was vulnerably situated. I was reminded of the day I watched the Twin Towers come down and the feeling of inescapable vertigo. Not long before I arrived in Kotzebue, a bulkhead was built for eighty million dollars, I was told, to protect the main paved road from rising sea levels. How long would this hold, I wondered. I imagined the village washed off the map. Who would do anything to stop it? Where would the funds for the community to retreat come from? In the conversation in my head, I found no dependable authority to appeal to. It seems increasingly unlikely that the federal government will provide the funds required by communities threatened by sea-­level rise, particularly communities of color, where intimations of climate apartheid are already found (Bonilla and LeBrón 2019; Wright and Bullard 2009). On the one hand, the attacks of 9/11 were a discrete event, with a beginning and an end. On the other hand, they marked the threshold into an era of an intensified sense of risk and instability, where disaster and disruption caused by global threats, particularly the climate crisis and its reverberating day-­to-­day catastrophes, have become a way of life with no imaginable conclusion: an endless Age of Anxiety. Let’s pause for a moment and think about what this means. Many people understand problems—societal, environmental, psychological—as things to be solved, as having technical ways forward based on particular kinds of expert knowledge or everyday knowhow. The United States, at least, is a place where techno-­optimism is embedded in

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national ideas of selfhood, worthiness, grit, and even superiority. But the climate crisis is not a problem be “solved,” to move on from to the next problem (Stengers and Goffey 2015). Now woven into our daily lives, it is as much a part of the planet as oxygen, water, soil. Living with this requires different conceptual and practical tools—and perhaps even a different kind of spiritual politics. The news on the climate front will only get worse in the foreseeable future. How is one to live with this and form lexicons that break through diagnostic grids and soporific quotidian vocabularies to become commensurate with a different world? After 9/11, there were many questions about trauma theory, the usefulness of various therapies, that linger, unsettled, and are daily intensifying in their urgency. Much of the bureaucratic language of spirituality I have described offers clues about the vocabularies and practices we require, even if they may ultimately fall short. The tensions between vocabularies of spirituality and mental health practices, and the ground in between, presage the struggles to formulate a response to the climate crisis, to forge an ecology of solidarity, an embodied material spirituality. Instead of the language of diagnostics, we need a “useful blues” (Bennett 2020:8), a form of being that simultaneously laments, acts, sings, and dismantles multivocal narratives of suffering and distress.

Vocabularies of Crisis What I have presented throughout this book are some of the different practices that spiritual and religious caregivers and mental health professionals mobilized to respond to disaster and the ways these tools reflect larger questions of selfhood, care, healing, and a particular kind of spiritual politics. The stakes have only grown since the day I walked off the F train on Houston Street and Second Avenue and saw smoke rising from the Twin Towers. The caregivers I worked with following 9/11 and Katrina have helped me to think about the different ways that spirituality functions for both individuals and organizations in disaster settings. The framing of distress in psychological or psychiatric idioms may help alleviate individual suffering. But this framing may have other consequences. Shouldn’t one feel terror at the thought of one’s home being washed away or of the increases in heat-­related deaths, particularly in poor communities? A nightmare that creeps into the day and, rust-­like, erodes the girders of the dependable. Is it possible for the language



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of mental health—or spirituality—to allow these inextinguishable terrors to exist alongside tools for living with them? There has been no shortage of either theological, secular psychological, or hybrid attempts to describe climate-­related anxiety: ecological mourning (Cunsolo and Landman 2017), ecological anxiety disorder (Robbins and Moore 2013), climate anxiety (Ray 2020), psychoterratica climate anxiety (Livni 2019), solastalgia (Albrecht et al. 2007), and pre-­traumatic climate syndrome (Curry 2019). These are all descriptions of psychic confrontations with the realities of a warming planet, terms devised by experts, academics, and clinicians to name that which mangles the mind. At every turn, we face the suffering and death of millions or billions of humans and nonhumans. While the mind can be mangled in many ways, the climate crisis presents forms of anguished bewilderment and material urgency. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh contrasts experiences with discrete events and climate change: “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’” (129). Ghosh describes some of the differences in the kinds of psychic impact that come with the relative slowness (though now daily seemingly speeding up) of a warming planet. How does one assimilate slow disaster? How does the language of mental health and spirituality either open or close possibilities for engaging in these realities when many would prefer to go back to binge-­watching Game of Thrones? In a surprising turn, Ghosh cites Pope John Paul II, who echoes some of the faith leaders I spoke with by concluding that a turn toward the spiritual (in contrast with the bureaucratic-­scientific descriptions of the Paris Agreement) may provide a path through the climate crisis, a kind of salvation that can be read as either religious or secular. Pope Francis, for example, writes passionately and poetically about an interconnected God-­created world, where every creature is sacred: “Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth” (Francis 2015:92). Indigenous cosmologies (Kimmerer 2020), which are increasingly being embraced (or at times co-­opted) in contemporary environmental politics, are paralleled here, providing a sharp contrast with the how much mental health expertise approaches the climate crisis.

154 Conclusion

Mental Health and Our Changing Planet (2017),1 a recent report on climate change from the American Psychological Association, presents a list of symptoms of climate-­related stressors: • Anxiety • Post-­traumatic stress • Depression • Interpersonal conflict and societal conflict • Family stress • Persistent grief • Child behavioral and developmental problems and academic decline • Eco-­anxiety, hopelessness, and avoidance from the awareness of climate change In many ways analogous to some of the trainings—including the CISM model—the dispassionate, clinical language of mental health expertise chafes against the growing sense of collective anxiety around climate change, leaving me, at least, with an even greater sense of anxiety. The experts themselves seem unwilling to confront our predicament. Frying the planet, losing a species at one thousand times the background rate (Chivian and Bernstein 2008), seeing hundreds of millions of refugees amassing at borders, disappearing shorelines . . . all of these realities just may cause anxiety? Once more, we see the ritualized use of checklists as a way of making the unmanageable manageable, the unruly ruled, and the untenable tenable. The report does, of course, point to the larger disruptions of societal conflict. But its language and presentation of information conceal the enormity and urgency of the situation at hand. The document urges readers to “find a source of personal meaning” to address this anxiety: Studies have shown that a spiritual practice tends to boost an individual’s well-­being and can be an important coping resource. In addition to the social support that is often provided by a faith community, having a spiritual practice can help people manage and find meaning in suffering during significant adversity. Mindfulness can be another type of practice, through yoga and meditation, that gives people a greater sense of purpose and meaning. In each case, the ability to flexibly reappraise adverse events in a way that enhances a



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sense of meaning is key for promoting personal well-­being. (emphasis added) Studies have shown. The well-­worn phrasing offers little comfort when set against the possible unraveling of life forms on the planet—at a pace not seen before. As Latour (Kimmerer 2020) writes, it’s akin to being “confronted with the abyss and being told you need to change the light bulb.” Meaning again is invoked as the path toward psychic health, and mindfulness is suggested as a method for “purpose and meaning.” In turning toward faith communities to offer the distressed a sense of meaning and purpose, mental health professionals are in some sense admitting the limits of their own tools. But the language of expertise here is lacking in exactly what expertise is meant to embody: clear empirical knowledge fitting the needs of a specific problem. This disjuncture between reality and language (Asad 2018) feels jarringly imported from an entirely different context—a different universe even—and superimposed on mind-­scrambling problems we are now facing. How can one hope to find anything resembling what the report names as meaning without first articulating what one is actually up against? Perhaps more than in any other era, our historical moment demands means of addressing the politically incapacitating and self-­fragmenting dimensions of climate-­crisis anxiety (Honneth 2003; Neumann 2017). Efforts that focus on how individuals make meaning are insufficient. What does a sense of meaning mean in the context of losing a planet? Like a child building a wall of sand on a beach to hold back an enormous wave, meaning washes away.

Meaning Lost and Found and Lost and Found and Lost and . . . Though many of the disaster spiritual caregivers that I worked with claimed that they were providing meaning for those whose meaning had been shattered by disaster, I increasingly came to question this view. It makes sense as a way to imagine a universal idea of spirituality, one that provides the glue for the expertise of disaster and spiritual care and makes possible the institutionalization of a variety of interfaith projects. But what happens if we leave aside the idea of meaning as the underlying architecture for therapeutics? What would a politics of spirituality rooted in something other than meaning look like? Is this even possible to imagine?

156 Conclusion

A vision of what we call religion or spirituality may look different from anything we have yet imagined. It would include rituals around care and conviviality and move from metaphors of homeostasis to forging new kinds of relationships. It would not jettison some of the benefits of psychological expertise, but would be suspect of any modalities that did not move the world around us, with a recognition of the essential sustaining relationship between the human and the nonhuman (Bennett 2020). Meaning would be taken out of the psychological realm. Such a vision would demand not a worship of nature but an active and grounded reverence, a clarity of insight around the connections between inequality; dispossession; desecration of land, water, and sky; and one’s own bodily and psychic health. What we take to be our internal states, our psychologies and spirits, would again be seen as inseparable from the ecologies that sustain us: city blocks, backyards, fire escapes, littered highway medians with Queen Anne’s lace and black-­eyed Susans stubbornly persistent. Such a poetics would be rooted not in deracinated invocations of “the environment” but “specific and locational relations between humans, the land, and our other kin” (Davis and Todd 2017:771), taking seriously the calls from centuries of Indigenous scholars and activists. It matters how a social and cultural order channels distress, anxiety, or trauma. Diagnostic grids—whether spiritual or secular—are the tools experts use to tell people what is wrong with them, how they might change themselves, and how they ought to live. The language of mental health has a particular epistemology and history. As a relative newcomer to human vocabularies of distress, mental health represents a move to provide a universal language of psychic experience. Perhaps this language has already outgrown its use—at least in the case of the climate crisis. As we have arguably transitioned into a new geological age, we also require an entirely new lexicon of despair (and possibility), one commensurate with a world that may no longer provide a suitable home for many of its inhabitants. Robert Macfarlane (2015) calls for a desecration phrasebook, a vocabulary that provides the linguistic resources for describing a rapidly reconstituting ecology. What word, for example, do we have to describe the conflicted feelings one experiences when enjoying a seventy-­degree sunny February day in Philadelphia, that mixture of pleasure, guilt, complicity, and powerlessness. That nervous laugh many of us have grown accustomed to, followed by the perfunctory, “We might as well enjoy it.” Along with Macfarlane’s desecration phrasebook, we require the ADSMWP-­I—the first edition of the Anti-­Desecration Diagnostic and Statistical



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Manual for a Warming Planet. Such a manual, were it to exist, might provide an alternative to what we now have. An appeal for a language of the local, the intimate, the backyard, the alleyway, and the garden—those quotidian markers that also make up parts of our inner lives, and which are now being driven insane (Bateson 2016). Such a guide might draw on some of the best of human traditions, an examination and reflection on that which we truly love and which sustains us. It would contrast with some of the manuals and trainings I encountered by providing more of a poetics of loss and grief and less a set of prescriptions. Instead, it might include spells, incantations, songs, poetics2 (Kane 2017; Bennett 2020; Harjo 2020; Macfarlane and Morris 2018; Russo and Reed 2018) or the intimate daily language that people use to describe their sense of loss and that which they love (Smith 2014), which have long been sung by many who have experienced and persisted beyond world endings for centuries. The ADSMWP-­I would also expose the historical and ongoing forms of violence and dispossession that are responsible for both the fragmentation of relationships and the enduring distress most blatantly found in communities of color. How might such a volume remind us that visions of world endings do not exist independently of the world humans make, that we inhabit and constantly coauthor them, and that the languages we use and the worlds we inhabit are inextricably linked? Not in an anesthetizing superficial sense of “everything interconnected” (Karera 2019), but rather in a particularistic, bodily felt, tangible way that lives are lived with each other, many others, many kinds of others, and that so many deaths are made by violent, calculated choices.3 If anything, the COVID-­19 pandemic has made this ever more insistently clear. I might kill you with my breathing—or you might kill me. Yet we can protect each other by taking a different path. Zadie Smith (2014) writes, “In the end, the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved.” Much of the language of spirituality and mental health I encountered in my ethnographic travels was framed in the language of the human machine rather than the intimate language of deep care and love. I am not suggesting a backward glance toward a past when we were whole, nor am I arguing that what we call spirituality is somehow better suited to the task of confronting the climate crisis. We require an entirely different kind of approach, one that equips us with psychic capacities to confront what seems uncomfortable (what some may call adaptation) while at the same time drawing us into a different kind of communality that reminds us of what we love, what sustains us, and what provides us with the resources to stand our ground. A sense of meaning that

158 Conclusion

suggests a radically different approach to other selves, demanding repeated articulation outside the realm of the kinds of expertise I have been discussing, one that is responsive to “the dynamic exuberance of life” (Rose 2012:139). This sensibility, this poetics of living, offers another way to live, a different kind of politics, emergent and grounded, uncowed and unpredictable. If we do require mental health professionals to help us work through our planetary disorders, how would they be trained? Or are we confronting a fundamentally spiritual matter, as Pope Francis and Ghosh assert? The question persists: Do spiritual frameworks provide a useful possible alternative, or do they end up looking essentially the same as those of the mental health world? Some mental health associations are confronting the crisis more directly. The Climate Psychology Alliance, for example, recently released a statement describing climate change as “the ultimate social determinant of health” (Moran 2018). A response to the ultimate determinant of health, it seems clear, requires something other than a diagnostic or spiritual language reworked for bureaucratic organizations. We require an altogether different kind of vocabulary, an invocation closer to that of the poet, World War II resistance fighter, and antinuclear activist René Char (2010:556): “the uncomfortable, the explosive, the miraculous.” Words that shake us out of semi-­intentional indifference. The political consequences of the interlinking of disaster, the climate crisis, and anxiety are all too visible in U.S. national politics. The Atlantic published one of the few pieces I have come across that directly ties the rise of President Trump to the politics of our warming planet. “Insofar as his supporters are drawn to him by a sense of global calamity, and insofar as his rhetoric singles out the refugee as yet another black and brown intruder trying to violate the nation’s cherished borders,” the author writes, “Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene” (Meyer 2016; emphasis added). Trump’s very denial of climate change, the piece argues, is the product of anxiety—the way he channels the anxiety of his supporters away from the true crisis of a warming planet toward fictional vulnerabilities. Latour (2018) makes a related point when he argues that the politics of the last fifty years must be seen in the context of climate change. We can contrast Trump with Jimmy Carter, who sported a cardigan, Mr. Rogers–like, and urged an anxious nation to dress warmly, turn their heat down, and conserve oil. This was a pivotal moment in climate history, a moment when an American president recognized the need for a shift in lifestyle and was met with swift political punishment for his mild symbolic act. It seems like an altogether different



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and impossible political universe. The subsequent forty years saw few bold environmental moves, symbolic or real, by American presidents. “If the anguish runs so deep,” writes Latour (2018:5), “it is because each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip away beneath our feet.” For many, the ground has long been more than slipping away: it has been bombed, stolen, and devastated. But for others, this ground slipping away beneath our feet, this vertiginous anxiety, a sense that the Earth no longer provides stability, is something new (Mitchell and Chaudhury 2020; Estes 2019). “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On,” as the title of Franny Choi’s (2020) desolate poem reminds. Latour concludes by calling for something analogous to what many Indigenous scholars and activists and environmental thinkers have been fiercely advocating for long before him (Todd 2016; Berry and Snyder 2015; Snyder and Hass 2020). Finding, or committing, to a place, to “land,” a form of rootedness in the ecosystem that differs from vitriolic nationalism—a place-­committed politics that contrasts with the ecosystem-­, psyche-­, and spirit-­destroying and deracinating forces—seems less and less a radical idea and more a necessary condition for survival. For many in the United States, 9/11 rearranged ideas of anxiety, stability and instability, and progress in ways that continue to echo intensely. These changes can be charted through spirituality, anxiety, and trauma, which I argue are political. These words, more than ever, now need to be pried open, taken apart, and reassembled into lexicons for acting in the world, for building new (or reawakened) forms of association. This task requires us to give attention to how the readily available languages open or foreclose possibilities for a politics of survival that moves toward collective and planetary thriving. The diagnostic frameworks of the spiritual or psychological varieties will not serve in the ways we so desperately need. The threads of a liberal narrative of progress, which were already unraveling after 9/11, were further unraveled by Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, as well as other disasters, painfully resurfacing the ways inequality renders some lives disposable and buoys up others.

Endings, Beginnings Now I look back to the young and vaguely hopeful student who, during his first week of graduate school, watched the Twin Towers collapse and naively thought that this catastrophe was a momentary aberration in a world that would continue on as before. I can see myself in the fall of 2001 walking to

160 Conclusion

Hindi class at NYU with the melancholy alacrity of a new student. And then I was caught in the swerve of history, loose wires in the cosmic grid exposed. It is difficult to imagine exactly what I was thinking as I listened to the teenage boys on the corner laughing to hide their anxiety over the Pentagon being hit by a plane, or as I telephoned my father to tell him I had seen the towers in flames. I recall instead the eerie emptiness of NYU’s Bobst Library and the interminable political posturing that followed 9/11. Today, I contemplate the present-­day resurrection of Giuliani, who many saw as a hero after 9/11. Something is happening, and it’s not good. Sometimes it is still difficult to believe that I witnessed the Twin Towers melting and crumbling down in 2001, the couches in trees and the roofs torn off in the Gulf following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and, more recently, the receding shoreline in Kotzebue, Alaska, and a global pandemic,4 the now normalized necessity of wearing a mask and avoiding most human contact. I have to realize these are not simply bad moments that will pass (Choi 2020). When I began this research, there was still some sense that what I have been calling the New Age of Anxiety was yet another part of the cycle of ups and downs. I was younger, and so was the new millennium, which, freshly arrived, yet hinted toward possibility. Whatever optimism clung to the first years of that new chapter frayed and has been replaced with an urgent sense of unraveling and increasing anxiety. It would be comforting to end this book with a neatly tied-­together conclusion about how to put back together broken bodies and minds—a nuanced, balanced conception of biology, mind and brain, meaning and spirit. But something continues to elude us in devising expertise for disaster mental health. And each successive generation’s belief that they have finally found the right kind of therapy, the most effective expertise, only to have their solutions discarded by the next generation, often with derision, attests to the sense that expertise often acts as a mask—a way to manage what is in many ways unmanageable, particularly in the case of disaster. Perhaps it was the sociologist at a disaster conference whose refrain throughout his talk was “every day things that have never happened before happen” who best articulated our limited capacity to predict the future. Religion, spirituality, and the mental health professions shape our expressions of distress and guide how we respond to and care for the vulnerability inherent in possessing a human body in a world that may “outstrip the concepts with which we seek to understand it” (Lear 2008). Many humans, it seems, have a persistent need for a home-­like sense of safety and may continue



The Ends of Anxiety 161

to fuel the urge to see cosmic forces as meaningful. When homes explode, are submerged in a flood, or sink into the quake-­shattered earth, or when skyscrapers disappear into infernal flames and vulnerability threatens to overwhelm, people will continue to interweave religious, spiritual, and psychological narratives—imagining, inhabiting, and patching together worlds. “I will forsake everything but the tree.” The epigraph by poet Alice Notley at the beginning of this book echoes an old church hymn. The tree, life itself, in other words, she seems to be saying, provides the only reason for living, that which goes by the name of spiritual—and requires no meaning other than itself. Or as Nobel Prize–winning polymath author Toni Morrison powerfully writes of those who died in the towers, “there is no scripture older or more elegant than the atoms you have become.” The fact of existence, that there are atoms, that life is, has been, and will continue on requires no elaboration. I end by returning to the start of this book, when I walked down Second Avenue into a different kind of world. It was a world that continues to echo. Now that we are in the era of climate change, the Anthropocene, I again wonder about the kinds of knowledge and collective efforts we will require. I search for a reimagined language of distress, one that seems commensurate with the struggles before us, one with a politics and a sense of communality that intimates a future, a future that includes an inhabitable—or maybe even thriving—planet. I recall the Prophetess, who stood up in the conference room at NYU and challenged disaster responders to see more clearly the way their framework blinded them to the other forces she saw operating in the world, a challenge to a dominant bureaucratic conception of disaster expertise. With the attempts to make meaning a form of expertise come the challenges of managing the unruliness of life. We realize now, more than ever, that if we are to maintain a planet that allows for humans and nonhumans to persist, we must think, speak, and act in ways that we have as yet only begun to imagine. The potentially endless Age of Anxiety has taught me that we will need to unravel what we know and recognize and live with a world that reads more like a disquieting ellipsis than an unswerving period.

NOTES

Introduction 1. With painful regret, cultural critic Rebecca Solnit (2016:55) writes, “I had hoped that one thing to come out of the end of American invulnerability would be a stronger sense of what disaster abroad—massacres, occupations, wars, famines, dictatorships—mean and feel like, a sense of citizenship in the world.” 2. Raymond Williams’s (1989) elusive “structure of feeling” refers to emergent semi-­ articulated sensibility, collapsing the public and private in the study of emotions. Most importantly for my thinking here, the concept takes the study of emotion out of the private realm and places it in the public or structural realm. Particularly important to understanding structures of feeling is how these larger-­scale changes are embedded in daily life and popular culture in ways that come to be seen by many as common sense. “We are talking about,” he writes, “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships, not feelings against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies” (132). 3. Whether or not an event gets defined as a disaster has much to do with the kinds of federal, state, and local aid that will be made available and whether it is categorized as a “natural” or “human-­made” disaster or as “terrorism.” But as many have shown, natural disasters are not necessarily so natural, and many long-­standing tragedies such as AIDS are not considered as urgent. Moreover, not all survivors of disaster are treated alike. Race and class prejudices shape popular views about whose pain is valued and whose is not. What’s important, then, has less to do with the toll of suffering and death and more to do with perception, human imagination, and moral panic. 4. As Rozario (2007:32) observes, “Disasters (real or imagined) have from the first days of settlement played a vital role in shaping American religious beliefs and practices, political and economic systems, social relations, environmental outlooks, and identities.” 5. Professional journals include American Journal of Disaster Medicine, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy and Management, and Journal of Emergency Mental Health. 6. The New York City Office of Emergency Management (NYC Emergency Management), a large and complex organization that encompasses a paramilitary disaster-­response structure

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for social programs, received increasing press coverage, moving from relative obscurity to the front page of the New York Times. The merging of natural disasters and “human-­made” disasters, together with military and intelligence responses, increasingly punctuates the new disaster model. September 11 helped to consolidate federal power, leading to large government allocations for disaster preparedness and response and helping to form an age of “permanent disaster” (Rozario 2007:25). The transformation of national security into a “disaster-­security state,” in which official and more secretive agencies have been granted a remarkable degree of power (often under the aegis of disaster relief and prevention), has had widespread implications for governance and service delivery in times of both disaster recovery and relative calm (Rozario 2007). 7. In most cases I kept the name of the organizations I worked with, while giving pseudonyms to individuals. In some cases, I altered gender or created a composite to protect people’s identity, particularly if they said things that might harm them. While I realize this may be seen by some as a controversial methodological move, given that identities could easily be uncovered— even after all of these years—I felt this was necessary to protect some of the people I worked with. 8. As part of this training, I assumed the role of chaplain and performed rounds with patients. Ultimately, I decided that it did not seem right to continue in that work as part of this research, as the dual role of researcher and hospital chaplain was uncomfortable. How, for instance, was I to tell a patient dying of cancer that I was both their chaplain, there to listen to them and be fully present, and a researcher? There seemed no way that felt right to disclose this to a dying patient in the midst of pain or hospital-­induced depression. 9. For example, mindfulness meditation is quite common in public schools in the United States. These practices, drawn from Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions, draw on a quickly growing body of psychological and neuroscience research (Choudhury and Moses 2016; Moses and Choudhury 2016). This research suggests that mindfulness helps with attention, empathy, and resilience. Spirituality was frequently not explicitly mentioned; however, it was easy to discern recognizable spiritual traces, a kind of “minimum spirituality”: just the right amount of possibilities for nonmaterial values, but not too much (and easily transformed into its opposite if required by circumstance). 10. The “patchwork” metaphor draws on the work of Anne Harrington (2008), though in some ways my use of the term points to my own sense of confusion. For many, it seemed that the stitches in the patchwork were not visible. That is, they did not understand their own work as patching together disparate practices. They simply drew from vocabularies and practices around them to get done what they felt needed to get done. 11. The internet, which during this time became ever present, fostered new networks, intensifying relationships and creating new possibilities that added to the creation of this patchwork. 12. The economic crash of 2008 was one of the most consequential American historical events that has occurred since I began this work, deepening the sense of anxiety about the future of the United States. This was followed, years later, by the election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of white nationalism, and then the COVID pandemic. Many have written on the relationship between economic decline, neoliberalism, and the rise of Trump, as well as the president’s ability to marshal particular forms of anxiety for political uses (Butler 2017; Costanza 2017; Forkert 2019). While I do not address these issues in depth, it is essential to note that since 2008, the American New Age of Anxiety has been shaped by seismic political-­economic changes that have shockingly added new fuel, intensity, and urgency. 13. The bestselling The Power of Now (Tolle 1999) is just one example in a seemingly endless list of publications on the power of positive thinking, an American genre that has widespread



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influence in health settings, and which has become associated with research intent on proving the positive correlations between positive attitude and health outcomes. Barbara Ehrenreich (2007), in a piece on her struggles with breast cancer, was so frustrated with American versions of positive thinking that she began an essay with the words “I hate hope” in reaction to American breast-­cancer groups admonishing her to maintain “positive thinking.” A great deal of research in positive psychology (Seligman 2011), which has some theoretical similarities to studies on resilience, seeks to correlate positive attitude with improved health outcomes. 14. Modernist poet Ezra Pound (2006:14) famously writes: I don’t know how humanity stands it   with a painted paradise at the end of it   without a painted paradise at the end of it. 15. As many have forcefully articulated, world-­ending threats are not new or evenly distributed. See Heglar (2019): Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat. 16. In the Trump era, the question of experts has taken on increasing urgency. The United States has long had a tradition of being suspicious of professionals, which has been exploited by various political movements on both the Left and Right. While I do not delve deeply into these particular politics, I acknowledge the hazards at this particular moment in history of suggesting that experts may not always know what they are doing. However, one would still do well resist an unquestioning reliance on many forms of expertise. 17. Such forms of stress and anxiety are productive of particular narratives about catastrophe that have the tendency to elide the ways colonized peoples, to take one example, have experienced world endings for some time. The assumptions embedded in particular forms of therapeutic culture (including spiritualized versions) turn the psychic eye back on itself, making it difficult to see that one’s own experience of the world, one’s own stress-­infused narrative, may be missing some essential understanding.

Chapter 1 1. But one need only read through Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality to see that vibrant nature and spirituality are still among us: “Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” (emphasis added). The papal encyclical is a document that seeks to challenge modern views of religion and science. It does so in admirable, sometimes poetic, and even radical ways. In some ways the encyclical insists upon the common metanarrative of modernity (Rosenberg 2007) that I have been writing about: the struggle between “the technocratic paradigm” on the one hand and a spirituality associated with a more “holistic” way of living on the other. I don’t want to suggest that this is fundamentally wrong, but rather point out how this framing structures the conflicts in ways that may be too familiar and do not allow for a fuller range of possibilities. 2. This view of modernity and disenchantment is one of the key ways that anthropological work has been used in everything from ideas about diet to “barefoot” shoes (see, for example, the rationale for the “paleo diet” and the ways in which various branches of the environmental movement in the United States mobilize tropes of primitivism [Nadasdy 2005]). Questions of

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disenchantment and enchantment have been an ongoing debate for the past century, and have received renewed attention recently (McCarraher 2019; Latour and Porter 1993; Josephson-­ Storm 2017). The recent flourishing of the “new ontologies” (Kohn 2015; Todd 2016) may at least in part point to particular planetary anxieties that drive a need for humans to find new forms of understanding for and solidarity with the nonhuman. 3. Farman (2020:257) writes, “Secular humanism held that with science, rationality, and proper social planning humans can and will make things better.” 4. Over the past thirty years or so, the dominant terminology used within the medical community has changed from “holistic medicine” to “alternative medicine” to “complementary and alternative medicine” to its current form, “integrative medicine.” 5. Poet William Bronk (1995:55) writes: I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world. 6. September 11 raised these questions on a global scale in part because of its location. New York City is a global research center and the production of knowledge on trauma response following the attacks was voluminous. 7. This is particularly true among “educated” communities on the East Coast, where spirituality has been a force since the postwar Baby Boomers rebelled against the institutional religious organizations that characterized the experiences of previous generations (Bender and Taves 2012; Wuthnow 2005). 8. Many anthropologists—and others— have explored how experts have policed boundaries and professional jurisdiction and domains of expertise. This work has ranged from courtrooms (Merry 2016) and laboratories (Bowker and Star 2008; Ballestero 2019) to Wall Street and other financial centers (Ho 2009; Riles 2019). Anthropologists have also shown how people adopt—and transform—the language of practices of expert communities to buttress their own standing, or as basis for political action and formation of identity (Petryna 2013; Fortun 2001). 9. As Horwitz (2013:119) observes, “the labeling of distress as ‘anxiety,’ along with the emergence of a therapy-­oriented culture in the post–World War II period, led to a huge demand for relief from anxious conditions.” March Nichter (1981) coined the term “idioms of distress” as a way to describe experiences of distress without reliance on culture-­specific diagnoses. I use it as a generic term for distress under which it is possible to group what appear to be similar kinds of experiences across cultures. 10. Genealogies of stress and anxiety are complex and have received nuanced historical treatment by numerous scholars (Becker 2013; Cantor and Ramsden 2014). But the history of trauma is often framed by psychiatry and psychology. There is, however, an important history to the understanding of the physiological origins of extreme emotional states (Sternberg 2002). 11. Cannon’s fascination with voodoo bears the mark of colonial fantasy about “exotic” and “primitive” practices. The fact that one could believe in a voodoo curse was largely seen as simple magical thinking that could be found only among “primitive” peoples. It turned out that this work told Cannon a great deal more about “moderns.” Further, Cannon’s work needs to be seen in the context of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which took place from 1915 to 1934, and imperialist projects of the twentieth-­century United States. Cannon’s use of the “primitive” fit within a



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developmental narrative that relegated “magic” to an infantile human past, helping to provide justification for U.S. intervention. 12. Cannon’s research on the physiological mechanisms of voodoo death and his fascination with “primitive” practices link science, religion, magic, and the workings of the colonial imagination in ways that continue to echo through American practices of spirituality (Dror 2003), particularly in the seemingly endless search for “exotic” practices marketed as various forms of alternative medicine. 13. According to Light Our Way: A Guide for Spiritual Care in Times of Disaster (2018:3), published by the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD), “Spirituality is an essential part of humanity. Disaster disrupts people’s spiritual lives. Nurturing people’s spiritual needs contributes to holistic healing. Everyone can benefit from spiritual care in times of disaster” (emphasis added). 14. Positive psychology (Seligman 2017), an influential research and therapeutic model, for example, has placed a great emphasis on spirituality, seeing meaning, happiness, and resilience as intertwined and essential for a good life. 15. Many of the practices that have become mainstream among middle-­class white Americans have their origins among formerly colonized peoples. Such practices, Vipassana meditation, for example (Moses and Choudhury 2016), were embedded in local moral systems that have been largely jettisoned when adapted to middle-­class American contexts. Further, there is a long history of a variety of forms of “dissident spiritual practice” that stretches back to the days of slavery, women’s engagement with Wicca, and other practices that do not conform to dominant Christian engagements (Ehrenreich 2010; Raboteau 2004). 16. Taylor (2007:680) makes an unusually incisive statement on the commonly held belief that the search for meaning explains religious practice: “It is easy to understand why, after religious views have been challenged, and even rendered for many people ineligible, the sense of what has been lost may center on the issues of meaning. The ‘disenchanted’ world does indeed seem a world without meaning. But this doesn’t mean that through all the ages of religious life in all its variety, this was the driving factor in the constitution and preservation of religious form. There is a fallacious inference behind the untroubled adoption of this theory of religious motivation. Just because this looms as a big issue for us in a secular age, it is all too easy to project it on all times and places. There is in the end something incoherent in this move. It will certainly not help us at all to understand why, for instance, certain kinds of shamanism arose in Paleolithic times, nor why Europe was torn apart over the issue of salvation by faith in the sixteenth century.” 17. Psychiatrist Harold Koenig, for example, has been a key figure in the religion and health movement because of his ability to raise funding for research on the health benefits of religion and to successfully publicize the results. One of the central sites for research has been Duke University’s Center for Religion and Health, headed by Koenig. The John Templeton Foundation has also been one of the key supporters of research on religion and health, including of much of Koenig’s research. These academic sites have provided language and research that helps to justify religious and spiritual care in health settings. They legitimized the role of religion in health through research, expanding the claim to expertise. Disaster spiritual care providers were, sometimes unwittingly, inhabiting the niche that was expanded by this research.

Interlude. “Talking to the Dead” 1. Jan Holden, a retired psychology professor at the University of North Texas, has been conducting studies on IADC. The IADC website explains the technique as follows: “It doesn’t

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matter what you believe, what we believe, or even what the experiences believe. The IADC® experiences we have induced in thousands of patients result in dramatic life changes that heal grief and trauma in a very short time and are sustained long-­term. The technique has worth because it works; it doesn’t need for us to agree on a belief system or theory about the source of the phenomenon to support it.” 2. It won the Hampton Roads award for best-­selling book in 2006. 3. Stephen Levine and Jack Kornfeld are figures in the Insight meditation lineage. This is a tradition of Buddhism that has, perhaps more than any other, found a home in medical and mental health settings through its high-­profile figures—most famously Jon Kabat-­Zinn, the creator with close ties to mindfulness-­based stress reduction (MBSR). MBSR has been successful in secularizing South Asian–derived meditation practices. A large body of research has been used to provide legitimacy for MBSR, which now finds a home in health, business, and other institutional settings. Here, again, stress reduction has framed the popularity of these practices. Kabat-­Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living (2013) can be seen as a manual for developing the skills required to maintain sanity in modern life. This version of medico-­spirituality resonates with many who see themselves as essentially secular. It is another way for spirituality to be seen as simultaneously secular and good for one’s health while maintaining a vague connection to ethical principles that go beyond the material. In other words, mindfulness practices are analogous to IADC in the way they rely on both scientific discourses and spiritual vocabularies, leaving the door open to multiple interpretations. 4. Shea is the author of numerous works of theology and Christian-­oriented fiction. 5. As another of my interviewees, when asked how they would explain the apparently high number of gay clergy in leadership positions in the disaster professions, said, “It’s because it’s an emerging area and much more open. Also, it has historically been considered low status, like hospital chaplaincy. The newness of it allows gay clergy to find a home.”

Chapter 2 1. In her excellent A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2014) discusses a similar observation: “Prohibited from appearing to favor one’s own or to proselytize either formally by law or, more informally, by the political and existential situation of religious diversity and competition, but also because of the illegibility of traditional religious practices to a fragmented and unchurched population, many chaplains in the United States in many different kinds of settings today are what they call a ‘ministry of presence.’” This practice is a minimalist, almost ephemeral, form of empathic spiritual care that is, at the same time, deeply rooted in religious histories and suffused with religious references for those who can read them (173–74). 2. Organizations, of course, are made up of individuals. And yet organizations have their own character, their own dynamics, which can render them vexing accumulations of individual psyches, magnified interpersonal conflicts, competitions, and needs on the intra-­organizational level. Added to this are the dynamics among multiple organizations. Trying to arrive at a fixed definition of organizations is like tracking waves in a stormy body of water. 3. Many of those in the organization had been involved with the Spiritual Care Aviation Incidence Response (SAIR) team, a national group that responded to aviation accidents. A year or so before 9/11, they had developed a curriculum for training clergy on mental health issues. 4. Originally written in Aramaic, Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for mourning. 5. Personal conversation with Allan Young.



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6. Bloomberg, mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013. A billionaire businessperson; during his time in office large-­scale development projects, like knotweed in a vacant lot, proliferated (Brash 2011). 7. The DSM-­IV v-­code includes a diagnosis for religious and spiritual distress, which, surprisingly, was not mentioned in my interviews or the trainings and conferences I attended. See Milstein et al. (2000) for an empirical study of the use of this diagnosis among rabbis.

Chapter 3 1. Jeffrey Mitchell (CISM or critical incident stress debriefing [CISD] is often referred to as the “Mitchell model”), clinical professor of emergency health services at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, and George Everly, professor of psychology at Loyola University in Maryland, founded the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation in 1991. After working for many years as a firefighter and paramedic, Mitchell went back to school and earned a PhD in human development from the University of Maryland. Mitchell recently stepped down as president of the Critical Incident Stress Foundation to take up his current position at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. 2.  https://​icisf​.org​/about​-­­us/. 3. For example, “Staying the Course in Stormy Seas: Establishing a Central Critical Incident Stress Management Team in the Navy Marine Corps Environment,” published in the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health (1999), was included among several pieces on similar topics. 4. From Objectivist poet George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”: “Obsessed, bewildered // By the shipwreck / Of the singular // We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous” (https://​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/53223​/of​-­­being​-­­numerous​-­­sections​-­­1​-­­22).

Chapter 4 1. The program articulates five “prosocial responses” to violence (Mansfield 2017:265): • • • • •

Promoting trauma awareness and resilience Doing justice Making meaning Building secure, sustainable communities Transforming conflict

2. Walter Cannon wrote an influential book, The Wisdom of the Body, in 1932. I mention this to show the continuing thread that runs through the mind/body medicine that Cannon suggested in his work, particularly as it relates to the concept of stress. Also, Cannon had a correspondence with Seward Hiltner, a professor of pastoral counseling at the Princeton Theological Seminary, about the difference between voodoo death and Christian healing. Presciently, Hiltner saw that Cannon’s seemingly outlandish early work on “voodoo death” might have important implications for Christian theology and healing (Dror 2003). 3. See Nelson (1978), who, I later discovered, wrote a book called Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology. 4. David Brooks (2008), in a New York Times op-­ed, uses the term “neural Buddhism” to describe the widely publicized studies on meditation’s impact on the brain. In my fieldwork, I observed similar phenomena that could be called neural Christianity.

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Conclusion 1. The report has been revised since I quoted it here. It no longer has this particular list, and now portrays what I consider to be a more nuanced view. 2. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo writes in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020:1): “We begin with the land. We emerge from the earth of our mother, and our bodies will be returned to earth. We are the land. We cannot own it, no matter any proclamation by paper state. We are literally the land, a planet. Our spirits inhabit this place. We are not the only ones. We are creators of this place with each other. We mark our existence with our creations. It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death.” 3. Perhaps in ways analogous to Karrer’s resistance to thinking of ethics and care “nonrelationally,” a focus on meaning elides other possible alliances we have yet to imagine, or ways of relating to self and other that we obscure. Maybe nonmeaning helps us come closer, paradoxically, to unseen ways of living that are already in this one life. Maybe by suspending the requirement for meaning something else can grow in the space that was occupied. 4. Activist author adrienne maree brown (2020:33) writes: “Our current collective circumstances require us to think about death, to grieve, and to consider that everything we have known has to change and come to an end. And long before this pandemic, we in the U.S. have had to live with leadership that protected our right to shoot each other, authorized state killing of citizens in our streets, in our homes, and denied every move to intervention on the climate catastrophe we have helped to produce.”

R EFER ENCES

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INDEX

Tables are indicated by page numbers followed by tab. Abbott, Andrew, 34 African Americans, 61, 72–75. See also communities of color Age of Anxiety, The (Auden), 31 Age of Consequences, The (Podesta), 17 American Psychiatric Association, 38, 83, 118 American Psychological Association, 154 Anabaptists, 125, 135 Anti-­Desecration Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for a Warming Planet (ADSMWP-­I), 156–57 anxiety: anti-­Blackness and, 75; catastrophe narratives, 165n17; climate change and, 15, 17–18, 23, 153–55, 158–59; disasters and, 150–51; distress as, 166n9; history of, 166n10; loss of meaning and, 31; selfhood and, 2, 49; spirituality and, 19, 56 Auden, W. H., 31 Balance Within, The (Sternberg), 36 Bloomberg, Michael, 57, 75, 169n6 body, 35–37, 87–90, 133–34 body-­centered therapy, 86–92, 136 Bonanno, George A., 13 Botkin, Allan, 47, 49 Bronk, William, 166n5 Brooks, David, 169n4 brown, adrienne maree, 170n4 Bruno, Joe, 57, 151 Buddhism, 47, 51, 168n3, 169n4 bureaucratic spirituality: credentialing and, 66, 83; disaster response organizations and, 56, 84–85; disaster spiritual expertise and, 19–21, 44, 84; minimum spirituality and, 11, 21, 55–56, 66; patchwork

of practices and, 12, 19–20, 164n10; spiritual-­scientific hybridity and, 45, 111 Bush, George W., 57 Cannon, Walter: on body and stress, 35–37, 87, 134, 169n2; Christian healing and, 169n2; fight-­or-­flight response and, 41, 134; homeostasis and, 35, 102; influence on relaxation response, 44; voodoo death and, 35, 41, 166n11, 167n12, 169n2 Carter, Jimmy, 158 Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (EMU), 125 chaplains: credentialing and, 71–72; disaster mental health training, 8–9, 21, 69; disaster response and, 5, 7–8, 62–63, 71; end-­of-­ life care and, 67–68; Ground Zero and, 8, 24; hospital, 10, 164n8; interfaith, 50–51; military, 101, 107; positive thinking and, 13; PTSD awareness and, 43; sense of importance and, 62–63. See also clergy Char, René, 158 Choi, Franny, 159 Christianity: Blessing Project and, 89; disaster spiritual care and, 41; forgiveness and, 137; healing and, 169n2; mysticism and, 106; neural, 169n4; pathological, 144; peace and, 128; redemption and, 137–38 Church World Service: American pragmatism and, 140, 146; cognitive behavioral therapy and, 141–44, 147–48; disaster spiritual care training, 21, 121, 124–25, 129, 139–46; fund-­raising by, 122; goals of, 142; patchwork practices in, 141, 146–47; religious-­trauma discourse in, 144; roots in 9/11 recovery, 146; self-­care and, 145–46

182 Index CISM. See critical incident stress management (CISM) clergy: accessibility of, 77–78; bureaucratic spirituality and, 11–12; disaster mental health training, 58, 67, 69–70, 168n3; on disaster-­related suffering, 11; disaster response and, 5, 7–8, 10, 62, 69; gay, 168n5; holism and, 52; local politics and, 74; loss of religious jurisdiction, 29, 31–34; mental health awareness by, 26, 43, 56, 66; post-­9/11 trauma, 54–55; professional jurisdiction and, 81–83; proselytizing and, 61, 70; on resilience, 14; sense of importance and, 62–63, 80. See also chaplains; faith leaders climate change: anxiety and, 15, 17–18, 23, 151, 153–55, 158–59; challenge to fundamental beliefs by, 17–19; communities of color and, 151; denial of, 158; disasters and, 18, 23, 140–41, 149; expert knowledge and, 18, 153–55; historical precedents and, 17, 165n15; living with, 151–53; psychic health and, 18–19, 153, 155–58; sea-­level rise and, 151; suffering and, 153; turn toward spiritual and, 153; vulnerability and, 17 Climate Psychology Alliance, 158 cognitive behavioral therapy, 141–44, 147–48 colonialism, 2, 165n17, 167n15 communality: disasters and, 3, 17; disaster spiritual care training and, 109, 112, 128, 138, 148; ecological-­psychic-­spiritual hybrids and, 23; lack of in contemporary life, 37; poetics of living and, 157–58; politics of the self and, 5 communities of color, 61, 73–75, 145–47, 157. See also African Americans compassion fatigue, 109, 131 Council of Churches of the City of New York, 56 COVID pandemic, 157, 160, 164n12, 170n4 credentialing, 64–66, 69–72, 83 crisis of faith, 97, 103–5, 105tab., 106–7, 109 Critical Incident Stress Foundation, 169n1 critical incident stress management (CISM): critique of, 112; first-­responders and, 94–99; founding of, 169n1; mechanistic human functioning and, 94–95, 109–13; military and, 21, 94–95, 107; patchwork

expertise and, 111–12; PCI and, 21, 94–103; psychological debriefing and, 94–96, 104; PTSD prevention and, 102; secular disaster response and, 22; spiritual crisis and, 102–3, 148; trauma discourse and, 128 Curtin, Ken, 9 DCS. See Disaster Chaplaincy Services (DCS) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 62, 71 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA), 38, 83, 118, 169n7 Disaster Chaplaincy Services (DCS), 21, 56, 58, 69–72 disaster mental health: acute trauma and, 76–77; forms of expertise in, 7–8, 65–66, 160, 163n5; military and, 107; 9/11 attacks and, 7–8; patchwork expertise and, 25; PTSD and, 43; spiritual care and, 6, 50, 65, 70, 76; training in, 8–9, 21, 58, 67, 69–70, 168n3. See also mental health disaster response: faith-­based initiatives, 57–58; fight-­or-­flight, 41; material care and, 62; mental health professionals and, 5, 7, 38, 62; mental health-­religious collaboration, 70; paramilitary structure, 163n6–64n6; post-­9/11 development of, 57–58; power struggles in, 54; resilience and, 13–15, 27; scrutiny of, 74; spiritual care and, 5, 7–10, 21, 29, 32, 43–44, 50, 62, 69, 164n7, 166n7, 167n13; stress and, 34–35; structural inequalities and, 15, 61, 75, 145 disaster response organizations: bureaucratic spirituality and, 56, 84–85; credentialing and, 64–65, 84; government relations, 56, 58–59, 61–62; individual anxieties and, 56, 59–60, 63, 83–84; intra-­organizational tensions and, 56–57, 59, 61, 168n2; re-­ traumatization and, 60; tensions between, 54–56, 59–65, 75, 84, 111, 168n2 disaster spiritual expertise: accessibility of, 76–78; bureaucratic spirituality and, 19–21, 44, 55, 84; climate change and, 23, 149; codification of knowledge in, 10–11; conflicts in, 56–57; contradictory discourses in, 5, 44, 52, 113, 134; credentialing and, 64–65, 69–72; as emerging area,

Index 183 52, 168n5; government relations and, 9, 43, 56–59, 61–62; history of, 25–26; holism and, 27, 29, 40–41, 50, 52; justification for, 21, 37, 41, 55, 66, 73, 101, 104, 148; meaning and, 6, 9, 11, 31, 40–42, 45, 68, 78–79, 81, 155; mental health expertise and, 26–27, 43, 65–66, 70; minimum spirituality and, 55, 66, 76; neuroscientific research and, 36–39; organizations for, 7, 21; patchwork of practices and, 19–20, 44–45, 141, 146; personal trauma and, 49, 52–53, 59–60, 132; post-­9/11 development of, 57–58; referral networks and, 10, 164n7; resacralization and, 40; scientific-­ religious practices in, 32, 49, 111–12, 140; self-­examination and, 49–50; stress and, 35, 148; syncretism and, 50 disaster survivors, 47, 88–89, 136, 147, 163n3 disaster workers: emotional intensity and, 49–53, 55–56, 59–60, 62–63; material struggles and, 145; mental health and, 8; personal trauma experiences and, 59–60; self-­care and, 109, 145–46; spiritual care and, 24, 59; super chaplains as, 62–63 disasters: anxiety and, 150–51; apocalyptic visions and, 115; climate change and, 18; communality and, 3, 17; defining, 6–7, 163n3; distress and, 152–53; expert knowledge and, 15–16, 74; meaning and, 40; organizational arrangements and, 16; politics of the self and, 6; religious framing of, 7, 12–13, 163n4; scales of, 2; self-­knowledge and, 28–29, 60; spiritual dis-­ease, 81–82; spiritual impact of, 44, 77 disenchantment: loss of meaning and, 167n16; modernity and, 24–25, 28–30, 165n2; psychological distress and, 34; secularization and, 28; spirituality as antidote to, 28; therapeutic culture and, 33 distress: as anxiety, 166n9; communities of color and, 157; crisis of faith and, 97; disenchantment and, 34; health and religion in, 35–37; idioms of, 166n9; pathologizing of, 33, 81; PCI’s categories of, 97; PTSD and, 43; reimagined language of, 152, 156–58, 161; therapeutic culture and, 33–34; treatments for, 11, 39–40. See also psychological distress; spiritual distress

Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), 114, 119–22, 124–26 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 165n13 Embodiment (Nelson), 169n3 EMDR. See eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) EMU. See Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality (Pope Francis), 165n1 energy healing, 86, 88, 90–91 Everly, George, 101 expert knowledge: contradictory discourses in, 25, 134; hybrid therapies and, 32; identity and, 166n8; limitations of, 15–16, 18; meaning and, 42; nature of, 27; problem-­solving and, 19; professional jurisdiction and, 33, 166n8; psychological distress and, 33; rationality and, 25–28; science and, 15–16, 18; spiritual vs. secular, 81–82; suspicion of, 73–74, 165n16; techno-­rational discourse, 11, 16; trauma and, 10–11; unruliness of life and, 161. See also patchwork expertise eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), 46–47 faith leaders: community trust in, 73–74, 76; disaster response and, 57, 70; expertise and, 22, 32, 70; meaning and, 27, 42; mental health professionals and, 22, 31–32, 38, 41, 43, 66–67, 70–71, 73–76, 84; PCI and, 96; PTSD knowledge and, 38; Red Cross and, 58; super chaplains as, 63. See also clergy Farman, Abou, 166n3 FEMA, 45, 62 fight-­or-­flight response, 41, 87, 134 firefighters, 8, 21–22, 87–88 first-­responders, 5, 87–89, 94–99 forgiveness, 104, 127–28, 136–37 Francis, Pope, 153, 158, 165n1 Frank (fire department chaplain): disaster spiritual care and, 49–52; EMDR and, 46–47; IADC and, 20–21, 46–49, 52; on interfaith work, 50–51; personal trauma and, 49, 52–53; on religion and mental health, 50; self-­examination and, 50 Freidson, Eliot, 64 Full Catastrophe Living (Kabat-­Zinn), 168n3

184 Index Ghosh, Amitav, 153, 158 God: bodywork and, 136; Buddhism and, 51; crisis of faith and, 104, 106–7, 109; damaged relationship with, 96, 98, 102; disaster spiritual care and, 76, 81–82; historical role of religion and, 38–39; mindfulness and, 51 Great Derangement, The (Ghosh), 153 Green, Reverend, 61, 72–76, 84, 145 Grewal, Inderpal, 4 Ground Zero, 2, 13, 24, 55–56. See also September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks Harjo, Joy, 170n2 Harrington, Anne, 26, 164n10 health, 12, 35–36, 44, 52, 167n17, 168n3. See also mental health Hiltner, Seward, 169n2 Holden, Jan, 167n1 holism, 27, 29–31, 40–41, 50, 52 holistic medicine, 30, 166n4 Holocaust, 68–69 homeostasis, 14, 32, 35, 102, 110 Hopper, Kim, 9 Horowitz, Andy, 6, 166n9 Hurricane Katrina: bodywork and, 89; climate change and, 140–41; culture of calamity and, 5; disaster response and, 4, 121; disaster spiritual care and, 8, 62, 67, 73, 140; mental health-­religious collaboration, 67; structural inequalities and, 75, 145–47 Hurricane Sandy, 151 Hussein, Saddam, 72 IADC. See induced after-­death communication (IADC) idioms of distress, 34, 166n9 Induced After-­Death Communication (Botkin), 47 induced after-­death communication (IADC): founding of, 47; scientific-­religious practices in, 168n3; syncretism and, 49; technique of, 47–48, 167n1; trauma healing and, 20–21, 46–49, 52, 168n1 inequality: communities of color and, 61, 75; disaster impact and, 159; disaster response and, 15, 121; poor communities and, 61; revisioning of spirituality and, 156; structural, 61, 75, 118, 147

International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF), 69–70 John Paul II, Pope, 153 Josephson-­Storm, Jason Ānanda, 24, 91 Kabat-­Zinn, Jon, 168n3 Kaddish, 68, 168n4 Koenig, Harold, 167n17 Kornfeld, Jack, 51, 168n3 Latour, Bruno, 155, 158–59 Leitch, M. Laurie, 24, 27 Levine, Stephen, 51, 168n3 Levy, Rabbi, 77–78 Light Our Way (National VOAD), 81, 83, 167n13 Macfarlane, Robert, 156 massage therapy, 86, 88, 91–92 MBSR. See mindfulness-­based stress reduction (MBSR) meaning: disaster spiritual care and, 6, 9, 11, 31, 40–42, 45, 78–79, 155; disenchantment and, 167n16; expertise in, 42; loss of, 30–31, 170n3; patchwork expertise and, 25, 42, 144; politics of, 9; psychic health and, 155; psychological resilience and, 27; religion-­spirituality and, 5–6, 40–42, 81, 109, 133, 167n16; selfhood and, 43; as therapeutic goal, 39 medicine: alternative, 36, 167n12; Chinese, 86; communities of color and, 73; disenchantment and, 28; holism and, 30–31; integrative, 36, 166n4; limitations of, 15, 30; mental health and, 25, 27; mind-­body, 21, 36, 45, 50, 169n2; modernity and, 30; nosology and, 11; re-­enchantment and, 40; spirituality in, 12, 20, 52, 67 meditation: benefits of, 35–36; Buddhism and, 51; disaster spiritual expertise and, 10; impact on brain, 169n4; mainstream popularity of, 167n15; spirituality and, 40, 164n9; stress reduction and, 168n3 Mennonites, 120, 125, 128–29, 138 mental health: clergy training in, 43, 69–70, 168n3; climate change and, 158; expansion of professions, 33–34; language of psychic experience, 156; medical roots of, 25, 27; PCI and, 96; problems of daily

Index 185 life and, 33; PTSD and, 78; religion and, 35, 67, 74, 76–77; selfhood and, 33; social change and, 32–33; spiritual care and, 5–6, 11, 25–27, 42, 125, 148; stress and, 34–38; trauma and, 24. See also disaster mental health Mental Health and Our Changing Planet, 154, 170n1 mental health professionals: authority of, 25; concern with clergy expertise, 43, 81–83; disaster-­related suffering and, 11, 34; disaster response and, 5, 7, 62; expert knowledge and, 34, 55; 9/11 attacks and, 8; perpetuation of psychological fragility, 90; relationships with faith leaders, 22, 31–32, 38, 41, 66–67, 70–71, 73–76, 84 military: CISM and, 21, 94–95, 107; disaster mental health and, 107; disaster spiritual care and, 70; ethics training and, 106–7; PCI and, 98–99, 107; psychiatry and, 7 mind-­body medicine, 21, 36, 45, 50, 169n2 mindfulness, 40–41, 51, 155, 164n9 mindfulness-­based stress reduction (MBSR), 168n3 minimum spirituality, 21, 55–56, 66, 76, 92 ministry of presence, 121–22, 168n1 Ministry of Presence, A (Sullivan), 168n1 Mitchell, Jeffrey, 95–96, 169n1 modernity, 24–25, 27–30, 165n1, 165n2 Morrison, Toni, vi, 161 Moyers, Bill, 40 mysticism, 106, 117

PTSD and, 43; religious communities in, 60, 66–67 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 9 New York City Emergency Management, 45, 57, 151 New York City Office of Emergency Management, 45, 57–58, 71, 163n6 New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS): controlling tactics of, 60, 75; disaster spiritual care and, 9, 21, 56–59; financial success and, 81; goals of, 58; government relations, 59–60, 71, 75; organizational tensions and, 60–61 New York State Office of Mental Health, 9 New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, 10 Nichter, March, 166n9 9/11 attacks: disaster mental health and, 7–8; end of normal everyday life and, 3–5; experiencing, 1–3, 159–60; government security response, 164n6; mental health-­ religious collaboration, 67; psychological impact of, 4, 43; spiritual care and, 8–9; trauma response and, 32, 166n6; vulnerability and, 18. See also post-­9/11 9/11 syndrome, 59, 109 Notley, Alice, vi, 161 NYDIS. See New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS)

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 72 National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD), 58, 64, 78, 81 Nelson, James, 136, 169n3 Neocleous, Mark, 15 neuroscience, 36–39, 136–37, 147 New Age of Anxiety, 4–6, 19, 151, 160–61, 164n12 New York Board of Rabbis, 56, 60–61, 67 New York City: clergy and local politics in, 74; as destination, 73; disaster spiritual care in, 58–59, 72; mental health-­religious collaboration in, 74; NYDIS and, 58–59; post-­9/11 spiritual care in, 8, 21, 43;

participation-­induced trauma, 130–31 pastoral crisis intervention (PCI): categories of distress in, 97; CISM and, 21, 94–102, 169n3; crisis of faith and, 102–5; debriefing and, 104; disaster training and, 94–96; goals of, 96, 109–10; homeostasis and, 102, 110, 112; meaning and, 98; mechanistic human functioning and, 111–12; military and, 98–99, 107; patchwork expertise and, 111–12; SAFER-­PCI and, 100; self-­care and, 109; selfhood in, 108–9; spiritual vs. psychological distress and, 94, 103–4, 108; statistical data and, 101; training for, 98–108; utility of religion in, 96–97, 105–6, 112–13

Oklahoma City bombing, 74, 96, 125 optimism, 4, 12–13, 151–52 oral crisis intervention (PCI), 96–97

186 Index patchwork expertise: CISM-­PCI training and, 111–12; disaster spiritual care and, 19–20, 44–45, 141, 146; forms of knowledge and, 25; meaning and, 25, 42, 144; modernity and, 27; selfhood and, 27; tensions in, 146 PCI. See pastoral crisis intervention (PCI) Podesta, John, 17 politics of survival, 159 politics of the self, 5–6, 37 positive psychology, 165n13, 167n14 positive thinking, 13–14, 164n13 post-­9/11: disaster response development, 57–58; disaster spiritual expertise and, 8–9, 20, 29, 67, 69–70, 93–94, 124–25, 146; era of risk and instability, 151; expert knowledge and, 18, 74; mental health-­ religious collaboration, 74; referral networks and, 10; religious conflicts and, 65; social service agencies and, 58; spiritual care and, 31–32, 41; stress and, 72–73; traumatized clergy and, 54–55; wholeness and, 43 post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): 9/11 attacks and, 43; CISM and, 102; diagnosis of, 34, 38; neuroscientific research and, 38–39; overdiagnosis of, 43, 81; prevention of, 78; religion as protective factor for, 14, 27, 106; suffering and, 27 Pound, Ezra, 165n14 Power of Angels, The (Trimpe), 13 Power of Now, The (Tolle), 164n13 prayer, 14–15, 27, 35–36, 136–37 Prophetess: apocalyptic discourse and, 115, 121; Charismatic tradition and, 119; as conduit for God, 22, 114, 117; ministry of presence and, 121–23; on resilience, 115, 118; spiritual disaster response, 22, 114; on spirituality, 116–18; STAR training and, 114, 117, 119–20, 122; on trauma, 116, 118, 121–22 proselytizing, 61, 70, 76, 107 psychological distress, 32, 81, 94, 103, 108, 152 psychology: bounded self and, 33; certitude and, 148; faith leader training in, 8; hybrid therapies and, 32; mechanistic human functioning and, 109; military, 7; pathology and, 14; positive, 165n13, 167n14; tensions between religion and,

42, 74–75, 143; trauma healing and, 127. See also cognitive behavioral therapy PTSD. See post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rationality, 25, 27–31 reconciliation, 127–28, 137, 147 Red Cross, 7–8, 21, 56, 58, 71–72 re-­enchantment, 26, 28, 40 religion: authority of, 75; conflicts in, 60, 63–65, 72; crisis intervention and, 50; disaster relief and, 7–9, 11–13, 163n4; government affiliations, 62, 71–72, 75; health benefits of, 12, 35–36, 44, 52, 167n17; meaning and, 42, 167n16; mental health and, 35, 67, 74, 76–77; mysticism and, 106, 117; neuroscientific research and, 38–39; NYDIS and, 9, 58, 60, 71; PTSD protection and, 14, 106; relationship with God and, 38, 96, 98, 116; restoration of selves and, 18; studies in stress and, 12; theodicy and, 112; theological embodiment and, 136; trauma protection and, 109; wholeness and, 16 resacralization, 26, 40 resilience, 13–15, 27, 97–98, 118, 133 restorative justice, 125–29, 138, 147 Rieff, Philip, 37 Rose (body-­centered therapist), 21, 86–92 Rosenberg, Charles E., 30 Rozario, Kevin, 163n4 Rubin, Rabbi Julius, 66–69, 84 science, 15–16, 18, 21, 40 secular disaster response, 10–11, 16, 22, 24, 26–27, 71 secular humanism, 166n3 secularization, 16, 27–28, 34–35 Seeley, Karen M., 8 self-­care, 109, 145–46 selfhood: American views of, 98, 110; disaster and, 6, 9, 60; holistic, 94; meaning and, 43; mechanistic, 110, 138; patchwork expertise and, 27; politics of, 5–6, 37; relational world and, 138; social change and, 33; spirituality and, 51; therapeutic culture and, 33–34; utility of religion in, 113 Selye, Hans, 134 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. See 9/11 attacks

Index 187 Shapiro, Francine, 47 Shea, John, 51, 168n4 Simpson, Reverend Mary, 69–72, 80, 84, 95 Smith, Zadie, 157 social justice, 117, 119 Solnit, Rebecca, 163n1 spiritual care: defining, 78–79; disaster response and, 8, 21, 29, 32, 43–44, 50, 69, 166n7, 167n13; disaster training and, 93–94; force of presence and, 76–78; global culture of, 59; meaning and, 45, 78–79, 81; mental health and, 5–6, 11, 22, 26–27, 42, 70, 125, 148; ministry of presence and, 168n1; motivations for, 79–81; scientific justification for, 44–45, 167n17; tensions between forms of, 116; whole-­person approach, 77, 81 Spiritual Care Aviation Incident Response (SAIR) team, 7–8, 168n3 spiritual distress: crisis of faith and, 24, 102–4; diagnosis of, 43, 94, 104, 105tab., 108; diminished spirituality and, 82, 102; disaster-­related, 102; intervention and, 104–5; psychological distress versus, 81, 104, 105tab.; relationship with God and, 96, 98, 102; religious differences and, 59; suffering and, 59; trauma and, 24; vertical relationships and, 103 spiritual expertise, 22, 33, 43, 56, 66, 103. See also disaster spiritual expertise spirituality: as antidote to disenchantment, 28; bodywork and, 88–89; bureaucratic, 11–12, 19–21, 164n10; dissident practices, 167n15; energy and, 90–91; exotic practices and, 167n12; health benefits of, 168n3; holistic healing and, 167n13; mainstream popularity of, 40–41, 167n15; meaning and, 5–6, 40–42, 133; in medicine, 12, 20, 36, 52; mindfulness meditation and, 40, 164n9; modernity and, 25, 165n1; positive psychology and, 167n14; relationships of care and, 156–57, 170n3; religious differences and, 59; resilience and, 14–15, 118, 133; restoration of selves and, 18; revisioning of, 156; science and, 21, 40; selfhood and, 51; social justice-­ oriented, 119; therapeutic practices and, 87–88; trauma and, 14, 20, 32, 129; well-­ being and, 12, 154–55; wholeness and, 16,

25, 27, 29–30, 40–41. See also minimum spirituality STAR. See Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) Sternberg, Esther, 36 Stevens, Wallace, 1–2 Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR): Christian therapeutic bias, 135–36; collective trauma and, 128, 130, 132–33, 148; forgiveness and, 137; goals of, 126–27; Mennonite religious tradition and, 125, 128–29, 135, 138; moral transformation and, 128, 133, 135–37; nonviolence and, 128, 169n1; Prophetess and, 114, 117, 119–20, 122; race and class in, 120, 125; reconciliation and, 127–28, 137, 147; religious-­trauma discourse in, 117, 124, 127–38, 147; restorative justice and, 125–29, 138, 147; Snail model in, 127–28, 136–37 stress: African Americans and, 72–73; biological explanations for, 37; body and, 35–37, 87, 133–34; catastrophe narratives, 165n17; climate change and, 154; cultural responses to, 134; diagnosis of, 34; disaster response and, 34–35; fight-­or-­flight response, 41; history of, 34–35, 166n10; human experience and, 35; MBSR and, 168n3; mental health and, 34–38; military psychiatry and, 7; popularizing of, 44; post-­9/11, 72–73; prayer and, 36; professional identity and, 49; recovery from, 130; spirituality and resilience for, 14; studies in religion and, 12, 35; therapeutic culture and, 37 structure of feeling, 6, 163n2 suffering: biological explanations for, 36–37, 39; climate change and, 153; disaster-­ related, 11, 34, 152–53; global fellowship of, 59; patchwork expertise and, 25; psychiatry and, 15; religious framing of, 12, 20, 26–27, 31, 119; secularization of, 34–35; trauma and, 119; treatments for, 34, 39 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 168n1 Sutta, Jata, 54 talk therapy, 47, 88–90 Taylor, Charles, 42, 167n16 therapeutic culture, 33–34, 37, 166n9

188 Index Tokarczuk, Olga, 124, 148 trauma: bodywork and, 87–90, 92, 136; brain-­spotting treatment and, 48; breaking cycles of, 127; collective, 128, 130, 132–33, 148; compassion fatigue and, 131; debriefing methods, 22; diagnosis of, 38; disaster spiritual care and, 66; EMDR in, 47; expert knowledge and, 10–11; fight-­or-­flight response and, 41, 87, 134; forgiveness and, 127–28, 136–37; historical, 116, 118; Holocaust and, 69; IADC in, 20–21, 46–48, 52, 167n1; individual, 59–60; medicalized discourse of, 119; mental health treatment and, 24; military psychiatry and, 7; moral transformation and, 128; neurological impact of, 144, 147; 9/11 attacks and, 76; organizations and, 60; overdiagnosis of, 90; participation-­ induced, 130–31; personal transformation of, 121, 137; recovery from, 130; resilience and, 133; restorative justice and, 127; spirituality and, 14, 20, 32, 109, 129; structural inequalities and, 61; suffering and, 119; talk therapy alternatives, 47, 89–90 trauma touch therapy, 87–88 Trimpe, Herb, 13

Trump, Donald, 158, 164n12, 165n16 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa), 127, 147 United States: anxiety and, 5; climate change and, 17, 158; culture of calamity and, 5; expert knowledge in, 15–16; ideals of resilience, 15; impact of 9/11 on, 159; mindfulness meditation and, 40, 164n9; New Age of Anxiety, 4–6, 19, 164n12; positive thinking and, 13, 164n13; spirituality and, 40, 167n15; state violence in, 170n4; structural inequalities and, 61, 75, 118, 147; suspicion of professionals in, 165n16; tropes of optimism, 4, 12–13, 151–52 Van der Kolk, Bessel, 90 vulnerability, 1, 17–18 Weber, Max, 16, 28, 30, 93–94 When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (Harjo), 170n2 white supremacy, 3, 164n12 Williams, Raymond, 163n2 Wisdom of the Body, The (Cannon), 169n2

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are so many people to thank—friends, colleagues, and family—when reflecting on a project that has spanned as much time as this one. It is difficult to know where to begin, and undoubtedly, I will leave out some who were of help, inspiration, and support along the way. For this I apologize in advance. Thank you to Shirley Lindenbaum, my Ph.D. advisor, who continues to inspire me with her love of birds, plants, and commitment to students. Shirley provided meticulous edits, patiently instructing me in the craft of writing while offering cups of “fortifying tea” and biscuits. Thank you to my committee members, Glen Milstein, Michael Blim, and Murphy Halliburton. I thank my graduate student companions Lyn Horridge, Martha Lincoln, Nathan Woods, Roberto Abadie, Brenda Biddle, and Abou Farman. Thank you to Daniel Silberbusch, Bill Sage, Thomas Taylor, Brenda Boyd-­ Bell, Grant Brenner, Julie Taylor, and the many, many chaplains, spiritual care providers, mental health workers, and disaster responders who generously gave their time and thoughts. Montreal has been a welcoming harbor for years. As a postdoctoral fellow and later as visiting faculty at McGill University I was fortunate to be surrounded by a remarkable array of friends and colleagues who have been enduring sources of encouragement, intellectual support, and camaraderie: Alberto Sanchez for enduring friendship, support, and an endlessly curious and lively mind, Biella Coleman for the incisive comments and walks, Suparna Choudhury for humor and kindness over the years, Cristiana Giordano, Rebecca Seligman, Kelly Mc­Kinney, Bruce Millet, and Bea Millet. There is so much more to say about each of you. Please accept my gratitude for the years of conversation, humor, meals, miso making, plant explorations, dog walks, sharing ideas, sharing anxieties, visions, and so much more. Thank you. This book would not have made it to print without Eduardo Kohn and Lisa Stevenson. I am grateful to them both for friendship, creativity, support,

190 Acknowledgments

editorial generosity, for believing in me and my ideas even when I did not— and for continually reminding me to stay close to poetry. My old friends, Ned Parker, Marc Rosenthal, Brian Oestreich, Christine Grimando, Jared Manasek, and Kevin Brosnan have been there all along and continue to provide comradery, love, humor, and solace. Thank you to Trudi Hirsch, Enkyo Roshi, and Koshin Paley Ellison, who I met during the early years of this research, and who pointed the way to so many things that have become central in my life. I have been blessed with many mentors along the way. These include Kirk Dombrowski, Laurence Kirmayer, Kim Hopper, and Davydd Greenwood, all of whom helped shaped my thinking and offered different models for acting in the world, Thank you to Bob Lockhart for seeing something of value in the manuscript and for consistent support and to Kim Fortun for generosity on all levels and for initially bringing the manuscript to University of Pennsylvania Press. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for University of Pennsylvania press, as well Paul St. Amour for his generous comments. Thank you to Sean Malin for providing the perfect rare blend of editorial incisiveness and encouragement. Thank you to Education Ecologies Collective—Nathan Woods, Tal Beery, Cedric Jamet, Li Sumpter, and Laura McGrane—for the generative space that helped me get through the grimmest days of the pandemic, and for one of the most affirming group experiences I have had in years. Thank you to the Anthropology Department of Haverford College— Zainab Saleh, for friendship, sometimes humorous bluntness, and being a model of discipline and fortitude; and Zolani Ngwane, for creating a supportive and gentle department and to Juli Grigsby for the many conversations about the challenges of writing and what really matters. Thank you to Jesse Shipley for encouragement, humor, and friendship. Thank you to Helen White and Jon Wilson and the rest of the Bi-­College Department Environmental Studies. Thank you to other folks at Haverford College for support an and encouragement: Kim Benston, Craig Borowiak, Theresa Tensuan, Eric Hart, Janice Lion, Guantian Ha, Jake Culbertson, Fran Blase, and many others. Thank you to the McGill University Department of Anthropology for providing me with a leave year perch. Thank you to all of my students over the years for their imaginations, openness, and for continually reminding me to have a firmly grounded stake in the future.

Acknowledgments 191

The research that laid the groundwork for this book was funded by the National Institute for Mental Health’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (1F31MH075591-01A1). No words are enough to describe my gratitude to Amber and Talya, who put up with my seemingly interminable tapping at the computer while nudging me to look around and remember that there are so many things to love in the world.