These remarks were made by Professor Debra Dean Murphy at the Interfaith Service of Peace held on the Wesley Chapel steps at noon on April 15, 2026.
Maybe you’ve heard the term “moral injury.”
It refers to the psychosocial and spiritual woundedness
caused by witnessing, experiencing,
or committing acts that violate one’s moral code.
It is a condition recognized by the American Psychiatric Association,
and has been observed and studied primarily in combat veterans.
Participating in actions that cause innocent civilians to suffer
is one way that soldiers in war may be morally injured,
as feelings of profound shame and guilt
compromise their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
Healthcare workers and journalists are also susceptible to moral injury,
whenever they confront situations that challenge their moral integrity.
But I think it’s also true that the rest of us—
if not at risk for moral injury in the clinical sense—
are subject to a similar kind of moral distress:
the psychic and spiritual hurt, woundedness, dis-ease we experience,
almost unceasingly these days,
when we witness actions that violate our sense of right and wrong,
and over which we have little to no control.
This moral distress is compounded when we suffer in isolation—
doom scrolling late at night on our phones,
feeling disconnected from people we love,
people we thought we knew.
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We are standing here today because we long for peace.
We want the grievous harms that bring destruction and death to cease.
We want injury and distress of all kinds to cease.
We want the dehumanization of all persons, all peoples, to cease.
We want war and the unconvincing justifications for it to cease.
But peace—
as it is understood in religious traditions the world over—
is not the mere absence of conflict,
the cessation of combat,
the end of hostilities.
Genuine peace is not about absence but about presence.
The presence of conditions that make for fullness of life:
where everyone has what they need to flourish;
where plenitude is practiced—
the plentitude of table fellowship, time, kindness, forgiveness.
These practices of plenitude and others like them
are forms of joyful, embodied resistance
to the violent systems and fictions of scarcity
which tell vulnerable persons, especially,
that there is not enough,
that they are not enough.
In such ways, abundance, not scarcity,
is both mindset and measure for every interaction.
This is genuine peace of the robust, costly, divinely-sanctioned kind,
if we dare to dream it, to believe it, to live it.
The Sanskrit word, shanti, conveys this kind of robust peace
in the traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
The concept of Al-Sulh al-A‘zam in the Baháʼí faith—
a phrase meaning “most great peace”—does the same.
For Muslims, the Arabic word for a genuine peace is salaam.
For Jews and Christians, it’s the Hebrew word, shalom—
intimately related to the word salaam,
connecting us to our Muslim sisters and brothers.
While all of these beautiful faith traditions
draw on their own stories and practices
to flesh out the contours of a robust, embodied, costly peace,
each one reminds us of our common humanity,
and of our shared hopes and dreams.
Each of us here, now,
can draw on the wisdom of our own traditions.
We can learn in humility from other traditions.
When we do this with intention and resolve,
we might dare to practice what I’ll call here
“disruptive peacemaking”:
forms of life,
of bearing witness,
of joy-filled embodiment
that disrupt the status quo,
that call into question the inevitability of war,
the inevitability of injustices systemic, institutional, bureaucratic,
the inevitability of violence of all kinds.
Disruptive peacemaking describes
forms of life and of bearing witness and of joy-filled embodiment
that are characterized by mutual aid,
cooperative care-taking,
collaborative problem-solving,conviviality and the sheer wonder at the giftednes
of life together on this planet
and in communities of thriving and flourishing,
Disruptive peacemaking is the non-violent refusal
to participate in or condone harms
that cause physical and moral injury in others
and moral distress to ourselves.
And so,
may peace—
genuine, robust, joyful, disruptive peace—
be upon us all.
Amen.
