Jesus ain’t keeping the shingles on the roof
I can pinpoint the moment I first felt it. Like the feeling of shock plunging into a pool of icy water, followed by a gasp for air—and then the numbness.
The moment was a church meeting in which, early in my ordained ministry, a community was debating putting forward a policy specifically aimed at extracting money from the community’s poorest to maintain the congregation’s budget. It doesn’t matter how—only that it did.
At that meeting, I took every opportunity to articulate why this policy would not only fail to achieve its ends, but it would also, more strikingly, fail to achieve what I understood as the church’s proper ends: to embody the teachings of Jesus, who was pretty explicit that the community he founded was a place where the poor would be blessed (Luke 6:20).
At that moment, a congregant stood up and said the words that have been haunting me ever since:
“Yeah, well, we’ve all heard that Jesus stuff before. But Jesus ain’t keeping the shingles on the roof.”
It was an argument persuasive enough to sway the vote in favour of passing the policy, charging pastoral ministry in the congregation to be shaped in accordance with its strictures—and then the numbness.
Much has been written on clergy burnout and resignations over the last few years, as increasing numbers of pastors and priests have found themselves charged not only with completing their tasks of ministry, but also maintaining the structures and institutions that were supposed to support those tasks. Whether due to the economic forces of rural depopulation or the more urbane dynamics of secularization, the result is often the same: doing more with less—more pastoral needs, more building repairs, less staff, less financial capacity.
In the Diocese of Quebec, where I serve, most of the few stipendiary clergy we have left are responsible for presiding over not only word and sacrament, but also over bulletins and boilers (a task for which they are not always well-equipped). The results are often the same: exhaustion, demoralization, even despair.
This is, however, not unique to clergy. Medical staff have long been aware of the dynamics of serving in failing institutions. Have you been to an emergency room lately? I don’t recommend it. Due to a lack of primary health care physicians (amongst other things), they are packed with patients in need who ought to have been served through more preventative forms of care. Yet for an increasing number of Canadians who have no family doctor, emergency medicine is a necessary last resort. To repurpose a phrase from Giorgio Agamben, the state of exception has become the rule.[i]
This has taken a toll on the health of health care workers, who find themselves struggling to do their work in a system overwhelmed and under-resourced, leading, unsurprisingly, to staff exhaustion, demoralization, and despair. We might be quick to call this burnout, but as medical practitioners, researchers, and reporters[ii] are beginning to articulate, there is something more at play.
It is not just that working in medicine is hard; it is that, for a person who took up a vocation to heal the wounded, working in a system that is preventing that healing from taking place and being forced to watch helplessly can be damaging. What if that strain is better understood, not as burnout, but as a form of moral injury?
“Moral injury involves an act of transgression that creates dissonance and conflict because it violates assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness.”[iii]
Most often associated with military service, in recent years the term has expanded to include health care workers.
An editorial in an orthopaedic journal puts it bluntly,
“For medicine, moral injury arises when physicians spend years getting educated, learning what good care is, and developing the skills needed to deliver it, only to run against system constraints that impede or prevent our ability to provide that good care. Moral injury is worse than burnout because it is irreversible if the system doesn’t change.” [iv]
Whereas burnout suggests a pathology in the worker (they do too much, do not set boundaries, etc.), moral injury assumes the illness lies in the system. Moral injury in this case occurs when the work the system requires you to perform somehow repetitively distracts, disables, or directly violates what you think you ought to be doing, what you consider to be the delivery of good care.
“By focusing on individual-level characteristics, burnout implies that physicians are the problem and are weak, not resilient, and therefore need to ‘suck it up.’ The onus of solving burnout is on the physician: The doctor is broken, not the system.”[v]
What does this broken system look like in medicine? Paperwork. Data entry. Insurance claims.
“We have become overpaid data-entry personnel when what we signed up for was improving the health of people who need us. The result is a stressed healthcare system, poorer quality care, and more-frequent errors committed by stressed, distracted physicians.”[vi]
This is, I suspect, a feeling to which many clergy can relate. Many clergy train in graduate schools for years developing a liberal knowledge of ancient languages and arts: philosophy, theology, history, ethics, practices of spiritual care, community building, the use of rhetoric, and all for the sake of helping to better equip the cure of souls. How soul-crushing it can be to realize that the majority of your time has actually been spent responding to a cascade of emails, correcting minutes, and attending countless councils to preserve buildings that are increasingly dilapidated and empty.
Yet the needs of the world have not dramatically changed. The poor will always be with us (Jesus promises us that in Matthew 26:11). The mental health crisis continues to simmer. Isolation and loneliness have become an epidemic. The need to organize and speak publicly against the expanding cultures of xenophobia and hate (not to mention the extinction economy) is pressing. We need communities of refuge and resistance in this world, and we need competent and engaged leaders who can help to cultivate them. Now is the time for communities of faith to be, in the words of Pope Francis, field hospitals in a wounded world.[vii] But it’s hard to be both a field hospital and a dysfunctional property-holding corporation. “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24a).
Not too long after this church meeting, I had the opportunity to attend a conference intended to equip and encourage clergy for ministry. The presenter at this conference was an elderly priest who quite matter-of-factly pointed out that working in the church was hard, and that it required sacrifice. There would be moments of great joy, yes, but also anguish. You had to live with both, white-knuckling through the latter to make it to the former. In the midst of this struggle, he rhetorically shouted, you had to tell yourself “Give it up, boy!” Give it all up to—or maybe for?—Jesus. Self-sacrifice, he insisted, is at the heart of our Christian vocation.
Suffering for the sake of bringing some semblance of healing to our wounded world? That is what I signed up for. Suffering for the sake of keeping the shingles on the roof? And then, the numbness.
I’d like to say I have grown wiser, that I would now object to the refrain of “give it up, boy,” with a newly minted philosophy or theology grounded in self-compassion, one in which Jesus came that we “may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10b). I would like to say that I would quip back with Irenaeus, that the glory of God is the human being fully alive.[viii]
That is what I would like to say. And I know on another day—after marshalling a moment to actually take up the cure of souls—I will. But today, I am just a little too numb. After all, Jesus ain’t keeping the shingles on the roof.
But then again, he never asked us to.
[i] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[ii] David Marchese, “Ed Yong on Science Journalism and the Pandemic,” The New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/magazine/ed-yong-interview.html.
[iii] Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003.
[iv] Mark C. Gebhardt, “Editorial: It’s More Than Burnout—The Moral Injury Crisis in Orthopaedic Surgeons,” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research 481, no. 11 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1097/CORR.0000000000002884.
[v]Mark C. Gebhardt, “Editorial: It’s More Than Burnout—The Moral Injury Crisis in Orthopaedic Surgeons.”
[vi]Mark C. Gebhardt, “Editorial: It’s More Than Burnout—The Moral Injury Crisis in Orthopaedic Surgeons.”
[vii] Deborah Castellano Lubov, "Pope: The Church Is a Field Hospital," Vatican News, November 4, 2024, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2024-11/pope-francis-the-church-is-a-field-hospital.html.
[viii] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 4.20.7, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, accessed February 24, 2025, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103420.htm.
