I have never doubted the power of story. As a hospital chaplain it was my privilege to hear countless tales of people’s lives, their hopes and fears. At times I felt I was curating these stories – being handed them like treasured items held close to the heart. So fragile, that mishandling them might cause these heirlooms to break. There was something very sacred about this curating. Being invited in whispered tones to hold this precious fragment; a meeting, a marriage, an illness – stray episodes of significance that only made sense lodged in someone’s long-crafted discourse.

Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill.

Doris Lessing, ‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’, 2007

These key stories were often decades old, and rooted in someone’s sense of identity. The elderly woman, many years after her husband’s death, squeezing my hand as she told me once again about that fateful day when her life changed forever. The compassion of the nurse; the matter of fact tone of the doctor; a relationship which even death could not divide.

We are made up from stories. They are not just the furniture of existence but the walls and roofs of our reality. Sociologists know the power of the tales we develop during illness. As I found in my work on the wards of the NHS, new experiences need to be accommodated in the stories held dear. The person who feels ‘lucky’ that they could sign up for a particular clinical trial. Equally, the person whose stories appear to lie in tatters: a pregnancy ended and a life imagined suddenly gone.

During the Covid-19 crisis all kinds of stories are being created. For many this will be a watershed event, a moment which divides the before and the after, the old world and the new. It goes without saying that we may not like the ‘new’. It could be a time of previously unknown austerity for the world, an era when the taken-for-granted certainties of the West become persistent doubts. I recall living in Argentina in the late 1980s and learning of the frequent experience of people going unpaid for several months. Teachers, breaking up for summer holidays at Christmas, and unsure when the next pay cheque would arrive. Even when it did, it was eroded by inflation – but perhaps that was all part of the plan. The micro-securities of the West are aberrations in historical and global terms. This may be something, unwanted, which we shall have little choice but to learn.

Doris Lessing was right about the power of stories. They can transform the disaster of Dunkirk into a different kind of triumph, and open windows to see the world in new ways. The stories being shared on social media by the Black Lives Matter campaign are digging at the hidden foundations of the privilege on which power has rested for so long. The urgency of these renewed narratives enable people to see that inequality is not the fault of the poor and the oppressed. It is wired into societies and institutions which have chosen to look the other way and long avoided the tough questions about what we choose to celebrate; replicate and elevate.

Our daughter is about to graduate – or would be doing if the ceremony could happen. It reminded me of my graduation from the University of Hull in 1986. Antonia Fraser gave the speech and recalled a time she had been at a State function in Turkey. In a heated exchange about human rights she swore extensively to emphasise her point. The host was shocked at the language – but didn’t appear to be disturbed about the realities of injustice. She cautioned us to focus on the things that matter rather than the distractions of civility. This is one story that has become part of my story.

The last word – a hopeful word – needs to go to Doris Lessing and the conclusion of her tour de force Nobel acceptance speech:

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Thank God, I have no doubt that they will.

By the South door of York Minster sits a fine statue of the Emperor Constantine. His left hand rests on the pommel of his sword while the right is extended at leisure, hand relaxed. It is here that Constantine was proclaimed Emperor in 306 AD; leader of an empire in his mid-twenties.

Around the time of lockdown Constantine was given a surgical mask. I’ve no idea why, or by whom, but the addition reminded me of how power has been humbled by something so tiny. All the weaponry of the modern world is powerless in the face of this tide of sickness. The Prime Minister’s personal protection officers stood no chance of averting contagion and its consequences. Security gates, alarms and early warning systems, were useless when it came to Covid-19. While spending billions on sophisticated defences a virus has stolen into our lives and wreaked havoc. Tens of thousands dead; personal freedoms curtailed; economies heading into sharp decline with astonishing speed.

Even as we attempt to negotiate an exit from lockdown our capacity to return to anything like normality is in serious question. The threat of a second wave hovers over us and the NHS is on standby, prepared for its impact. We are both heaving a sigh of relief that the worst seems to be past, while feeling apprehensive about the consequences of more people being closer together.

Hidden in the worries about wellbeing and economic survival there is the risk of collective Moral Injury. This is a state of suffering distinct from PTSD and burnout, which reflects the implications of actions – or a lack of actions – in particular situations. Moral Injury as a distinct term is not yet twenty years old but offers a new way of understanding the impacts of behaviours which leave a deep sense of moral consequence. While initially developed in the context of military personnel it is a concept already recognised for its relevance in frontline health services. However, whatever moral pressures health systems were under before Covid-19, these have been magnified by the current crisis. As a fuller picture emerges, heath professionals are beginning to wonder what unintended consequences have followed a policy to send patients back into residential settings. This post-event dawning realisation is the stuff of Moral Injury.

Moral Injury is an evolving framework for the understanding of critical situations and their consequences for individuals. However, in the light of Covid-19 it is reasonable to ask whether this individual experience might take on a collective expression. If as a society we are shown to have given older people such limited priority in our planning and provision, what lasting consequences will there be for our national character? As I argued in a previous blog, there is a real question – when compared with other nations – as to whether the UK allowed a form of social amputation. James Childs, writing in March 2019, suggested that Moral Injury could have a kind of corporate manifestation:

When actions of government violate the ideals of our communal spirit, we as individual citizens, though not guilty, are nonetheless responsible for allowing our government to do such things and, therefore, share in that guilt as a community.

Childs, J., 2019. Can a nation suffer moral injury?. Dialog, 58(1), pp.3-6.

There is a long way to go before we emerge on the other side of the acute crisis caused by Covid-19. Perhaps the lesson we need to draw from Moral Injury is the need to allow space for the possibility of corporate responsibility in the memorial events which will take place. To acknowledge that even when the last person infected with Covid-19 has emerged from isolation, there will be questions we must live with for a very long time to come. The tempting short-term option is to sweep it all under the carpet (‘what else could we have done?’) rather than address real questions of responsibility with openness and mutual compassion. The emerging evidence of Moral Injury requires us to consider the longterm emotional cost of our response to the virus and act now to mitigate its damaging aftermath. After all, a future which aspires to achieve wellbeing for all can never be built on a buried past.