While most of us are spared moral injury to the scale produced by the horrors of war, I think we all experience moral injury in life. Even good people. We've behaved in ways that have damaged our conscience. We all carry soul wounds.
I think here of George Saunders' famous commencement address about how his greatest regrets in life have been failure of kindness. I recall the story of Nadia Bolz-Weber in her book Accidental Saints. As the pastor of a church, Nadia was sending out an invitation to a church retreat. In sending the email she intentionally left off the name of a member she didn't want to attend as she found him irritating and exhausting. A petty, horrible thing to do, especially for a pastor. And then the man died and Nadia had to preach his funeral. Suddenly, she came face to face with her moral injury. She couldn't forgive herself for what she did.
I think we all can identify. Our life is filled with moral injury. Sins of commission and sins of omission. Things we have done and things we have failed to do. And there's a sad paradox here as well: the better person you are the more your conscience haunts you.
Sure, there are good people in the world. And maybe they don't need to be better than they already are. But the shadow cast by our goodness is moral injury, the haunted conscience. Good people might not need Jesus to be good, but they do need Jesus for grace.
There's a petition from the Liturgy of the Hours that always interrupts me. We pray it on Fridays in reflecting upon the penitential psalms. The petition asks, "Heal our wounded conscience." I need that prayer every Friday because I can't make it seven days without sustaining some sort of moral injury. I'll confess, I've been trying to be a good person for over 50 years and I don't think I've made a ton of progress. Week after week the prayer I most crave and need is "heal my wounded conscience."
Of course, there are temptations here. If we hurt someone we need to make amends. We shouldn't use grace to escape our hard responsibilities in making things right. With absolution comes penance and repentance. But as all the guilty know, you can do everything in your power to make things right and still be haunted by a wounded conscience. Yes, you've been reconciled to the one you hurt, but you can never forgive yourself. You are unable lay that burden down. Moral injuries are not so easily healed.
Why do good people need Jesus? What makes the way of Jesus so potent and powerful for good but godless people is its paradoxical mixture of radical goodness and radical grace. It's really quite remarkable. Christianity calls you to the impossible heights of love yet recognizes in the very same breath your moral frailty and vulnerability.
For even good people, and perhaps good people most of all, need healing for their wounded conscience.
