March 2021 – Incarnation Pianity

[I present here a thoughtful essay by my long time friend and fellow liberal. It makes some thoughtful distinctions between the individual and the community based in part on what we both learned in Catholic schools in Iowa 1957-1965]

Greg Cusack March 27, 2021

Many years ago now, when mostly conservative religious voices began calling for the need for us to return to values, I actually resonated with that call, even though I recognized that the values they were calling for were primarily those that applied to personal behavior, sexuality issues specifically. If I recall correctly, this was during the 1970s when the US was reeling from the aftermath of the divisive Vietnam war and wrestling with many of the cultural issues raised during the 1960s.

I thought that their observation that the United States had become an overwhelmingly secular society that needed to rethink its direction was right on.

I promise that I am not going to be writing a moralistic lecture. Rather, I want to focus on what I believe has been lost in our conversations for some time – the revitalization of communitarian ethics. And, no, these are not the same thing as socialist rhetoric under a disguise!

Rather, a communitarian understanding stands in sharp contrast to an individualistic one, and it is this latter that pretty much represents our country’s mindset these days, as it has for some time.

These three words are becoming a mantra of sorts today. I see the phrase often. It appears in articles I read and has become the title of a Bible study video series created by scholars John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus Borg.

The phrase comes from a letter the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote to a young man in 1903 troubled by the doubt and uncertainly he felt in the early twentieth century, a time of change like our own marked by worry about the future.

Rilke “begged” his young correspondent, plagued by questions about the future, “to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.” Answers would come later, but for now, “the point is, to live everything. Live the questions. “Perhaps,” Rilke added, “you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”