The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

In my opinion, the social healthcare of Austria is better than the U.S. I know that it has it's flaws, but I nonetheless consider it better than the U.S. As I wrote yesterday, the welfare state of Western Europe is not a result of communal responsibility but from a collective identity that amounts to a collective from of individualism. The end result is still a good thing, but it doesn mean that, given the influx of immigrants to Europe, particularly Muslims, there may come a time in the future in which Europeans are no longer willing to endure the heavy tax burden necessary to fund their welfare state. If the welfare state was a result of a sense of the greater good, it is much less of a concern that, as Europe becomes less homogenized, it will leave behind this system.

In the United States, our system is individualistic down to, well, the individual. If I am in poor health, my family will help care for me. My friends will do what they can. The church will most likely pray for me (hopefully to get better). But, there is no real assurance that I will receive care or that my basic needs will be met. It is my individual responsibility. If I die, then I die. If I go broke, them's the breaks. Because I am so often afraid of what might happen, I am reluctant to help others and put myself at an unnecessary risk. I think this is because I don't really find my indentity in a group. As Anderson mentions in the quotation atop yesterday's blog post, it is a sense of group identity by which the welfare state of Western Europe exists. There is no group out there that assures my well-being, except for my insurance company whose devotion is contingent upon my ability to pay them and then, of course, there are limits and regulations upon which their assurances of care are extinguished.

This is where I think the importance of Jesus' message emerges. I really don't know of anything else in the world (and I'm fairly well-read) that considers the goodness of the other over the goodness of the self the way Jesus does. I don't know of anything that considers the goodness of the group over the goodness of the individual the way Jesus does. But, also, by loving your neighbor and even your enemy, Jesus assures that we will be cared for as well. The problem here is that the embodiment of Jesus is tough. Consider this, how many times has a church taken on new debt, a new loan, in order to add to their church building? How many times has a church taken on a loan to provide life saving medical care for one of its members? I've never heard of it. I've heard of fundraisers for a sick member, budgeted benelovance, the token special collection, but that's about it. Church's are confident in their need for new and bigger buildings and they are confident in their ability to pay for these buildings. But, I've never heard of a church taking out a loan to provide life-saving medical care for one of its members, and I know more than one Christian who could have used such a gesture from their church family.

I'm there too. A victim of my individualist culture as well a perpetrator of it. I would like to overcome this though and better embody the message of Jesus to the world around me. And that, I do believe, has a little bit to do with helping others pay medical expenses, food expenses, tuition expenses, housing expenses, etc.