"Master," the young teacher asked fervently, "of what account are the sins of youth?"

"The sins of youth?" The old man said. "Why, on the other side the sins of youth are of no account whatsoever."

"But what sin is punished," the young rabbi wailed, "if not the sins of youth?" And the old man answered, "on the other side, that sin which is punished with constant and unending severity is the sin of false piety."

The point is clear: piety is cultural. Holiness depends on our choosing pieties proper to the times.

Culture and spirituality, in other words, are of a piece. The function of spirituality is not to protect us from our time; the function of spirituality is to enable us to leaven it and stretch it, to bless it and break it open to the present will of God.

The question becomes then: what cultural realities are challenging the gospel now, and how can spirituality best challenge the culture if we are really to be a holy people? Here. And now.

Let's look briefly at the cultural situation that faces us.

1. In this period, we have experienced major shifts in the national belief-value system. Family patterns have changed; sex roles have changed, and governments that talked freedom and justice and human rights have been raven with one corruption after another.

2. This generation, too, saw scientific progress that was often as threatening as it was helpful: in just a few years, science changed life and changed death, changed family and changed sex, changed birth and changed war from struggle to annihilation. Until, finally, science has managed, in our generation, to change the very meaning of "meaning."

3. In this era military security became our highest priority, our greatest expenditure, and -- our scarcest commodity. Thanks to our "military security," indeed, we have created the end of the world and we are storing it in the corn-fields of Kansas.

4. In this same time frame, integration challenged white supremacy. And feminism challenged the white male system.

5. Now, too, great poverty in the midst of great affluence, -- that 20% of Americans who either can't find full-time work, or the 6 million who work as many as 2 jobs without full-time pay -- challenge all the American myths ever made about freedom and justice for all.

6. And all of this has happened in a society where 10% of the world -- Western Europeans and North Americans -- consume, horde, waste or control two-thirds of the resources of the world.

Indeed, social consensus on values and beliefs has broken down. An annual survey of college freshmen found that, unlike their predecessors, this period's college freshmen were less concerned about pollution, more approving of abortion, less opposed to the death penalty, less obligated to help others in difficulty, considerably less concerned about developing a philosophy of life, and extremely more interested in being "very well off financially."

And all of this while the government spent only 20 cents of every disposable dollar on human resources -- education, employment, job training, social services and health -- but spent 64 cents of every disposable dollar on the military.

Indeed, the spirit is dying in the most church-going nation in the world.

Indeed, the current spiritual-cultural dilemma looms large and clear: individualism runs rampant -- at a time when global community is urgent if both this planet and its peoples are to be saved.

Our current spiritual dilemma, then, lies in how to link the personal with the public dimensions of life in a world fiercely private and dangerously public at the same time.

The anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace teaches that major transformations of thought and behavior happen in a society when what was once a common set of religious/philosophical understandings have become impossible to sustain.

At that point, Wallace says, the society undergoes a "revitalization movement" of four major stages: Stage one, Wallace teaches, is a period of serious individual stress. In this stage people begin to question what the generation before them took for granted -- about the nature of family or the morality of racism, for instance.

In stage two, wide-reaching social stress becomes apparent. People begin to decide that their problems aren't personal. Their problems, they decide, are a result of failure in the anchor institutions they had depended on for stability and direction: the churches, the schools, the government, they argue, are out of tune and remote, corrupt and corrupting.

In stage three of the revitalization process, people agree that there's a problem but they can't agree on how to cope with it: some want to change the system entirely; some want to send in the troops to maintain it. And they quarrel and divide and blame authority.

Then, inevitably, in stage three a nativist or traditionalist movement arises: nativists argue that the danger has come from the failure of the people to adhere to old beliefs and values and behavior patterns. They want the "old time religion" and they find scapegoats aplenty: the economy would be all right, you hear, if it weren't for unions; marriages would be all right if it weren't for feminism and the country would be fine if it weren't for liberalism or welfare or Japanese industry.

But, then, in the fourth and final stage of a revitalization movement, Wallace teaches, a new world-view emerges. In simpler societies, the leadership for this rebuilding of society usually came from a single charismatic person. In complex cultures, like our own, the leadership for rebuilding must come from multiple spokespersons who bring people to new understandings about old values.

The role of spiritual leadership in times of cultural change, then, is not to repudiate the older world-view entirely, but to shed new light on it so that it can be remembered that God's spirit manifests itself always in new ways to meet new needs.

Finally, Wallace teaches, not the older generation, not the people who have moved from one period to another, but the generation that "grew up with" the emerging insights; the generation that never knew a world before this one, comes to maturity.

Then, old institutions find themselves with new leadership. And the institutions are restructured....provided that someone brings up a new generation with the new questions and new insights.

And how do we know it can happen? Because in this country alone we have seen one generation withdraw their allegiance to a king; and the next abolish slavery; and one after that regulate businesses; and the last one empower laborers; and this one, now, beginning to struggle for liberation and equality and survival.

Obviously, we need a new world view again. We need to put old ideas "in new light."

But how? What is left out of which to build a new world vision? I suggest that we begin to look again at the bases of social brokenness. And that we begin to see the spiritual link between the personal and the public. I'm suggesting that we look again at the seven capital sins but this time on two levels, rather than simply on one. The level of the personal, yes. But the level of the global, as well.

Envy on the personal level, for instance, is certainly a rejection of others. But at the global level, isn't envy ethnocentrism as well? When we refuse to learn from other countries and cultures, isn't that a form of envy that fails to accept the value of others?

Pride is, of course, a personal need to dominate, but on the global level isn't it also the mania for national superiority, whatever the cost?

Lust is clearly the exploitation of another for the sake of physical satisfaction. We are beginning to recognize it when it's date rape or pornography. But is there yet enough conscience in us to also see lust as the national passion for an instantaneous gratification that justifies the exploitation of whole peoples, so that we can have the cheap cash crops or conveniences we demand that rape their lands and loot their futures.

Isn't it the exploitation that comes from lust that leads to the feminization of poverty and the loss of feminine resources in a world that is reeling from the institutionalization of masculine values?

Gluttony, the over consumption of food, leads to waste and bloatedness and misuse of resources on the personal level. But it is also surely basis for the lack of distribution of surplus to the dying in Somalia and the farmers in the Soviet Union as well.

We speak of covetousness as a lack of a sense of "enough" that leads to hoarding and the inordinate desire for unnecessary possessions. But what is the difference between that kind of covetousness and the demon that fuels a suicidal arms race in the quest for superiority or refuses a peace dividend on the grounds of national security?

Anger we recognize as a sense of righteousness and judgment, of putting ourselves in the place of the patient justice of God. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," we remind one another. But what has happened to the national moral fiber when whatever evil we say of Iran or Iraq is counted as virtue; what about the sinful anger of demonizing our enemies?

We abhor sloth and the assumption that anyone has the right to live off the efforts of others. But where is the spirituality it will take to build a new world view about the sinfulness of multi-national structures that live off the backs of the poor by giving unjust wages and benefits; or of systems that take the unequal treatment of women for granted and absorb women's lives at lesser pay for the convenience of others, and then moralize about it in the name of "God's will" for us?

While we go to church. And go to church. And go to church.

Once, the ancients say, a seeker asked a group of disciples: "Does your god work miracles?" And they replied, "It depends on what you call a miracle. Some people say that a miracle is when God does the will of people. We say that a miracle is when people do the will of God."

Clearly, we too must bring the world to see life differently so that God's miracles can happen in our time, so that true piety can live again in this age, in us. Here. And now.