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When Jesus prays for his disciples, he asks that they be sanctified in the truth. Made holy by the truth. Freed by the truth. What he says in a very complex sermon (for Jesus) is that the truth is relationship. We don't belong to the world. Nor does Jesus belong to the world. We belong to God.

The truth is relationship to God. This sanctifying truth is very hard to understand in a world like ours, which sanctifies individualism and isolation and discrete parts. We don't really believe in relationship, theoretically or practically. We believe in breaking things down into their constituent parts. We dissect to know. We imagine that we are on our own in the universe. Jesus connects to know: he knows that we are not alone.

Ask the new welfare policy: it lives by the ethic of personal responsibility, not collective relationship. Or ask the school teacher who discovers children cooperating on their work: grades are still given to individuals, not to groups.

The case of Richard Jewell and the media shows how we see individuals and individualism. Jewell, suspected by the FBI and a media feeding frenzy of the pipe-bombing at the Atlanta Summer Olympics, woke up a private person and went to bed a public person. He was both public and private at dawn and public and private at dusk -- but his self-understanding shifted. He had to go to court to complain about just how public his private side became.

His case against his offenders rests not on his claim of libel so much as on whether he will be judged as a public or a private person. Libel laws protect public people even more than they protect private people. Why? Because public people need room in which to maneuver, or so think the writers of the law.

They may be right about the necessity of additional protection for public speech. Legal life has some important differences from real life: in real life, we need to depend on both common sense and justice. Not just one, but both. Common sense tells all Americans that we only look more public and more private at any given moment. We are always both public and private, both individual and grouped, both isolated and connected, all the time. In a world where spiritual wisdom insists on relationship, and actual life teaches individualism, we are always being buffeted by dual longings and dual messages. Richard Jewell is not alone.

Consider just how many issues turn on this point about public and private, isolated or connected. Jewell may choose to behave as if he were "just" a private or public person. But we all know that security guards wake up in the morning to public responsibilities. Their person affects their profession. Their profession surely affects their person, as well. Ask the wife of any policeman how private her husband's life is.

Conservatives image welfare reform as though there was an individual somewhere who by virtue of personal responsibility could find a job that doesn't exist. Liberals counteract from their side of the partiality: their take on welfare is that of the necessity of collective intervention on behalf of victimized individuals. Any fool can see that systemic reform coupled with personal responsibility will yield welfare reform. Not either, but both. Relationship will prevail -- especially if Republicans and Democrats figure out how to have one!

The charitable choice provision of the new welfare reform bill -- in which religious institutions can get government help to provide for the poor -- is a marvelous improvement on the old separation of church and state. If only religious institutions help the poor, however, their help will also fall on the sword of the dangerous public/private dichotomy. Religious institutions will be no more moral when faced with large public grants than others have been. We need not just private institutions or public institutions but both. We need private accountability for public money and public ways to keep individuals accountable.

Think of the Hillary Clinton/Bob Dole flap over village and family. One paraded the more public; the other the more private. Both have to know that you can parent children at your optimum and bad coaches or teachers or Sunday school superintendents can do in years of nurture. It takes both a village and a family to raise children. Not either, but both.

Richard Jewell innocently represents a picture of the dichotomy in our comfortable, if inadequate, self-image. A used-car salesman keeps telling his public that he is a self-made man. People know, however, that he inherited the car dealership from his father. Many position the "private sector" as independent of costly public infrastructure in the same way. Let Microsoft try to make money without publicly-built phone lines or let entrepreneurs make profits without roads for a while just to get the full dimension of the myth of privacy. Consider what the GI bills did to create the suburbs we now resell, property by property, at higher personal profits.

Richard Jewell is "Any Man" -- who woke up in the morning and tried to do his job and discovered, if he didn't know already, that he was part of the larger world. His person and his private life are now affected by his being in the wrong place at the wrong time. While we want justice for him as a person, we also want fair self-descriptions of ourselves as a people. We want both. Not either.

Jesus helps us "fix" this awful dichotomy which not only Jewell faces but which we all will face. He says that we belong, both as individuals and as communities, not just to each other but also to God. He actually speaks of getting the right theory of our life correct as "making our joy complete." We find ourselves not alone, and not just in relationship with each other, but each and both contained in a larger, more full relationship with God who made us -- and, as the old commentaries insist, "not we see ourselves." When we move beyond the dichotomies of our ways of seeing, we begin to see ourselves as God sees us. God sees us as belonging, as moving toward a completed joy. God sees us as not alone but connected, both to each other and to God.