It may seem from my posts that I think that the gospel is an ethics of solidarity with the poor. I don't. I think *incarnation* is solidarity with the poor and that responding to the call of the gospel is *setting down a path to* solidarity with the poor. However, the journey to the poor is a slippery path and to walk it is to walk with good peripheral vision. The gospel will never refuse to live and work with someone who is "not poor enough." Indeed, it is not at all hard to imagine a person living a long life and dying with one solitary person entangled in the crushing debilitation of modern social fragmentation and isolation. The work of the gospel is useless work that will not yield to measurements of effectiveness and will almost never make an appeal to photojournalists out to snag a spot with a major news outlet. You pray and you think and you feel and you move and you live for the people from whose stories you find your life trajectory to be inabstractable.