Eric pointed me to this post from Dan,  which is touching in all kinds of ways,  profound,  and confrontive and ultimately challenging.

poserorprophet: Go Forth in Peace
What is interesting is the way in which Wittgenstein’s claims overlap with the claims Jim Wallis makes in his book The Call to Conversion (IMHO this book, and not God’s Politics is Wallis’ best work). Wallis claims that we cannot love the poor, unless we are in active and intimate relationships with those who are poor. Indeed, bringing Wittgenstein and Wallis together, it could be said that we do not even know what it means to love the poor until we are in a dynamic relationship with them.

I suspect that this is part of the reason why mainstream Christianity does not want to listen to voices from those who journey alongside of those who are in exile. Those who do not engage in active relationships with the crucified people of today have a fundamentally different understanding of love. In essence, to continue the thoughts of Wittgenstein, the language-game played by Christians on the margins is fundamentally different than the language-game played by mainstream Christianity.

Which is why, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter all that much if people agree or disagree with me on this blog. Only, if you will not give me a voice, please do this: journey into deeper intimacy with those who are in exile — with the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the isolated, the sick, and the abandoned. It is there, and not here on the internet, that you will learn what it means to love as God loves.

This is a challenge becuase I know better than anyone how sheltered and therefore “cut off” I am from real life over the past few years (and even though I’ve spent a graeter part of my life deeply involved in the church both socially and in my private time via reading and , in the past few years, “surfing” the net looking for kindred spirits, I know I have not yet really tasted of the kind of life with the truly needy.

Part of me knows that I will need much more of the reality of the redeemed people ;  and a people who live also as if we MUST have one another as companions on this journey,  for we have much wioth which to support one another.  But it is God at work among us and through us that enables this to be experienced,  otherwise we are just one more social gathering abnd have to rely (or think we have to) upon the ways of the world’s reasons for gathering;  that is, reasons which enable us to avoid being truly opened to god and to one another so that we can see life as it is; and have the courage to BE in that life.  (Some of this thinking was also begun in me as I watched a copy of The Matrix that I bought today for 4.99—I loved the premise of the “generated world” vs ” the real world”,  and the resistances to “unplugging” from the Matrix and the pull on us to “stay plugged in” to all that we think we have ever known.  I know that it’s just a movie,  but the first movie in that series was on to something good and lost that edge as they went on into the sequels.  Those parts that were onto something correctly separate a “structural evil” that robs us of our true purposes. Even though the Matrix couldn’t quite get there,  the use of some of the imagery of the faith in their struggle against the forces of darkness needs to be recaptured in resistance to our present day “comforts” and “at home-ness” with “our way of life” which Bush and all his predecessors constantly hold up to us as some sort of prize.

This need for us to “seek out” the poor is not given as an option in this “Matrix life” in which we have been “nurtured”;  (more accurately, “malformed”).   This has been the constant theme, even more so lately,  of the journey to becoming Authentic Church of which The Church of the Saviour has been reminding me of over 30 years now,  and it seems to me that I’ve barely done more than simply nod my head and read the books.