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To be very crass, if you have never smelled cow manure, you do not know what cow manure smells like. You can become educated about the smell of cow manure by visiting a dairy farm, but if you have been cut off from the idea that you can have a regular on-going experience of God, it might be as difficult to come across the experience of God as it is to hear 14 vowels when you only grew up with 5. I know people who have been so damaged by the rigid forms in which God was packaged for them that their capacity to actually have an experience of God—as opposed to an idea or belief about God—has been well nigh severed from their body. That’s a harsh assessment, a painful assessment – and yet true, which is why bad theology and spiritual indifference both make me so very angry. Because they both harm people in the vital sensory function of perceiving God. Luckily, God continues to seek us even when we have lost our capacity for seeking God. When some wall has come between my heart and God, God has infused an opening into that wall. God creates a back door and finds an empty room to dwell in.

To quote Marjorie Suchocki: “It’s not just that we need to pray—it’s that God needs us to do the praying. Our prayers actually make a difference to what God can do...God works with the world as it is. Quite simply, prayer changes the “isness” of the world. A world where there is this specific praying going on is not the same as a world where this praying is not going on.”

If we can become those authentic friends, through our worship and our study and our conversations, then our roots become woven together in the places where we are at our best and deepest. And that matters because it keeps us stable. It matters because when we sustain injury or damage, the roots to which we’re tied give us strength.

This is how our situation is not like the Black Death: the fear and cruelty and forceful power that afflict us at this moment do not have to be contagious. We can do what faith requires of us with protection from the chaos and disease of our time. Because love is our protection and love is our weapon. It is our vaccine and antibiotic and germicide. WE are inoculated with love and courage in our faith community, and we walk through the world with protection.

Even the phrase “an unknown god” is ambiguous, because it could mean two things. It could mean, “we do not know who our god is;” or it could mean, “the god that we do know is a mystery.” Paul understands it the first way, because his argument with the Athenians is to show them that he knows the god that they don’t know. So when I try to understand this story, I start with Paul’s idea: that the Athenians have consciously created an idol to a god who has some controlling influence over them, but whose name and character they do not know.