An Altar to an Unknown God

A question to begin with: when did you last encounter God?

Statistics show that a growing number of Canadians identify as having no religious belief or, more strikingly, as ‘spiritual but not religious’, the most rapidly growing group. So, many may reasonably answer, “I’ve never encountered God, because there is no God to encounter.” Or others may say, “Yes, I’ve experienced something, but not the God you talk about at that church of yours.” Whether you place yourself in one of those groups, somewhere in between, or firmly in ‘church’, my guess is this: like most people I’ve met, you carry somewhere within you a sense of ‘other’, something good beyond yourself, a presence that is often hard to name, dare I say, unknown. This sense of the divine can arise in many places. Nature: the grandeur of a sunrise, a bird in flight, the panoply of stars. The everyday: the trust of a small child, an act of kindness from a stranger, human love shared for a lifetime. Art: an abstract modern sculpture, a Renaissance painting, a single line of poetry.

I remember as a younger man hearing a line from a song by The Clash: “The gutter prince of ghetto poets was bounced out of the room by the bodyguards of greed for disturbing the tomb, his voice like flame throwers burned the ghettos in their chests…”. Was this about the degradation of a society preyed upon by a rich elite? Possibly. Or was the “gutter prince” the one foretold by prophets? A prince who was indeed rejected and cast out by those in power, only to rise again on the third day? A prince and king whose voice still burns within those who dare to follow him today? Perhaps both. Was that moment for me an encounter with God, or simply a product of my imagination? In truth, I’ve come to believe this: left to myself, I tend to fashion a god who conveniently agrees with me. That god always affirms my preferences and never asks much. Which is why I need others, a community, to keep me honest. I need voices outside my own head. I need a story that comforts and challenges. I need a book that dares to speak the truth. Many call that community the Church, and that book the Bible.

We live in a time when many question the need for the church. And I get it. The Church has, at times, caused harm, protected the wrong things, and forgotten the Gospel it was meant to live out. Yet, when the Church is faithful, it becomes not a place of easy answers, but shared searching. A place where we name what is unknown, and find that God has already been at work. In earlier times, missionaries often assumed they were bringing God to faraway places. The story they told was one of “introducing” the divine to people they saw as uncivilized. But Indigenous voices have rightly reminded us: God was already here. Present in ceremony, story, land, and spirit. The missionaries, at best, gave a new name to the One already known. At worst, they obscured the divine behind cruelty and cultural destruction. Some of the hardest truths of our past lie in that tension.

Still, I believe the longing for God, the hunger for something more, remains in every human heart. You may have your own list of “encounters.” They may not have seemed dramatic at the time. But I invite you to reflect: what moments have stirred that sense of ‘other’ in you? Could it be that those were sacred?

When in Athens, St. Paul found hidden among the many sites a little altar with a strange inscription. Intrigued, he dashed to the market square to listen and talk about it to the leaders of the city. He said, “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of devotion, I found among them an altar with this inscription: ‘To an Unknown God,’ now what you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” (Acts 17:23). It’s a brilliant moment. Paul doesn’t condemn the Athenians for their searching; he affirms it. He names the unknown God not as a threat, but as the One they were already reaching for without knowing it.

So it is for our church today. Our task is not to scold the world for being ‘secular’ but to pay attention, to listen for where the Spirit is already stirring, even among those who don’t know what to call it. We name the God who is already present. And we point gently toward the altar. Not with triumph, but with humility. Not with certainty, but with hope. Not with judgment, but with love. The altar is still there. The invitation still stands.