“Yes,” Morgen said patiently. “Yes it is. Faith sustains us; religion divides. But answer this. If you are climbing a mountain and find that the rope keeping you safe has rotten fibers, do you cast off the entire rope? Will you abandon your entire faith because of the rotten fibers?”

Seth frowned.

“Faith binds us to the spiritual,” Morgen continued. “But faith and religion have become intertwined in the same rope. In every organized religion true faith and blasphemy lie next to each other like strands in a rope. I despair of being able to tease away the evil without destroying the whole. I am mortal and limited and don’t always have the vision to truly know which fibers should remain and which should go.”

“So you just accept the church as it is, warts and all.”

Morgen nodded slowly. “Mostly.” He paused. “As best I can. You see, instead of the stained glass example, I look at every religion as a different doorway to God. As finite creatures, we can never comprehend more than one small part of the infinite. So it’s no wonder that different people, cultures see just their own small true part of God.”

“Like the blind men describing an elephant?” Zoe prompted.

“Precisely. We are all blind in our own ways,” Morgen said. “I believe that every religion has its own true glimpse of God.”

“But how can they all claim to be the one true way?” Zoe asked.

“They can’t really. Not honestly. Not in true good faith,” Morgen said. “The exclusion, the rejection and reviling of other views of God are the evil that men do.”

“And women,” Zoe added.

Morgen smiled. “And women. God is male. God is female … both and neither. We try to catch a glimpse of God and we want so badly to believe in someone like ourselves.”

“So faith is our connection with the divine, and religion is our attempt to impose our vision of God on other people?”

The old priest nodded.

“But don’t you think it’s wrong to hold up one vision of God over another or to try and make God male or female exclusively?” Zoe asked. “Isn’t that some sort of intellectual idolatry: to limit the limitless, to put a face on the faceless? Perhaps the commandment against graven images was an attempt to have us focus on the abstract, the infinite, the all-encompassing rather than on the concrete embodiment of the theology of the moment.”

“You are right,” Morgen agreed. “Limiting God in whatever way or only believing in a God that looks like you is blasphemy, pure and simple. I believe—” He stopped abruptiy as they heard shouts from outside the cabin.

“Quick,” Morgen said to Gunther. “The Passion.” Seth’s eyes followed Gunther’s bent physique as he shambled to the corner of the hut occupied by a mattressless bunk bed.

“How did you get that!” Seth exclaimed when he saw Gunther bend low to pick up the black metal briefcase they had taken from the Thule Gesellschaft bank the previous day.