I’m guessing that whoever put this sign together wasn’t thinking literally about ears, but still: at 7:45 in the morning the question ‘who has ears’, posed theologically, just gives one a bit of an existential headache.

(Who does have ears? Rabbits have ears, but they don’t, to the best of my knowledge, pray. Corn also has ears. Fish don’t have ears – do they? What about ears that don’t work? Are the deaf shut off from God? That can’t be right. Is noise pollution destroying our ability to pray? Are we unable to listen for God in situations where our hearing is impaired? Mightn’t some of those situations be exactly the ones in which we’d be most inclined to try to listen – say, during an earthquake or other very loud emergency? Are the ears really the gateway to the soul? What then are we to make of earmuffs, or ear plugs, or those iPod earbud earphones?)

(This is why I stopped doing philosophy. The mornings were hard.)