Pushed away: Incense

It treats reverence as a confidence trick and steps around anything that would place it in the smaller position, while remaining unusually easy to win with praise. The worth that cannot be received from above gets sourced sideways, from whoever happens to be flattering, and beneath that runs an early verdict of not belonging here at all, made plausible by a household that measured people in possessions and rank. What it asks for is one unpoliced moment of awe, with nothing owed and nobody present to grade it.

Tell me I'm remarkable and I'll stay all night; ask me to kneel and I'm already gone.

It echoes Hrafnkell, the Icelandic chieftain who, once his temple was burned and his standing stripped, declared belief in gods to be foolishness and never made an offering again. The form implies a task: to see that the renunciation was made in humiliation, and was therefore never really about the gods.