There are times when you don’t miss a thing until long after it’s gone.
You assume it’s there, but you don’t know exactly where. Then, one day you need or want it and so you look. But you cannot find it. It’s long gone.
So, it is with “The Reverend,” a complimentary title that once, for decades if not centuries, was imposed upon men and women of the clothe. But “The Reverend” has passed and, sadly, no one really noticed.
It was well known that churches were in decline and, consequently, people were no longer flooding them on Sundays. Also, generally known was the waning influence of the Pope and his counterparts in other denominations.
There are consequences, of course, for “The Reverend’s” passing.
#1 – You don’t have a real pastor readily at hand for a memorial service, not even for a baptism or marriage ceremony.
#2 – While it was that you could in public rather easily identify an ordained pastor, that’s no longer the case; and
#3 - Worst of all – nothing is really being “revered”, certainly not like pastors once were, before, that is, “they went away,” the Reverends did.
The overall result is of course a quite serious consequence: with “the pastor gone” we have no one of sacred reliability to turn to in times of religious or spiritual need.
So, it is: We stumble. We fret. We cry. Over our loss.
“Dang it!” we say, ‘Can’t anyone get anything right anymore.”
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