Soldiers Unknown

"YAHWEH, I KNOW YOU ARE HERE."

Before pandemic, one of the last Roman Catholic masses I can recall was at the Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church in Mount Vernon, where the title for the homily was "What's in a Name?" taking specific time to remind parishioners that in the days of the Old Testament, the name of God was so sacred that it could not be spoken, a tradition carried on among Orthodox Jews, which you might notice if you ever read passages in which the "o" is omitted when God is referenced.

And, I recalled during Easter mass, at that parish, on this Easter, sitting in an overflow room, watching the celebration of the holiest day in the Christian faith, to accommodate the largest in person worship since the doors of the churches were closed, the title of this post from the days when I was a son of a Baptist preacher attending a Jesuit high school, when the guitar mass was the appealing thing about worship for younger believers, while today, intriguingly, Millennials are flocking to Latin mass, in an age when, even though they are thought to have the least faith, even when the church was found to have a sharp decline of 12% over the past decade, and the sharpest decline in church membership in the historic black church during the administration of the first black president, were found to be the most avid readers of scriptures that today find their lowest levels of reading in history, despite record sales of Bibles at the beginning of a public health crisis, and even 24% of atheists saying that they, for the first time, had decided to pray.

Even some Christians deny a virgin birth, probably most churches support abortion, and it is en vogue, in a secular world to find a rainbow flag or black lives matter plastered across the front of just about every church, but just like the declaration of a communicable disease in the Commonwealth of Virginia before even a presumptive positive, much less laboratory confirmed case of infection had been reported, most churches with over 100 participants in weekly devotional worship had apparently spoken to God, and some even say they had conferred with the CDC, and cancelled worship indefinitely before the first order to prohibit nonessential social gatherings of more than 100 people was ever issued from the nation's only physician serving as a state governor on March 15, 2020, two days before the sweeping executive order on March 17, 2020 that reduced the number to ten.

Some churches even have landing page videos to display their efforts in protesting for social justice during a pandemic crisis, but very few were marching or even in a courtroom when the law told them that their first liberty under the Constitution had been put on hold, indefinitely, and it is interesting that members of the Fourth Estate, even the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" Washington Post, never cared to make a reference to the first litigation brought to defend those first guaranteed liberties in the celebrated First Amendment, and dedicated all of their efforts in an election of a lifetime to talk about a duty to vote for a government the President recently said in his address was not a far away capital but was "the American people," even if he gets the nice office and pay check.