So, I’m watching the crowds continue to gather, and the reports of how volunteers are equipped to help people and how many porta-potties are in place, and I can’t help help but marvel at the lackluster rhetoric we’re seeing from religious leaders on the topic of Elizabeth and her faith, saying little-to-nothing on the state of faith in the world today. I can’t help wondering why Catholic and Anglican Bishops are offering such “beige” pablum on the monarch’s faith and saying nothing of or to the crowds of mourners, action-seekers and true disciples. “She was a good Christian,” they’re writing as they haul out some Elizabethan quotes — and they are very good quotes, indeed — but whether Elizabeth was a good Christian or merely a so-so one, we cannot say, any more than we can absolutely know the state of anyone’s soul or can absolutely define what in fact constitutes a “good Christian.” I know that by the measure of many (and often even myself) I am not a “good” one, and so reading this sort of vague drivel amounts to church leadership doing as little as they must in order to clear the inbox and be counted among the prominent voices. The articles will please those who wish to be pleased and move no one else, either toward a Tabernacle or away from one.

But what a moment this is! What visual cues we are being given! And how hugely the leadership of the mainline churches are missing the larger cue (call it the God-provided cue to speak to the queues); they’re missing the chance to say something real, something valuable and timely and differently hopeful and even (dare I say it) prophetic about the state of faith in the world — and not just the Christian faith, not just the Abrahamic Big Three Monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity — and why its continued diminishment is eroding and threatening the very underpinnings of what we call civilization.

This is the moment for some bold voice within the churches to gesture to these crowds and make note of the fact that, as ever, people want something to love, and to honor, and that as these lines demonstrate, when human beings have identified what they treasure, they will greatly inconvenience themselves, will even risk health and well-being, to serve that great pearl.