The Family Business

Nothing like it, inheriting the family business. The difficult work was in getting it started, and there's nothing quite like word-of-mouth to spread momentum and hope among those wishing to avail themselves of such a unique product. Word-of-mouth has it, when dishing out spirituality, over conventional advertising. Word-of-mouth goes directly to that demographic most in need and most likely to respond to the enticement of proffered hope; one need but have inviolable faith.

And that's quite the family business. In most families there may be some kind of family treasure handed down from father to son, ad infinitude, but in the spirituality and touch-healing business that's quite the gift; an heirloom treasure of the living touch. Healing hands that upon application are capable of producing an extraordinary effect. In fact, a quite other-worldly effect, a transcendent moment eclipsing the kindly ministrations of church-sanctioned priesthood.

For this is a quite unaffiliated religious institution, the Dal-Grotto Mission, hard by Eganville, Ontario. A place where business comes right to the door of the miracle-maker, the man with the healing touch. Desperate people obedient to the rules of the establishment; to sign in before eight in the morning if you have any hopes of being tended to that very day. For this is a busy man, this Reverend Dale. And they come in droves, imploring, pleading for a moment of his time.

Jesus Christ was more in the mode of one dispossessed of property; he travelled from village to village, from town to city almost as a mendicant, with his faithful followers, spreading the goodness of God's promise to humankind. Reverend Dale is more of the mendacious mode, hunkered down on his property with its grotto and its figure of Christ the King. Like Jesus, Reverend Dale aspires, and like his father before him, to minister to the halt, the lame, the blind and impoverished.

Heaven forfend that they be too impoverished to grace the good reverend with a donation. For he too must have his daily bread. On his lovely lakeside property he has established a canteen where those anxious for his attention, remaining in their cars, their tents, sacrificing their time and hope for his attention, may purchase candy bars, soft drinks, Freezies. The Reverend Dale has felt obligated by his worship of Jesus and his love for his fellow man to follow in his blessed father Edmund's footsteps.

Or laying on of hands, as the case may be. And he has proven himself exceptionally enterprising, as entrepreneurial as his sainted father before him. In a truly Eureka! moment he bethought himself of opening up the family business to a mail order sideline. As a testament to the power of his hereditary gift, he has managed to hone that priceless gift to a fine edge; conveying the power that God has gifted his family with, through the medium of time and space.

Send a recent likeness, a description of one's malady, and sit back. Reverend Dale has it in his extraordinary supra-natural powers, to mend all ills. Even at a remove. At your service. Business gone sour? Send a photo. Reached end-stage disease predation? Send a photo. Wife threatening to leave with the children? Send a photo. Out on bail for your court hearing resulting from a criminal charge of sexual assault? Send a photo.

Oops, scratch that last one. Reverend, heal thine self.