Raindom Thoughts

“Something is in the room. You have felt it before you had language for it. It is old. It is everywhere. And if you get still enough to really smell it, it is putrid. It is the smell of something that was once alive and human being slowly rotted from the inside out. We call it hierarchy. But that word is almost too clean for what it actually is. What it actually is, is a wound.”

I need to remind you who is writing this before I write another word, because this particular conversation requires that kind of honesty. I am an ordained minister. A former hospital chaplain. A theologian who has spent more years than I can easily count sitting with the sacred in its most unguarded forms. At bedsides where death was making its slow and certain approach, in therapy offices where the accumulated weight of religious wounding had finally become too heavy to carr