An Undercover Priest

They took the title.

They took the standing, the collar, the institutional permission, the public right to stand at the altar and speak in the Church’s name. In the official sense, I am no longer a priest. Fine. Let us start there.

But there are things they did not take.

They did not take the eyes.

They did not take the reflex that still notices who is ashamed, who is lying, who is lonely, who is hungry for mercy, who is trying to confess without using the word. They did not take the part of me trained to hear what people mean underneath what they say. They did not take the instinct to sit in the wreckage with someone long after the respectable world has moved on.

That is why I think of myself now as an undercover priest.

Not because I am pretending to hold an office that is no longer mine. Not because I need religious costume to feel important. I mean something simpler than that, and harder. I mean that priesthood, once it gets into your bones, does not leave cleanly. It lingers in the body. In the nervous system. In the way you listen. In the way you read a room. In the way you hear confession in ordinary conversation and despair in ordinary jokes.

Maybe that is why the statue on the front of Redemptive Trauma mattered so much to me. Michelangelo’s Deposition. Christ’s body being held, lowered, borne by others after the violence is done. Not triumph. Not spectacle. Not the polished confidence of religious authority. Just weight, grief, tenderness, and the terrible dignity of staying near what has been broken.

That is the Christianity I trust.

Tradition holds that Michelangelo gave his own face to the hooded figure behind the broken body, as if to place himself not above suffering but under it. Not explaining it. Carrying it. Bearing witness to it. Helping lower the weight of it to the ground. That feels closer to priesthood than half the pomp the Church mistakes for leadership.

Because priesthood was never meant to be mainly about status. It was meant to be about proximity. About telling the truth. About remaining near the broken when others are already backing away. About refusing to confuse authority with holiness or reputation with faithfulness.

The Church can remove a man from ministry. It is much less able to remove the marks ministry leaves on a man.

So here I am. No licence. No parish. No altar guild. No bishop waiting for my annual report. Just a man who has buried the dead, blessed the broken, preached the gospel, failed publicly, collapsed personally, and kept enough of the old wiring to recognize grace and fraud when they walk into the room.

That last part matters.

Because one of the strange gifts of exile is clarity. Once the institution no longer has a use for you, you start to see how much of it ran on performance, fear, careerism, and managed ambiguity. You also start to see what remains when all that falls away: the lonely, the addicted, the grieving, the ashamed, the ones still asking whether mercy is real and whether God tells the truth.

That is priestly ground, whether anyone grants me the title or not.

So no, I am not a priest in good standing.

But I am still priest-shaped.

Still listening.
Still noticing.
Still helping lower the weight.

Call it what you want.

I call it being an undercover priest.