Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 35

Portrait of a smokestack at work, the only work it’s ever known, doing the same work as Mrs. Mary Brogan at the sacrament of her religion – the strange Church of Phillip Morris.  Consider, if you will, whether or not a smokestack and a church steeple really are so dissimilar. 

 

In the rolling mills and sheet mills, in the harr and boom of the blast fires, iron and carbon are pounded into a bar of steel.  By the process smoke comes out the stacks. 

 

In the rolling pews and sheetmetal chapels this Sunday, like every Sunday before, sit iron men and carbon women.  People taking a pounding.  Ready to be alloyed.  A fiery process that turns sinners into saints.  A process that uses the hammer of the Holy Bible, the flame of the Holy Spirit, and certainly, most definitely, must send smoke up the chimney – or in this case – steeple. 

 

Remember, you can’t see men shucking sin.  You can't smell a woman’s prayers.  You’ll never find the molt of a person’s mistakes.  But that doesn’t mean that a church isn’t a refinery making angels out of men.  Angels made from clay, fired by a ghost, with a byproduct of smoke going somewhere. . .