介绍： 039 | I Will Be Your Mother Figure

"It's all hit the fan, Mother," Ned said to me over the phone. He was old enough to be my father; he called me mother because I was his priest.

Or I had been, before I moved to North Carolina from Louisville, where Ned and I met. My first job after ordination was as the as...

介绍： 039 | I Will Be Your Mother Figure

"It's all hit the fan, Mother," Ned said to me over the phone. He was old enough to be my father; he called me mother because I was his priest.

Or I had been, before I moved to North Carolina from Louisville, where Ned and I met. My first job after ordination was as the assistant priest at the Episcopal parish where he had been a member for decades. After I moved away, we stayed in touch. So when he called on that spring day, I knew exactly what had hit the fan.

At 71, Ned was in love with a 28-year-old man. And the church was going nuts.

The parish was a fairly gay-friendly community in a city of Midwestern reserve and Southern denial. A few gay men had joined the church in the 1970s, when it was a safe place for those who lived five days a week in the closet and wanted to be quietly themselves on Sundays.

For 35 years, Ned fit right in. That's how long he had been celibate after the demise of his relationship with the man he called the love of his life. Since then, he had poured his passion into the church. For Ned, being a Christian meant loving your neighbor through the good, the bad, the scandalous and the ordinary. He knew who drank too much, whose adult child was headed for her third divorce, and which pillars of the church treasured memories of affairs long since set aside. And he never breathed a word.

Now Ned was in the throes of a wild passion, and it never occurred to him to hide his joy. When he came out of the closet in his 30s, the Episcopal Church welcomed him. Since then, the church had deepened its affirmation of gays and lesbians. So he was disappointed his friends couldn't be happy for him, while they insisted they were simply concerned.

After all, what did he really know about this young man? At Ned's age, wasn't he emotionally, financially, even physically vulnerable? When the parish's two priests called him in for counseling, Ned cut it short, saying: "This is sexist. If I were seeing a 20-something woman, you'd be slapping me on the back."

I was concerned, too. Before ordination I had worked on sexual-health hotlines and at Planned Parenthood and had counseled survivors of domestic violence, where I heard more than my share of love gone wrong. But I knew enough of Ned's story to know that to him, this new love felt like a gift. And I wasn't his counselor. I was his friend, and a priest.

Priests sometimes have to ask hard questions, gently, about our parishioners' lives, but mostly we're called simply to offer them the kind of compassionate presence that we believe defines the holy. So from 500 miles away, I listened.

What I heard was a new zest for life in an old man for whom open, joyful love had long been elusive. In his 20s, Ned had married a female friend who knew he was gay. As he told me: "It was the early '60s. We thought gays could change if you prayed hard enough." He and his wife realized on their wedding night that wasn't true, but they stayed together for a decade and two children. When they separated, they shared custody and stayed friends.

Ned and his ex had been young together, cherished dreams and raised children. When she died, years after their divorce, Ned mourned with deep despair and began drinking to excess. When he ended up in hospital, close to liver and kidney failure, the critical-care doctor asked: "Were you trying to kill yourself? Because you damn near did."

"Yeah, I guess I was," Ned said. He never drank again.

.......

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