Dinner

On Wednesday night, the night after The Talk, I had dinner with the parish priest. It wasn’t as a result of The Talk, it was actually organised just before Easter. Despite some disagreements on some fairly fundamental things, homosexuality chief among them, it was a great night.

He’s known me since I was fifteen; he has this uncanny and often totally inconvenient knack for being able to look at a person and surmise what is wrong and then manage to get them to spill all. And I cannot lie to the man. True, I cannot really lie convincingly to many people, but to him it’s impossible.

When I got in the car he asked how I was. “Frazzled.” I answered. Before I knew it I told him about the previous night’s confrontation. As I said the words I thought “What the fuck are you doing!!??” but he didn’t blink. I knew that whatever doctrinal issues he may have, he’d understand where I was coming from in terms of the overwhelming sensation of being sideswiped. “You know Dan,” he said “that whatever disagreements we have you know you can just say ‘I don’t want to talk about this further’ and we’ll move on to something else and it won’t affect our friendship.”

With that caveat in mind, we went over most of the issues that I had discussed with Sister and found, to nobody’s surprise, that he agreed with her on nearly all of them, yet strangely it was nowhere as hard to talk about it with him as it was with Sister. The one disagreement between his view and hers was that Fr said that being gay in and of itself is morally neutral and that any kind of sex (straight or not) outside of marriage is wrong, whereas Sister referred to being gay as a “sickness”.

All in all he seemed to treat me much more gently than Sister, and certainly with much much more of a sense of humour about things. But then he already knew; he knew I was gay before I did. I asked him, point blank, “you knew back then didn’t you?” He replied “Yes, I strongly suspected it. And I gave you so many opportunities to confide in me but you never fucken took any of them!” I laughed. The thing is I can remember a few occasions when I’d been on the cusp of telling him, but something always got in the way to prevent it. But what’s done is done.

Ultimately it was a very cathartic evening in which I was able to get off my chest a day’s worth of frenzied, pent-up frustrations. I was going to go into a bit more detail, but there isn’t really much point… it’s the same old topics, all of which I mentioned in the post about The Talk, so you can use your imaginations.

In the last week there have been some new developments which I’ll write about tomorrow...