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Neil's relationship with religion and God is a complicated one, complicated further by his homosexuality and his suicide, and that there is no mandatory religious attendance in Darrow like there was at Welton. He's baptized and confirmed, he was a good Christian boy. He was never flippant about religion, the way that Charlie was, but he had questions that he wasn't allowed to ask. Because it was the 1950s, and because he want to a religious school, and because he didn't know how to ask them. And when he did, when he did ask his questions of the people he loved and trusted most, sometimes the answers were not always the ones that he wanted or needed to hear. Sometimes they were the answers to the questions he'd said out loud, and not the questions he'd meant to ask but couldn't figure out how to say.
The problem with the situation he's gotten himself into--being in love with a boy who, maybe, just can't love him back as much as he does and being physical with a boy that makes him feel wanted--is that everything about it feels like a sin. He wants the surety of the Dead Poets Society back, wants that simplicity in his life of his friends and Mr. Keating and poetry. Suddenly, the structure of Latin class and church service on Sunday and silent pining seemed infinitely better than the mess he'd made for himself.
So he's sitting in the park, on the edge, staring at one of the churches. He can't bring himself to go in, because that feels like a lie too. His relationship is complicated, and even if his situation were not conflicted by the boys he's seeing or screwing or whatever he wants to call it, he doesn't feel like he belongs in a house of worship. Too full of sin, too bound for hell at this point. Even if Darrow is a more peaceful place for him, that doesn't change the things he's done and what he is.
He has to tell Gabriel, at some point. He has no idea how to do that.
The problem with the situation he's gotten himself into--being in love with a boy who, maybe, just can't love him back as much as he does and being physical with a boy that makes him feel wanted--is that everything about it feels like a sin. He wants the surety of the Dead Poets Society back, wants that simplicity in his life of his friends and Mr. Keating and poetry. Suddenly, the structure of Latin class and church service on Sunday and silent pining seemed infinitely better than the mess he'd made for himself.
So he's sitting in the park, on the edge, staring at one of the churches. He can't bring himself to go in, because that feels like a lie too. His relationship is complicated, and even if his situation were not conflicted by the boys he's seeing or screwing or whatever he wants to call it, he doesn't feel like he belongs in a house of worship. Too full of sin, too bound for hell at this point. Even if Darrow is a more peaceful place for him, that doesn't change the things he's done and what he is.
He has to tell Gabriel, at some point. He has no idea how to do that.
