Father John Conner - Essay

     With his heart pounding rapidly, his eye's burst open.  He had to know.  He had to know if it was a dream or could it possibly be real.  “Oh please God make it a dream” his mind repeated over and over again.  “Make it a dream....”

     “A dream, thank the Lord only a dream.”  Father John Conner said as he tried to breath a sigh of relief.  Only somewhere in the back of his mind he still wasn't sure it had been.

     He had been having this same nightmare every night for the last two weeks and every night the dream consumed him a little more.  It was becoming harder and harder for him to wake himself from the nightmare. 

     For a man of seventy he considered himself to be in as good a shape as any man in his fifties.  He took pride in the fact that he could still run the young priests of his parish into the ground.  Only now, in the last two weeks he knew his age had really started to show.  The lack of good sleep was taking its toll on him.  He was snapping at everyone who came near him, he knew he was, and once he even became so angry with a parishioner  that he walked out of the confessional on him.

     The way he burst out of the confessional had caused everyone in the church to turn and look at him.  He saw two of his youngest priests, father Tim, and father James gaping at him with their mouths open and knew right what he had done.  Taking a few deep breaths and quickly returning into the confessional booth, he easily smoothed things over with his parishioner by saying that he had suddenly been struck with the closeness of the booth walls and needed to fill his lungs with outside air.  Between this story and his humble apologies the parishioner and his priest content and satisfied.

     That would never satisfy him though, for he knew it as the lie that it was.  Fifty years in the priesthood and never one lie until that one.  But, how could he tell them the truth, how could he say that suddenly the urge to kill had swelled up in him.  That if he had stayed in that confessional for one second longer he would have reached through the window and strangled the man on the other side.  A man who for that one second he hated.

      So from that moment forward he let the younger priests do most of the parish work and when father Peter, his second in the parish, came to him talked to him remembering his age and not to push himself as hard as he does.  He almost broke down then and told of his nightmares, bust he could not.  They were his private curse, his test before God.

     The next morning during his fifth cup of coffee, as he had awaken at four that morning to the nightmare, with the fear that if he slept again that night he would never recover, father Peter came into the dining room where he sat.  He told him that he had thought long on the conversation they had had the night before and was calling the bishop this very morning to arrange for a sabbatical for himself.  “While on my sabbatical he said “I will think on giving you father Peter permanent charge of the parish”.  At the moment he said it, a voice inside his mind screamed out to him.  “Don't let that lazy boot licking bastard have my church, KILL HIM!  KILL HIM!

     It took long moments for father John to gain control of himself again, but he knew right then that whatever that night mare was it had now entered a seed of evil into his mind that he would never be able to get out.