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From the New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, Laws, and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakra Birdie.

When people ask for advice, do they really want to hear what you have to say?

Sometimes it's hardest to find a friend who can just lend a sympathetic ear.

This week, actor Laura Dern takes us deep into a friendship that experienced a unique evolution.

Here she is, reading Ronda Mahood Lee's essay, 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 Church 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 it 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'd been celibate after the demise of his relationship with the man he called the love of his life.

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