with each individual boy he helps them towards becoming what they are meant to be.  Which is what love is.
Another boy, Neil, has an oppressive bullying father.  Neil’s life is planned out by his ill parent.  He must get good grades from the best private school in America, then to Harvard, and then to be a doctor.  His father exerts his massive ego on his child, without looking into his son’s spirit to discover what his son is actually meant to be.  The boy’s inner nature tells him he is meant to be an actor, but this clashes with his father’s wishes.  But Neil is encouraged by Mr Keating’s love to grow, and he gets the part of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  He plays the part well, finds happiness, reaches his potential, but his father unexpectedly turns up at the performance.  His father reacts by taking Neil from the school, and plans a new future for Neil in a military school and from there on to medical training.  For Neil it is a life sentence.  The person who should be loving Neil the most – his own father, is crushing his spirit, giving Neil the opposite of love; anti-love.  Holding Neil back from what he is naturally.  It is too much for Neil.  He takes his father’s gun and kills himself.  Stupidly, and probably accurately to life, his father and mother are thrown into instant shock and grief when they find Neil’s body.  But by then it is too late to give love to their son.

The inquest begins.  A search for blame.  When one understands the persecution of truth and love, it is easy to predict what happens from there on.  The reality, the truth is that it was the oppressive father who killed his son through the mental cruelty which made his son ill and led to the suicide.  But the guilty party wants a scapegoat.  As guilty people do.  To disguise their guilt.  They have to attack truth, and love.

Behold, and lo, the school’s verdict after the inquest was that the unorthodox teaching methods of Mr Keating led directly to Neil’s death.  It may sound mad.  In fact it is mad!  But this is exactly how persecution works in real life.  In Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack Nicholson’s love is persecuted and Nicholson’s character is destroyed with electro-convulsive therapy, even though he had helped cure many patients.  So Mr Keating was also scape-goated.  He is sacked.  He gave the love which helped the boys to grow; the truth of his love exposed the truth of one father’s evil.  When one exposes evil with truth, evil defends itself by fighting back.  The evil in the father defended itself by attacking the good in Mr Keating.  Exactly as in real life.

At some point in our lives most, if not all of us are guilty of persecuting someone good.  I’ve been guilty of it.  It takes strength to look inside ourselves and ask “am I really doing the right thing?”  Many of us don’t find the spiritual strength to confess “I have done something bad.  I want to change, and I want to become a good person.”  It takes strength.  We fear if we confess to doing something bad, we will get frowned on by others, so often we hide our badness by persecuting truth and good.  The easier option in the short term.  But in absolute terms persecuting good has a bad effect on our own souls.  Doing bad counts against our souls, but then not confessing and