Blessed Be

A beautiful young man, dancing alone and completely naked at the edge of a pond, is not what Spencer Hill expected to see. It''s 1987, and he has been assigned a ministerial post in a Unitarian Universalist parish in Assisi, Vermont, close to the Canadian border-a far cry from his hometown of New York City. So a "sky clad" wood sprite takes him very much by surprise.

What might have been a ho-hum posting in this remote northern location turns out to be anything but that. The good news: His progressive parish doesn''t care that he''s gay. The bad news? His attempts to make a goodwill connection with The Forest, a nearby Pagan community, are consistently rebuffed for reasons he doesn''t understand.

As Spencer makes friends and enters into a love affair, he begins to explore the fraught relationship he''d had with his late father. And in his efforts to reach out to The Forest, he uncovers a dark secret the Assisi townsfolk don''t want to talk about.