#mastermindmonday

Nathan Ford - Thief

(apologies for being a day late for Mastermind Monday renew-leverage)

Prompt: Why did Nate Ford choose to enter seminary and why did he leave?

Nate grew up with Jimmy Ford the con man. His father was the bad guy and trained Nate to be the same, but it didn't sit well with him. He was a naturally moral person and Jimmy hints that his mother was very similar. Given their strong Irish heritage, Nate likely had decent exposure to Catholicism, perhaps through his mother. To him, the faith became a connection to her when she was gone and represented the opposite of his father. He clung to it like a lifeline in his early years and began to seriously consider a religious vocation. He went so far as to enter the seminary.

Eventually, Nate left the seminary to get married and start a family, but that was not the beginning of his crisis of faith. In the Catholic community, it isn't in any way shameful for a man to leave the seminary. The first two years are built around intense prayer and discernment so the seminarians can decide if they're really being called to the priesthood or if God has another vocation planned for them. If they conclude that they have a different vocation, their peers and mentors are wholeheartedly supportive of them leaving. They don't believe any one vocation is more important than another because a faithful life is about doing what God asks. Somehow, Nate felt God was calling him to something else. Maggie solidified that feeling, they got married, and together they had Sam.

In one of the flashbacks to his son's illness and death, we see Nate with a rosary, so he didn't lose his faith until after his son died. Instead of accepting God's will in the wake of his son's death and searching for meaning, he fell apart. He probably felt that, if God had just provided the insurance money that seemed within reach, the experimental procedure would have saved Sam's life. After all, IYS only had to sign the papers. Realistically, the procedure may not have saved his son, but, looking back on a tragedy, the one thing someone didn't try always sounds like the one thing that would've worked. Nate spent his life in service to God and law to make sure he never ended up like his father. He overcame so much to be a good man and he felt that, in the ideal world he thought he lived in, it would earn him a good life. He began to blame God for not taking the easy step to get him the money. He recognized those feelings as sinful, but perhaps he felt that he couldn't control himself. He was distraught. In the chaos and pain, he heard the whisper of some saying his father once told him about how the law Nate thought was so good didn't always help good people and it rang a little truer that time. He started to see the seeds of his father in him and lose hope. He felt that there was no escaping the darkness his father pushed on him despite the fact that he was still, in everyone's mind, an honest man.

His disillusionment with faith and feeling that he was just like his father softened him towards the idea of an illegal heist. The notion that he his illegal actions would only hurt a bad person provided enough of an excuse to accept the job. A flicker of hope passed through his mind. If the law doesn't help good people and I'm destined to be a criminal like my father, he thought, maybe crime can help good people. Their success not only in completing the job but in recognizing and getting revenge for the double cross spurred him on to continuing those actions as long as he was in control of making sure their targets were bad enough to deserve it. Still, for much of the series, he remained internally conflicted about the morality of what they were doing. He still believed what he was doing was wrong, but tried to use the good results as his personal redemption. Much like Eliot, he cast himself as the antihero who did bad things for the greater good to save good people from the burden of sin. Unlike Eliot, he couldn't quite make peace with the idea and it continued to eat at him. He fought back with alcohol.