Just minutes before we began to pray Compline tonight the abbey church was invaded by teenagers. They were pretty much on schedule since these Confirmation groups visit the monastery on a regular cycle. In the evening, as the sun is going down, you see car after car pulling up in front of the guest house and you know there's going to be a crowd at Compline. A candidate in the novitiate, who comes from Aruba, was startled one night by another Confirmation group, turning in choir and staring at the whispering, giggling stampede filing into church in the semi-darkness. He later told me he was struck that the monks didn't show the slightest annoyance at the noise. Compline is prayed in the dark — the only one of the prayer services that the monks memorize in its entirety. This gives the prayer service something of the quality of a lullaby as the cantor intones: "Te lucis ante terminum . . ." You might expect that a bunch of teenagers huddled together might be restless and bored watching the monks pray in the dark — and often they are. So it was surprising to find them, as I did tonight, sitting very still, very quiet and very attentive. It was actually a little disconcerting. I could feel them watching us and wondered what they were thinking. They were a powerful presence in the back of the church and I began to feel an ache in my heart as if I were singing a lullaby and these young people were my own children. I will never be a parent or sing a child to sleep but, tonight, I had a taste of what that might be like. I found myself really wanting those young people to sleep well tonight, to sleep secure and be safe in a world that is not safe, to not be anxious or afraid but at peace and hopeful about tomorrow even as darkness falls. And as I sang to them, I had a premonition that something was passing away. What is passing? A Fall day that will never come again? My own youth dwindling to middle age? No — something bigger. An era is passing away. The brash youth of an over-confident America is giving way to the sober realism of a chastened adulthood and innocent children are witnessing the crisis. Tonight, forty of them sat gazing into the darkness where a monk they will never meet and whose face they could not see, prayed they would know as he knows that every ending is only another step toward the fulfillment of Jesus' promise. It has not entered the human mind, nor has the human heart imagined what lies in store for those who love Him.

Father Raphael