Dear Brother Placido — at moments, we North Americans must seem to him to have come from another planet. You have to admire the quiet trust and persistence with which he endures the awkward moments &mdash the disconcerting encounters with our North American culture. I guess a certain feeling of displacement is the lot of a man from Peru sharing a cloister with thirty-five North American men in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Even so, I sometimes wish I could spare him the pain of it. Placido is a Junior monk, a devout and very intelligent guy. He has lived in America for years, was a practicing lawyer in Chicago and actually studied Constitutional Law with Barack Obama at the University of Chicago in 2001. It's not like he just "got off the boat". He is pretty Americanized, but the defining lines of his character were drawn in far away Peru, and on some level, Americans remain an enigma to him. Moments occurring every day remind him of that. He and two other Junior monks and a nun taking part in a class sit down for lunch one day. In the middle of an easy-going conversation, one of them interjects: "Brothers and sisters, something happened to me this morning; I think it may have been a breakthrough . . . something &mdash how can I say it &mdash shifted deep inside me &mdash I don't know how to describe it . . . " Placido's head sinks, his eyes nervously scan the faces of the others at the table. Poor guy. He is the only one at table caught off guard by this instantaneous transformation of a breezy lunch into a therapy session. His companions all make the transition effortlessly as the presider commences a detailed description of a deeply subjective inner experience of . . . something. Placido's early spiritual mentors in Peru were a different cast of people. As a boy, growing up, nobody he respected behaved like this. He wonders what he is watching. What is the motivation of the others at table to break off a perfectly enjoyable conversation and listen to a man struggle for five minutes to describe some sort of inner happening which, as becomes more evident the longer he talks, can't actually be described. After sixty seconds, Placido wants to dive head first into his chicken soup and never be seen again. But these people are his "brothers" and "sisters". A destiny has been appointed him by God which can only be worked out with these people at awkward moments just like this. He cannot not be a part of this. But how does he enter into this? The monk relating his inner experience suddenly changes his tone. In response to a sister's question, he suggests that she has quite misunderstood what he was saying. He sounds disappointed, even a bit hurt. A tense silence ensues. Nobody knows what to say. Just then, the disappointed monk glances at Placido who is bent over looking straight at his soup &mdash and it is Jesus. Jesus is there sitting in the guise of a reticent man from Peru eating a bowl of soup. Jesus never raises his face or utters a word, but the disconcerted monk hears the Lord say to him: "Brother &mdash I often felt alone as you do now. I was often misunderstood. It is an inescapable aspect of the human condition I came to share with you. We are all from a foreign country, brother. We are each of us alone."

Father Raphael