The president looks pained in Time magazine today. I prayed for him, and should do that more often. Weeks go by and I don't think about him that much. His election in 2008 sent a quiet wave of alarm through the monastic community here, and during the course of his three years in office, it has become quieter and quieter. I rarely hear a monk mention his name. Like many Roman Catholics, my brothers tend to view our president as a divisive figure and, with perhaps an exaggerated delicacy, have decided it's best not to speak about him at all. I remain convinced that he is a basically decent man, though, occasionally misguided. Meeting the Pope, he was given a book challenging the assumptions of moral relativism. Had he read the book on his knees, the world would be a safer place. He told the Pope: "I'll read it on the plane." It was unnerving for me, somehow, that having been grounded for an hour or two, speaking with the representative of an authoritative two thousand year old moral tradition, our president should then disappear into the clouds, to that place where nobody seems to be able to find him. This is what I find strangest about him: that having been elected president in 2008, he remains, almost three years later, a man who eludes us, somehow "missing in action". He is elevated to the presidency, celebrated by the world as a prophet of change, in the news every day since . . . and we can't find him. (I remember Francis Cardinal George's astonished report after his first face to face conversation with the president about abortion: "He . . . agreed with everything I said!") "Who is he?" "What does he stand for?" "Is he a Christian?" "Is he a Muslim?" Some of the questions are positively silly. Strangest of all: "Is he an American?" It is hard to imagine a person more American than this man who strikes me as the product and perfect embodiment of the free, open, morally neutral conversation that is America's public persona. Is not his ascendancy as a politician owing largely to the fact that his "brand" has such widespread recognition? He is us. He is different too I suppose. A cork is different from a wave. But a cork bobbing on a wave is soaked through and through by the sea, and maybe that's the source of our confusion. "We the people" are water. We are clear and so imagine we are pure. A cork soaked with the limpid water that we are—he keeps changing in appearance. People speculate, make inferences, and become afraid. This behavior does not flatter us. The truth is, he is us; he is soaked with us; soaked through and through by the fluid, relativistic, ever changing colors of moral indecision that we are. I fear we may be answerable at the judgment for impugning dark motives to this descent man. He is not dark, he is absorbent.

Father Raphael