I have to go to a meeting of Junior Directors in Canada. These are monks who work with newer monks who have graduated from being "novices", and are now "juniors", that is, they have taken the vows of Obedience, Stability, and Conversion of Manners, but only for three years—not for life. Anyway, to go to Canada, I need a passport, and I let mine expire. (It's not like I use it a lot.) So I go to the federal building today on Bluff Street in Downtown Dubuque to speak to the Passport agent. For most people all this would feel quite routine. For me it feels strange. I am a cloistered monk. I live a life of silence and solitude. My life is so quiet and uneventful that, on most days, the only really interesting thing that happens is that I meet and share intimate converse with the living God. I become absorbed in these encounters—well, because. . . there's not much else happening in a monastery. So—it can be disconcerting to break out of this familiar and wholly marvelous friendship with the Divine in which one feels so alive to God, so absolutely unique and favored by God, only to realize that, at the passport office, you are just one "applicant" among millions of others. I am no better than anyone else and certainly make no claim to be exempt from the mundane duties of an American citizen. I am only reflecting this evening on how strange it feels for a monk. Gazing out my window at the sultry air hanging over the newly planted fields, vibrant with the light of the dying sun, it occurs to me why the trip to the post office felt so strange. A Trappist monk actually has rather few occasions to meet a complete stranger. I spend a typical day surrounded by people I know very well and who know me. I don't meet a lot of strangers. I think of someone who, in the course of an ordinary day, might visit a shopping center, use an airport, ride a subway, or go to a concert. In all these places, they encounter salesmen, ticket agents, passengers and spectators who are strangers and who relate to them with that reserve and watchfulness one brings to an encounter with someone you know nothing about. Maybe, bumping up all day against people who don't know you in a world as dangerous as ours thickens the skin a little after a while. And maybe, not meeting strangers on a regular basis, you are more sensitive to this aspect of the human condition—that we live in a world of strangers.

Father Raphael