O.k.—what am I looking at here. Brother Giles is crumpled up on the floor in front of the refrigerator on all fours with his cheek apparently pressed to the floor. He is eighty eight years old. An eighty-eight year old man doesn't do this. Giles does it every morning—I mean every single morning, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. I don't usually pay much attention to it, but this morning I find myself staring. There is no one else in the refectory, just Giles and I, so I indulge myself. It is an uncanny sight. Evidently, there is some sort of tray that collects condensation beneath the refrigerator that needs to be emptied frequently and which Giles attends to with the quiet concentration of an acolyte preparing the altar for holy mass. Everything Giles does is carried out with this amazing concentration and sense of purpose. The ritual begins in the scullery where he wets a cloth with warm water and drapes it over his walker. Proceeding to the refectory he approaches the table with the two toasters intent upon clearing the space around them of crumbs, takes the honey dispensers, one by one, removes the cap, wipes clean the spout, the neck and entire outside surface, replaces them, does the same for the space around the milk machines, and then heads over to the refrigerator for his little floor exercise. He does this every single day: the day the anguished priest wrote in NCR that the publication of the new sacramentary made him "want to weep!", the day Prince Andrew married Kate Middleton, the day the story broke that Osama Bin Laden was gunned down. And if tomorrow, if the clouds suddenly part and Jesus descends in glory, he'll find Giles holding a sticky honey jar, looking up at him quizzically with an expression as if to say: "Uh . . . let me finish this—and I'll be right with you."

Father Raphael