We were greeted at the door by the Abbot, a man who upon initial examination more closely resembled a 70's disc jockey than greater Cleveland's answer to Friar Tuck. Grinning warmly behind his yellow-tinted glasses and goatee, he told us where to drop our sizable cardboard boxes and offered to take us on a tour of the premises before he put us to work.

My PSR (a.k.a. CCD, Sunday School, or Liturgical Brainwashing, depending on your perspective) class had decided to visit St. Herman's Monastery and Shelter with the intent of donating some food and clothing, and perhaps doing some menial labor to help out about the place. (Don't fret, this isn't another 'inspirational' personal essay about some quaint, old, homeless guy I gave soup to one day, honest.)

To say the Abbot was long-winded would be just the tiniest inkling of an understatement. He simply found it necessary, as we entered each room, to carefully enumerate and describe each item in the room, relating in detail the long, elaborate story of how the shelter came to be in possession of it.

I smiled and nodded as he recounted the harrowing origin of the basement's sprinkler system, trying my best not to feign interest but to be interested. Already, several of my less reverent peers were exchanging less-than-enlightened banter along the lines of 'does this guy ever clam up?' with a generous sprinkling of callousness and profanity. As the others continued their jeers, I found myself thinking that, sure, this guy enjoys his exposition, and he's more wordy than a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, but at least he's not a jerk.

Our next stop on the tour was the eating quarters, replete with servers, the majority of whom were other volunteers of about our age. With some difficulty, we managed to get our whole group into what little space wasn't currently occupied by large, Formica tables. Here, we had an opportunity to meet several of the residents (with full introduction and biography, courtesy of the Abbot), as they casually slurped their soup. Again, I found myself surrounded by hushed, rude voices, commenting on the inhabitants with an air of astonishment and disgust. I began to feel ashamed to come from the same community as these slack-jawed suburbanites, who seemed so detached from and surprised by the fact that not everyone lives in a split-level with two cars, a TV, and a higher income than some countries' GNPs. My experience at the shelter was making me feel less sorry for the dispossessed folks there, the majority of whom seemed rather amiable, and who thanked us for even showing up at the place, and more sorry for those of my peers who were so homogenized and callous as to feel immediate disregard for what was outside the 'norm' in their little bubble.

The Abbot decided to end our tour with a brief moment in the shelter's diminutive chapel. As he arranged the various candles, altars, and other liturgical detritus into their prime positions, he mentioned that since we were a church-based group, he felt it would be appropriate to conduct a brief prayer service, to sort of welcome us to the place, and to put a concluding note on our tour. What ensued was a ceremony that was different in many ways from anything I was accustomed to, as the monastery was Orthodox, and I'd never been to an Orthodox Christian service. Nonetheless, I stayed quiet and reverent, and tried my best to bow my head when the Abbott did, and stand at the right times, etc. Not surprisingly, I heard the now familiar voices giggling behind me, exchanging their shockingly disrespectful comments. I was not only struck by the stupid audacity some of my classmates would actually have to laugh at someone's religion, but by the blatant hypocrisy of it. "We're CATHOLIC," I wanted to say. "How can any of us have any place mocking a religion for having 'funny ceremonies'?! Did you forget that we listen to an old Polish guy in a funny hat, and make cryptic hand motions during our Masses?"

We never did get to do any work that day, as the Abbot's exposition ended up taking longer than the time we had allotted to stay at the shelter, and ended up simply returning home that evening. As I sat in the back of the diminutive green jeep, hurtling down the freeway towards home, several thoughts traipsed about my mind. How so many of my peers could be lacking the seemingly fundamental conventions of respect for elders, people speaking, people's faiths, and those less fortunate was a total mystery to me. If the majority of my generation is really like this, I thought, we'd better shape up, and quick, or we're all in trouble. I don't even want to begin to imagine a world run by a society full of people who are too busy ignoring each other and being generally rude to help anyone else. Creepy.