You may have first seen him in the film "Joe," playing a blue-collar bigot seething with rage and frustration. Surely you saw him in "Young Frankenstein," portraying a monster that evoked our horror, sympathy, and somehow, our affection, all at once. (That scene of monster and Gene Wilder, tap dancing to "Puttin’ on the Ritz," can make me laugh just by thought of it.)

And of course you knew Peter Boyle from TV’s "Everybody Loves Raymond," where he played a tyrannical know-it-all who treated his family outrageously. His Frank Barone was venal, profane, selfish, mean-spirited, almost incapable of expressing affection even to his wife. And yet somehow we understood Frank, and we even liked him. I think that, as he played that character, Peter Boyle did, too.

I knew and admired Peter Boyle in all those parts, but I really had a jump on the rest of you. I first saw him in a much earlier picture. He was in a group photo, standing with his classmates in front of a Victorian building I knew very well. He was dressed in the same black habit and white collar I wore for 13 years. In the class photo, a black-haired Peter, age 19, is looming up in the back row. His craggy features are lit by a big grin. Back then, his name was Brother Francis de Sales.

For after high school, Peter Boyle had entered training to be a monk_in the same order I was to enter, four years later. He did his novitiate, his monastic boot camp, at Ammendale, near Beltsville, Md. After 15 months there, Peter took his first vows and moved with his class to the scholasticate, located north of Philadelphia in Elkins Park.

Four years after him, I entered the same order, was trained in the same novitiate regime, and, like him, moved north to Elkins Park. When my class arrived at Anselm Hall, Peter’s class was still there. But he was gone.

With his class, Peter had completed his bachelor’s degree in three years and two summers; but he didn’t stay for the fourth year, a master’s degree in theology. After his college graduation, Peter set aside black robe and white collar.

I don’t know whether he was counseled to leave or did so on his own. But, thinking back across his wonderful career, I can make a good guess at his motivation.

In the order’s Annals, the old formulary for recording such a departure was, "He left us, loving the world." The implicit smugness in that statement still rankles me. ("He left, while we more perfect souls are still here.") But in Pete Boyle’s case, I think the old phrase is literally true. He did love the world, not in its evil works and pomps, but in its astounding beauty and variety. Most of all, I think, he loved people.

That’s what all his former classmates say about him. (I’ve been in email contact with a bunch of them, now aging men themselves.) By their testimony, the young Peter was a brilliant student and very funny. But most of all they recall his gentleness, his readiness to accept others’ imperfections. Peter seemed to love others, not just in spite of their flaws, but because of them.

And that’s what his fellow actors say, too. Doris Roberts, who played the other half of his dysfunctional marriage on "Raymond," called him "a brilliant actor, a gentleman, incredibly intelligent, wonderfully well read and a loving friend." And Ray Romano, his TV son, spoke with filial affection: "The way he connected with everyone around him amazed me. The fact that he could play a convincing curmudgeon on the show, but in reality be such a compassionate and thoughtful person, is a true testament to his talent."

I think that it was his depth, added to his innate talent as an actor, that led him out of the order and into theater.

Where, of course, Peter Boyle continued to pursue an ideal. Through all his film and TV portrayals, most of them of men slogging through life with scant self-awareness, he held up a mirror to us. Implicitly, he warned us not to become savage Joe, or even the meddlesome, crotchety Frank Barone.

Maybe all those hours of monastic meditation had honed his own self-awareness, let him search his own soul and, to a degree, read the souls of others. Perhaps that’s one reason he was so good at portrayal. And maybe there’s a second reason. Maybe all that quiet introspection showed him the potential for selfishness, for outright evil, that simmers in each of us. Maybe, in seeing the man he chose not to be, he found the basis for all those portrayals of unhappy, dammed-up men.

In all his parts, Peter Boyle was wonderfully sympathetic with the characters he played. That’s what beguiled us about his villainous Joe and a long line of other film heavies, and that’s why we loved him as Ray Romano’s dad. As he played his characters, he forgave them their trespasses. Peter loved the world, but especially he loved humans in all their flawed, tawdry glory.

He said something endearingly sympathetic about his monster Frankenstein: "The Frankenstein monster I play is a baby. He’s big and ugly and scary, but he’s just been born, remember, and it’s been traumatic, and to him the whole world is a brand new alien environment. That’s how I’m playing it." No wonder we love his Frankenstein, and Peter Boyle, too.

So why did that big guy with the black hair leave the monks? Well, I think he’d always felt called to enrich the lives of others. But, after five years as a monk, he realized that he’d picked the wrong way to do it, a way that didn’t match his amazing talents. He was meant to act, to embody other humans, to mirror us and help us see. Leaving the monks was unquestionably the right, the intended, move.

And now he’s left us again, still loving the world. God bless him for all he did in it. God rest him.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. Learn about his book at JimAtwell.com.