Merry Christmas.. godfather.

I received this beautiful e-card from my “godsister”. I know there is no such a word in English (at least not in the Collins Dictionary) but I think its connotation is quite obvious. I mean.. just think about godparents, godfather or godmother in Christian sense...

This card reminds me of my late godfather, Lucius Duki Mandadi. I was baptized in St. Peter Cleaver’s Church at my home parish, Ranau. I didn’t know exactly why my father chose him to be my godfather except that he was my father’s good friend. In fact, my father and he went to college together. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to know him closer partly because soon after I was baptized, my parents moved to Semporna (a small town about 8 hours driving from my hometown) due to my father’s working commitment. Only some 15 years later did I came to know that he was my godfather.

“A man with a smiling face” I would describe him.. He never missed to talk to me whenever he saw me, sometimes just a small conversation but always with big smiles on his face. There were few occasions I would never forget about him... the first was when I met a car accident in the year 2000, he happened to pass by with his white van and took all the troubles to help me. Sometimes later he invited me for his daughter’s wedding. I promised him to come but I never turned up.. I felt so bad about it when I met him the next day but he simply grinned, couldn’t be bothered at all about it.

I would also never forget him for his zealous involvement in the parish organizing committee for my ordination. In one of the meetings, somebody proposed that, being my godfather, his name should be up in the ordination booklet but he humbly declined it. I regretted not to insist. But most of all, I remember when he was in agony in Queen Elizabeth Hospital.. I came to give him the Sacrament of Anointing. He was all on oxygen mask, obviously in extreme pain yet he still tried to smile at me.

I heard about the demise of him three days after he was buried... too late to attend his funeral. I remember sitting silently behind the Blessed Sacrament.. unsure what I should say for him in the prayer. I just felt so bad for many ambiguous reasons.. one thing for sure was in having taken for granted the irreversibility of time.

It has been two years now.. or was it three years ago? I must thank my godsister for being so thoughtful to me this Christmas. I guess she doesn't really realize how much this card actually mean to me but I’m sure her late father aka my godfather does.

Merry Christmas to you, godfather.

The Man of the Shroud

The "Man of the Shroud" (as it has been always named)  is an anatomical study based on the Shroud of Turin by Isabel Piczek, a noted monumental artist and theoretical physicist and a highly respected Shroud researcher.

This 24" X 5" bronze depicting Piczek's works captured my attention as I entered the Casa Nuovisima in Collegio San Pietro Apostolo. Placed on the right side of the staircase facing the main entrance of the house, one would never miss to notice the significance of it.  My own word to describe it is the "Humiliation of the Lord"..

"In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken up from the earth." (Acts 8:33)

On the Threshold

"Songs of Chokhamela"
Why have you thrown this challenge, god?
Solve this riddle of mine;
Enter my shoes, know in your own self:
An outcast, what rights do I enjoy?
Says Chokha, this low born human body
Every one drives away?


Chokhamela was a fourteenth-century untouchable saint-poet who belong to the varkari tradition of Maharashtra. These poems, the first expression of dalit poetry, express poignantly a peculiar dichotomy: the awareness of living at the margin, and God's need and love for him.