Plus

Plus

Fifty years of inspiring service
By Nihal de Silva
It began with two rolled up slips of paper. Written on one of them was the word ‘Sports’, on the other, ‘Seminary’. They lay in the fist of an eighteen-year-old student kneeling at the chapel of St. Joseph’s College.The two words represented a fork in his life-plan. He was already a record-breaking athlete and a talented cricketer. Sports promised him a life of glamour and affluence; he already had an offer of a good job, to go with a cricketing career with the Sinhalese Sports Club.

The seminary represented a leap in the unknown. In a classic Christian gesture of letting God decide, he tossed the scraps of paper in the air and picked up the one that fell closest to him. When he unravelled the little tube he saw that the word written on it was ‘Seminary’.

Lucien Dep applied to join St. Bernard’s Seminary and was asked to sit for a paper in Latin. He was mortified when Fr. Martin Guneratne, the head of Sr. Bernard’s, told him that he had failed. His fate hung in the balance until he met his Latin teacher, the legendary Fr. Ignatius Perera. Highly incensed that his best student had been found wanting, Fr. Ignatius took up the matter personally with Fr. Martin. The upshot was that young Lucien Dep entered St. Bernard’s on August 29, 1949. He was ordained a priest on March 23, 1956. The rest is history.

His Grace, Thomas Cardinal Cooray was proud of the new ‘Warrior-for-Christ’ and gave him a tough apprenticeship as assistant in the remote parishes of the Diocese. Accordingly, Fr. Lucien served in Dunagaha, Pitipana, Palangathurai, Kattuwa and had no less than four stints at Uswetakeiyawa. Many of these isolated stations did not, in those days, have basic amenities such as electricity and running water. True to his calling, Fr. Lucien took it all in his stride.

In those years, he often used his sporting skills as a tool for uniting the community and bringing young people to the church. He set up basic gym facilities, organised drill displays and sports meets. On one memorable day, when his young protégés were performing before the Bishop, they lost their nerve when it came to diving through the ‘Ring of Fire’. Fr. Lucien, to the dismay of His Lordship, tucked up his cassock and demonstrated how the feat was to be performed.

Fr. Lucien had two tours of duty at St. Joseph’s College; first from 1956 to 1959 and again from 1972 to 1975. It was during his first stint that he experienced the greatest disappointment of his life. He was being groomed for the position of ‘Prefect of Games’ when the incumbent, Mr. Ekanayaka, retired. Top sportsman that he was, Fr. Lucien believed that he could make a serious contribution in this field and was looking forward to the day of his appointment. To the surprise of not only Fr. Lucien, but the rest of the school community, Fr. Peter Pillai appointed Fr. Gerry Abeysekara to that position.

It was much later that Fr. Lucien found out that Fr. Gerry had suffered a traumatic bereavement at that time, and Fr. Peter, the wisest of Rectors, had decided that his was the greater need. Good sportsman and good priest that he was, Fr. Lucien took the disappointment in his stride and soldiered on.
Fr. Lucien was reassigned to St. Joseph’s in 1972. It was during this stint that he had the opportunity, as Prefect of Games, to contribute his sporting skills and knowledge.

Throughout his career, Fr. Lucien has relished the challenge of building, be it a grotto, a community centre or a church. His technique has been to dive into the project without the least concern for budgets or availability of funds. His driving force is a firm conviction that ‘God will provide’. God has indeed provided.

The Church at Uswetakeiyawa was only a dream when he gathered the villagers together to uproot forty-two coconut trees one afternoon. He had Rs. 45,305.00 in the kitty, and a parish deeply divided along political lines. When Fr. Lucien went to a kiosk nearby to pick up some soft drinks, he overheard the following words uttered by the owner, who was unaware of his presence. “I hear that the new priest is planning to build a church here,” the man had said.

“The day he does that, I’ll shave my head and walk through the village.” Back in the parish ten years later to finish the last phase of the church project, Fr. Lucien visited the same kiosk, now a substantial shop. He had planned to invite the owner to make good on his promise but sadly, in the ensuing years, the man had lost all his hair.

Fr. Lucien was transferred to St. Mary’s, Bambalpitiya in 1997. Once again he felt challenged by the rundown condition of the church. Today, he can look with pride at the magnificently restored edifice of St. Mary’s. True, the parishioners rallied round and contributed the funds, but it was his own confidence to take on the giant task, and his drive to see it through, that got the job done.

Fr. Lucien is a man who has never hesitated to speak his mind. Indeed, many parishioners of Bambalapitiya look on him as the Sanath Jayasuriya of the pulpit, given his propensity to flash outside the off stump. Even those who have been at the receiving end of his ‘bouncers’ will, however, admit that there is no malice in the man. And now it is time to say goodbye.

Fr. Lucien is not about to go quietly into the night. His fifty years of priestly life, and seventy-six on the other clock, sit lightly on his shoulders. Time has not sapped the energy of his stride nor dimmed the sparkle in his eye. So God will surely have more tasks for him: another church to restore, one more grotto to construct, and one more community centre to build. We know that he will take on each of these challenges with his customary energy.
The parishioners celebrated Fr. Lucien’s Golden Jubilee with Holy Mass at St. Mary’s, Bambalapitiya on April 24.

Back to Plus