Suddenly Francis shut the volume, placed it on the desk and started to walk backwards from it as if he was trying to move away from a Cobra ready to strike. He uttered under his breath, as if he was talking to his soul; that line from the holy book,

"For whom, then do I work so hard and grudge myself pleasures?"

Retreating thus, his rosary and the heavy Crucifix hanging at the end, banged on the chair making a metallic sound like the ringing of bells hanging in the Hindu Temples he used to pass by in his native home in Goa. His robe was half open and clothing underneath also was unbuttoned as if he had planned undressing to retire for the night. Then something snapped in his mind and in a sudden frenzy he pulled all the habiliments of a Roman Catholic Priest and flung them on the bed. He pulled the last piece and was left with his trousers and a loose tank top. Then he opened the door of his little cottage behind the church, stepped out in the night and rapidly headed straight into the old cemetery on the hill behind the parsonage. He walked through the neatly arranged graves and followed the foot path leaving behind the cobblestone, narrow path and soon reached at the edge of cemetery and stepped out of the Church boundary. Soon he was on a side road that once connected to the Zuni Tribal Village. Apparently, he must have used that path many times because in that pitched dark night he navigated without knocking down any lose tombstones. In the dark he was walking rapidly towards nowhere; just going and going somewhere, as if following his inner compass.

The summer night was warm and moon was barely peeping up from over the Mesa surrounding the valley giving it an appearance of a vast medieval castle of a Scottish king. He knew his way around and soon reached the highway leading north towards Utah Boarder. He was not looking at anything nor his mind filled with any thoughts. In that vast and empty landscape he would have looked like a walking dead from the Indian Wars. It was past midnight and nothing was moving except the tumbleweeds running across with the cross wind and every now and then a coyote came from the brush to check him out and vanished in the sage bushes clinging onto the dry surface of that volcanic, read-indigo- dusty landscape. A mountain lion called out for a mate, somewhere up in the crevices but he had not heard any sound at all; everything was eerily silent to his agonizing mind.

Francis must have walked for several hours and from that elevation, the lights from the solitary tent casino below were looking like a section of Milky Way planted on the earth. Apparently the road had gently taken him to the higher grounds. At last he paused to take a breather. In spite of his excellent health and that youthful athletic body, he was sensing the rareness of the Oxygen in the air at the higher altitude of 5,000 ft. He stood there on the side of the highway where road took a sharp turns inward like a coiling Rattlesnake. He was still deeply lost in the numbness of his mind and not a single thought had penetrated the fog that had enveloped his soul completely.

Like a teenager who gets punished harshly and is desperate to get away from that tyrant dad so badly that he, or she for that matter, throws away all cautions to wind; he was running away from his home- the Mother Church of twenty plus years. He had bolted out of the Catholic World, the only one he had ever known ever since he began understanding his surroundings.

The temperature was falling gradually. It was end of August and variations in temperatures of the day and night were shifting toward milder days and colder nights until the approach of dawn and then it lingered lot closer to freezing, capable of causing hypothermia to anyone wearing nothing but a lose tank top to cover the torso and nothing to wrap the head. He was in that state at that moment. Finally he sat down slowly on flat bedrock and without his knowledge, sunk in a stupor like unconsciousness.

As he lay there with his hand folded under his head for a cushion, suddenly his numbed mind came alive like the fog lifting from the waterfront and moored boats become monsters with their wrapped up sails, gently coming towards the marina to grab the first living thing within its reach. With his eyes wide open, he began to hallucinate.

There were sounds and words coming from somewhere he couldn't't tell but they were very unfamiliar words and phrases he had forgotten. In the beginning, they sounded like gibberish but very soon became distinctly clear. Much of the conversation was going on in his own hometown tongues; 'Kokani,' mixed with 'Marathi' both languages spoken in the village and the surrounding areas in Goa, India. That's where he was born in early fifties. Soon he was linked with the source of that conversation and began to understand every word the folks present in that room were speaking:

" Miriam che chedwo pale"( Look Miriam's son) someone spoke in Konkani dialogue .

"Deva che roop assa; Yesu aailo to" ( God's incarnation; he is Baby Jesus arrived) another person was speaking.

That was the moment of his arriving in this world. Tens of thousands of miles away, lying on the side of that infrequently used road in New Mexico, he was watching his life passing in front of him. Was that a birth of a divine child?
This is the Story of Father Francis Christo Mendez.