Below is a letter I've received from a learned parishioner in Petaling Jaya who has given her response to the most recent article on ancestral veneration in the Herald. Miss Rachael Wong has given permission for her correspondence to be published on my blog.

Below are some salient points of responses I have to this week's article on the Herald (published on 24 February) about the veneration of the ancestral tablet, which is in turn a response to my earlier article published the previous week (10 February). Click here to read the article first.

If you have been lingering over the online social network Facebook recently, you would have noticed a particular picture of a priest from a Catholic parish in Malaysia venerating an ancestral tablet before his congregation during the most recent Chinese New Year. And the comments that this picture has garnered from among its viewers are all but scathing, be they reactions from non- Catholics or non-Christian peoples. For many of our friends, especially those from the Protestant denominations, this practice constitutes a great scandal of idolatry. What say we?

There are moments in our journey when everything life offers just doesn't seem enough. Somehow, someone else always seems to be having it better, and we're stuck with the feeling that we've been given the raw end of the deal. We begin asking why.