PPPG Bloggers

Can’t go out to eat so I’ve been binge watching the Cooking Channel. Can’t meet up with friends so we Zoom or talk through text longer than ever before. Can’t go to mass so I pray less than I used to when churches were open and Adoration Chapels were available to all. What’s wrong with me?

I’ve been struggling spiritually during the quarantine and feel like I must be the only one. A friend was explaining how she watches livestream masses daily, prays four rosaries and reads the Bible now that she’s not distracted with window shopping and other time killers. But the opposite seems true for me.

When I was driving around town to go to school and run errands, I would pray in the “hermitage” of my car. When I was swamped with school assignments and helping out my teen, I would carve time in between my hectic schedule to listen to Bishop Barron or audiobooks on the saints. But now I feel lost.

For the year of 2020, our prayer group is blessed to have the whole year booked with the prominent keynote presenters including our own Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, from the Archdiocese of Vancouver who is scheduled to come in July 2020. Having different presenters add different characteristics and dynamics to the prayer group which attract many people from our own parish and the surrounding parishes.
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I love dealing with different presenters, each one of them is unique and wonderful. I look forward to every prayer meeting. Meeting our presenters and our members bring me special delight. Sometime though a presenter might need to cancel due to health reason or an emergency that cannot be averted, then a replacement must be found or try to find a different way to fill in the time, if in any case all efforts were in vain, then the prayer meeting has to be cancelled. So far, God always provided me with a presenter needed for that particular month, He provides the replacement speaker. Praise God. I have never had to cancel a prayer meeting. But that was before COVID19 outbreak!

​I made a plea in January 2019 asking for help to run our prayer group. First, I prepared a short presentation to explain various tasks that required to run a prayer meeting. I decided to have 5 teams: publication, hospitality, setup, prayer intentions writers and prayer requests. After the presentation, it was so heartening to see so many people stepping up to join the various teams. I especially want to acknowledge those who have already been part of the PPPG Team. In addition, it was truly wonderful to see so many people coming forward volunteering to bring food and refreshments to share with everyone! I’d like to share about more specific encounters with generosity.

​One of our publication team members wrote this recently on her email to me -- this is in the context of making a poster for the upcoming prayer meeting – “I used the picture of Jesus with children, as Jesus said: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.” She used the color purple for the title of the talk, she continued to explain that; “Purple is a combination of blue (the color of the Word of God) and red (the color of the Holy Spirit), so the combination is purple which means royalty and priesthood.” 

The story about the Relic of Saint Padre Pio.
 
When I presented the plan to invite keynote speakers for our monthly prayer meeting back in November 2018 to Fr. Gabriel de Chadarévian, O.P. (Fr. Gabriel)  the Spiritual Director of St. Mary’s Padre Pio Prayer Group (PPPG), I learnt that Fr. David Bellusci, O.P. (Fr. David) works in Rome during Summertime.  Fr. David’s name came up during the meeting as he would be one of the priests that I would invite to give presentation for PPPG.
 
After the initial meeting with Fr. Gabriel, I begin to send out the invitations, including an invite to Fr. David. He was quite responsive, and we then settled on a date for him to come to give a talk to our prayer group on May 4, 2019. When Fr. Gabriel mentioned the city of Rome, I immediately thought about the Relic of Padre Pio.
 
Let’s back up a little to the era when Fr. Pierre Leblond, O.P. (Fr. Pierre) was still the pastor of St. Mary’s and the Spiritual Director of our PPPG, we started the initiative to request for the first-class Relic of Saint Pio from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin (Latin: Ordo Fratrum Minorum Capuccinorum). We discovered that there are certain requirements that must be fulfilled and upon approval, that the Relic will only be released in person and to be picked up from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin headquarters in Rome. The initiative later had to be put on hold due to the news of Fr. Pierre’s sabbatical.