Above All, God Will Provide Deacon Gabriel Cisneros Campos, Notre Dame Seminary We all want to be like our favorite hero, the one who is invincible with superpowers that other heroes don’t have. A hero does not necessarily need to be Superman. There are heroes without capes. They could be your coach, your science teacher or your physical education teacher. It could be your dad or mom. I always wanted to be like my dad, he was the model of a hero that I wanted to be. He was strong because he would pick me up with one hand, and when we played arm wrestling, he always won. He knew a lot about mechanical things and construction. Even when I grew older, and my physique changed, and my mentality about things in the world was different, my father continued to be my hero even though we no longer shared the same ideas. He noticed my change, and he was always attentive. Contemporary heroes no longer caught my attention, Superman, Batman and the others moved to the plane of fantasy and the unreal. I believed that there were men who really flew like Superman and who lifted an entire house with one hand. It was then that my father told me about a person I knew but not completely, everyone talked about him in books, magazines, movies and all the priests, nuns and catechists. “Jesus is the true hero of the history of mankind” they said. Jesus… I do know him, well… in part. At this point in my life I did not attend church regularly, I attended with my friends and because I knew that at Mass I would see the nice girl who caught my attention. I had no idea of the sacramentality, of the sacred and much less of the mystery behind Jesus. I was listening to Mass but had no idea of everything that the 12
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celebration entailed. For me and some of my friends, it was boring to go to Mass. It never caught my attention to be part of the group of altar boys or people who help in the church. And much less be a priest. Time passed, the years accumulated, and without realizing it, I turned 30. I stopped attending Mass - my parents never forced me to go - and I did not receive a religious education. I did not take communion because I did not prepare for that moment... until a new preparation course for the sacraments was opened and I was invited by the Director of Religion of the parish. I enlisted to prepare myself. At first I was embarrassed because I was already 30 years old, and I wondered what others would say about me when they saw an older person taking the sacrament courses. Sometimes shame is an obstacle to knowing Jesus, society before us now is against the Truth. So I signed up and took the courses. While that was happening, I met Saint Martin de Porres through a film. His humility and love for Jesus captivated me and I adopted him as my Patron, as my favorite saint, my hero who helped me meet the true hero, Jesus. It also influences the testimony of the priest of the community a lot, a man who wore boots with his cassock. I asked myself why he always wore boots, so one day I asked him, and he told me that they were work boots. He, himself, worked in the construction of the parish together with the construction workers, and they were building some rooms for catechesis in the church property, and construction workers did not mind getting dirty - that caught my attention. I thought that the priests
