It’s easy to spot us

Like an exclusive club, some of us compose take-charge crews that include preparing the altar for Mass, arranging the flowers, watering plants in the grotto, cleaning altar crevices and polishing the brass cande­labras. Filipinos also comprise the cathedral’s multiple Le­gion of Mary presidia. As well, in my parish, a Filipina had been president of the Cath­olic Women’s League while another acts as coordinator of the Blessed Sacrament chapel adorers and a few, members of the parish council.

But not only do we go to Mass daily and serve in church, we have also car­ried on with our devotions from home. In an archdio­cese where our kind of fervor may not be recognized, we’ve managed to find approval for them. The Guardian Angels Parish in the Westside, for one, holds Wednesday evening novenas for the Santo Niño; unfortunately, an “Ati-Atihan” celebration sometime ago, endorsed since by Vancouver City Hall, highlights only the “ati” revelers, with the San­to Niño thrown in only as an icon.

At our Southwest parish, Saint Anthony de Padua’s feast in June draws most Filipinos from neighboring cities to the novena Masses concluded by a procession around the block— the last Mass often overflows into the church’s basement, where devotees follow it on a giant screen. We then troop to partake of the fiesta food laid out in the parish school parking lot, half of which would be “pancit,” “lechon,” with “puto,” “suman” and “pi­chi-pichi” sometimes sneaked in.

The same happens at Saint Patrick’s in the Eastside, when on the last day of the Virgen de Peñafrancia novena Masses in September, we sing the Our Father in Bicol, also join a procession around the block and a feast at the parish hall—“laing,” as it should, be­ing the dish most sought after. Immigrating to Canada hardly even posited itself as a dream, when as devotee of “Ina” on a 1997 pilgrimage to gain sup­port for the restoration of her shrine in Naga, I first knelt here. Her image has since been ensconced on a side altar.

We do, indeed, live up to our being “Amada de Maria,” like how then-Pope, now Saint John Paul II, instantly endeared during his second papal visit to Manila, had called us. In most churches, it’s us who often lead the praying of the rosary. As well, on first Saturdays, a random group, that includes an octogenarian, gathers at a meeting hall in Saint Mary’s Parish to pray a round of 20 petitions each with 100 Hail Marys or 2,000 in total, like an army barraging heaven for gnawing needs and healing of ills.

Indeed, we’re easy to spot, like her this first Friday: In the throb of the almost-empty ca­thedral after Mass, she puts on her winter coat, slings her purse on her arm, tugs down a bit the selvage edge of her veil to her brow so that it shields her eyes, and kneels in the middle aisle, a straight line to the now-exposed Blessed Sac­rament at the altar of the Met­ropolitan Cathedral of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary here in Vancouver.

Closing the pages of a novena, she creeps on her knees, fingering her beads, and lips muttering more prayers. In both our minds, even if swathed in winter slate-gray light pouring through stained glass windows, as I watch her—she’d later lie prostrate at the altar—I’m certain we both feel transported to Quiapo Church, the Shrine of the Nazarene.

Soon in the hush, the clink of vigil candles being shaved of drippings and replaced with fresh ones, rhythmically floats with silent prayers. An elderly Filipina, covered from head-to-toe with a bandanna, thickly layered with padded coats, and a long skirt barely showing her thick boots, finishes off the last row of candles right under the gaze of the Divine Mercy and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Earlier at Mass, her read­ings in Southern singsong with that distinctive familiar accent, echoed in the cathedral’s vault­ed ceiling. She has also assisted in the offertory, later cleaned and kept the purifiers and fold­ed away the linens. A few more have remained, with bowed or nodding dark-haired heads like mine, some dyed blond or auburn, who count among the 70 percent of daily Mass-goers.

Even as we’ve blended in our fervor with the French, Eastern Europeans, some Asians, English and Ameri­cans, still on Sundays and li­turgical feasts, which the arch­bishop often celebrates, our presence reverberates; from the altar boys and a girl, lectors and the long line to commu­nion, it’s us. In most parishes, we greet Mass-goers as ushers and sing in choirs, of course.

While our prayers hum with undertones of pain in a life of exile, with its sacrific­es and loneliness–especially among caregivers, who com­pose a significant number– perhaps our grip on our be­liefs and faith, which we often manifest as joy, spills over as a distinctive mark; apparently, it shines even in as faintly as walking briskly to Mass like this morning, when an elder­ly man, sensing my obvious rush, smiled at me at a red light, saying, “You’re off to the cathedral, aren’t you?”