Call to the Permanent Diaconate
When Paul Ma was first approached about the prospect of becoming a permanent deacon, his response was to walk away. He had no interest.
“It was 2002, my wife Maria and I had some friends over for dinner, to celebrate the 100th day of our newborn son,” he recalls. “During mealtime, Deacon Peter walked to us and said, ‘Paul, you will be a deacon.’ I didn’t know how to answer that. My understanding of diaconate was to spend a lot of time serving the Church and do that for free. As new immigrants and with our newborn, Maria and I didn’t like the idea at all. So, we simply walked away.”
The thought that he would be a deacon just made no sense to him or Maria at the time.
“I was just baptized in the year 2000. Came to Canada from Shanghai in the same year. We were still learning about the faith, struggling to settle down the family, and I was busy at work. The Diaconate, that’s far beyond.”
Fast-forward six years from Deacon Lovrick’s initial comment, to 2008, when the calling returned, only this time in a much different way.
“We took our kids to see Toronto,” he says. “As I was getting out of the car, a voice came to me, ‘have you ever thought of being a deacon?’ That came from nowhere. So I silently prayed in my heart, ‘Lord, if that is you, can you have Maria say it?’ Maria and I never talked about this since 2002, I knew she did not like the idea, so there was no way she was going to say that.”
Or so he thought.
“Just like the wind,” Maria remembers, “As we were walking, the idea came to me, so I simply said it to Paul ‘have you ever thought of being a deacon?’”
Paul was astounded. He stopped walking, stood in awe, and said to Maria, “The Lord is calling.”
“But I still didn’t do anything,” he says. “I was not ready to answer.”
It wasn’t until a year later when Maria was suffering from illness, and she barely had enough strength to prepare meals for the family.
Paul prayed for Maria's healing and asked for one month's health for Maria as a sign of the diaconate calling, and this time he promised, "Lord if you still call me, I will answer."
Maria was miraculously healed, not just one month, but healed since then. Our patient and gracious Lord generously granted the couple another sign to assure their calling.
So, in 2010, he and Maria began studies at St. Augustine’s Seminary in the Permanent Diaconate program. He was ordained Deacon Paul in 2014.
“On this journey, I take one step at a time, but wholeheartedly,” says Deacon Paul. “I am striving to be a faithful servant, though a useless one.”
He and Maria are now mentors to other couples as they discern the call to the diaconate.
“It’s humbling that God has chosen us, the most insignificant, to mentor others,” says Maria. “Our Heavenly Father looks at each one of us as the apple of His eye and equips the candidates and their wives with so many different gifts. I greatly admire each candidate couple and am encouraged to see their generosity and willingness to answer God’s call. I pray I can be a good channel of God’s love and be a good companion on their discernment journey. The one who forms and transforms is the Holy Spirit.”