VANCOUVER—Nine- and 10-year-olds are praying for the personal intentions of homeless and drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood.
Every afternoon at about 2 p.m., Grade 4 students at St. Francis de Sales School take handwritten prayer cards, find a quiet place, and plead with God on behalf of complete strangers.
“It became a really great discussion point about the importance of prayer,” said Michael Penney, their teacher.
He and his students pray twice a day: together in the morning, and individually in the afternoon. In May, he encouraged them to pray a decade of the rosary each time.
Then he made connections with some street ministries in the Downtown Eastside that made that prayer time more tangible, educational, and meaningful.
While looking for an outreach project for his students, he connected with The Door is Open, a drop-in centre that offers 400-500 meals to the poor every day.
His students teamed up with Grade 1 and the hands of 80 eager children made more than 400 sandwiches in 45 minutes.
It took “a little bit of creativity and teamwork,” Penney said. “All of a sudden you have 80 kids involved in making a difference in people’s lives.”
They donated the goods, but not before making a connection with Good Shepherd Street Ministry at St. Paul’s Church around the corner. That group of volunteers spends its evenings walking down streets other pedestrians avoid and handing out free candy, rosaries, socks, and other items to the homeless, drug-addicted, and other people they meet.
They also pray for anyone who asks, recording the prayer intentions in a small notebook.
“Most of these folks don’t feel worthy to be prayed for,” said Good Shepherd foundress Linda Noel.
They have “food, clothing, available to them throughout their neighbourhood, but they have no one who cares about them. On each nightly walk we live out our mission statement: ‘Let us be witnesses.'”
Noel suggested to Penney they team up and start a new program they called “Adopt a Prayer.” The Grade 4 teacher was thrilled and soon received a list of 40 real prayer intentions from Downtown Eastside residents.
He read them over, typed them, and delivered them to his students along with a 10-cm “angel prayer card.”
“They wrote a prayer for God’s blessing” on the card, Penney explained. Noel sends new prayer requests every two weeks.
The paper angels became a helpful visual and an educational starting point about homelessness, mental health, and aboriginal issues, Penney said.
“There were lots of questions about why people make these choices. We talked about mental illness and aboriginal challenges, which is a big part of the Grade 4 curriculum. It really tied in.”
The children were also encouraged to pull out the prayer cards when they were having a bad day.
“Sometimes when you’re feeling a little low, when life is treating you hard, you can look at these things and get a bit of perspective from what other people are struggling with,” he told his students.
Though school is out for the summer, Penney hopes to bring “Adopt a Prayer” back to his Grade 4 classroom next year. Projects like this “plant the seeds as they get older and make their own decisions.”
