I was born in a very loving family where my father was an atheist and my mother a practicing Catholic. At the age of five, I had a terrible accident that nearly took my life: I received a bullet shot under my left jaw. I stayed at the hospital for over a month after a very delicate surgery. The result was that I was “spoiled brat” by my parents. I was the middle one of three children. At the age of fifteen, after having received a Catholic education, I told my parents that I will no longer go to church as my mother used to take me on Sundays. Just a few days before, I had read a booklet called “the Manifesto of the Communist Party”. I told my distraught mother that “religion is only for three categories of people: the elderly, the ignorant and women!” Besides, I became convinced that “religion” and “god” were mere superstitions and “the opium of the people”. Obviously, my atheist dad was happy and thought that I was indeed becoming an adult. Gone were the multitude of hours of catechism and church going and prayers that I had learned in my younger days… I was basking in my newly acquired freedom! Three years later, at the age of eighteen, I got into university where I was about to take four years of biochemistry. But during the first two years, I got involved in all sorts of political activities on campus to the point where I felt totally empty, craving for something much deeper than the kind of life that seemed to be mired in materialism, sex, drugs, parties, money and power.

At the beginning of the third academic year, I attended an on-campus outdoor Rock concert. I was looking forward to it especially that I was fond of rock a lot and the Beatles in particular. But like the more than six hundred students who came to the concert, especially the males, I was drawn by the very attractive female members of the student band called “the Solid Rock”. To our great joy, the singing and the playing were very good. We were all excited! Here and here, you could see and smell the typical fragrance of joints being shared by the students, not to mention the many bottles of beer and other alcoholic drinks. But wait a minute! All of a sudden, the music stops and a pair of students from the Solid Rock band comes to the mike, a guy and a girl, and tell the six hundred students who were listening to them, that they had given their lives to Jesus Christ. Jesus had turned their lives upside down and transformed them into men and women who were no longer centered on power, fun, sex and money! At one point in their lives, they had experienced a sense of drowning and it was only when someone told them about Jesus and invited them to accept Him as their personal Lord and Saviour, that they were set free and experienced the power of God’s transforming love in their lives. To my utter dismay, they invited the students to come forward and receive Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour. More than one hundred students responded! And I felt drawn like a magnet to do the same. This is how in the month of october 1972 at the age of twenty, Jesus Christ became the Lord and the Saviour of my life, my “Solid Rock”. It is this rock concert event that changed my life. I rediscovered the beauty of the Church and its sacraments, especially the power of the Eucharist and the Bible as the Word of God.

A few years later, I joined a religious order called the Dominicans and was ordained to the priesthood in 1990. I worked at the University of Sudbury from 2003-2006 as the Catholic Chaplain and a part-time professor. I am now in Vancouver having the same ministry and I thank God for his call on my life. I am a very happy priest indeed!

Would you also stake your life on Christ?
Father Gabriel de Chadarévian O.P.