Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Novices on Community/Pastoral Experience

Friday, February 29, 2008

Novices on Community/Pastoral Experience

Having completed a year in the Novitiate our novices are now on a three month Community-Pastoral experience. Breaking with tradition, this year the novices have formed three communities of four each in and around the "Tamale Metropolis".
Fred, Phelix, Paul and Belden form community at Skekina, Gurugu. Their main ministries include working in a health clinic, food distribution and organising classes for children from the immediate environs.
Pascal, John, Wycliffe and Samuel are based in Nyankpala. All four teach in the Primary and Junior secondary school in the village.
Julias, Jackson, Casimir and Sonny live in Gurugu Jalapa and cycle everyday to teach at the CB run school in Kanvilli.
Over the next few days we will be able to give you more news and reflections on their experience thus far.

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What do we want this novitiate to be?

There is a saying that goes something like this: “If we don’t do what we believe in, then we’ll end up believing in what we do”. Without a vision that is authentic and alive to guide our actions, then we can settle for rationalizing the status quo or what is convenient and comfortable.
One of the first things the new team in Tamale did was to spend time beginning to articulate its vision of a novitiate beyond the basics laid down in our Constitutions. Here are some elements of what we came up with:
Novitiate is a journey, a process that involves KNOWING, EXPERIENCING and CHOOSING.
It is an INITIATION into Christian Brother religious life, so a “rite of passage” into a new identity, a time of learning and testing.
Novitiate confronts the novices with the Brother’s vocation as a call to brotherly solidarity and community, not to privilege, status and security.
It involves exploration of the basic values of faith and vocation, and the challenge to embrace these out of personal conviction and free choice.
Novitiate means understanding that a religious vocation makes a claim on the whole of the person and his life, including his inner life, his relationships and his professional activity (ministry). Furthermore, it challenges the novice to see the dynamic inter-relationship of these areas and to learn what their integration means.
Novitiate is a time of DISCERNMENT. The novice learns more deeply who he is, and what this Christian Brother life is. There is a constant back-and-forth movement between these two poles as an answer is sought to the question, “Is this where I am meant to be? Is this the life that will enable me to find my true self in God?”