Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: February 2012

Saturday, February 11, 2012

COMMUNITY PASTORAL PLACEMENT

We novices are currently doing a very important part of our novitiate experience – the Community Pastoral Placement (or CPP). This is a chance for us to practise in a much more realistic way the life of the Christian Brothers. We are living for three months in two communities in Tamale, away from the novitiate and managing our community life, attending to our daily chores and working full-time in our various ministries. The CPP began in early January and concludes at the end of March.

GURUGU COMMUNITY

One community is at Choggu and the other at Gurugu. Each community has a Community Coordinator and a Bursar, and these positions rotate after every month, so that all of us have the opportunity to be in a leadership role in the community.

At Gurugu there are six of us - Belamino Muunga, Blaise Semoso, Christian Hazeley, Nature Busiku, Romano Rambu and Septimus Sama. Gurugu is a suburb of Tamale about 2 kilometers south of Tamale town centre. We were all anxious about what awaited us in our new setting, considering it was a new experience to all of us as non-Ghanaians, away from the familiar grounds of the novitiate house. Nevertheless, we have now acclimatized in the new place.

We are grateful to be living, working, praying and interacting with each other as we form a community and interact daily with the wider community around us. We are trying to express our commitment and be inspired by the spirit of Edmund and Jesus to live as a Gospel community. We admire the way that each of us has settled in to the new environment with his diverse experiences, uniqueness and gifts. There has been a good brotherly spirit over the first four weeks as we have adapted to our daily routines. The experiences encountered in our community are dealt with responsibly. We believe our experience so far reflects the quality of the novitiate programme over the last eleven months together, as well as the giftedness of each novice. We look forward to the gifts and challenges of the remaining two months.

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?”