Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Life bursts forth from a parched Earth!!!

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Life bursts forth from a parched Earth!!!

Brought forth from a dry and arid ground by one shower of rain some days ago plants have come to life, flowers have bloomed .... what promise they hold!! The fragile flowers and the tender fresh green leaves dare us to wonder at the mystery of life which burts forth with such splendour on a seemingly unsuspecting world!!

As Belden C Lane says, "So uncommon is it for us to grasp the beauty and mystery of ordinary things that, when we finally do so, it often brings us to the verge of tears. Appalled by our own poverty, we awake in wonder to a splendour of which we had never dreamed."

So on this Holy Saturday here in Tamale there are signs of New Life and Easter splashed all around us upon this Earth "crammed with heaven" where every common bush "afire with God" is proclaiming the gospel message ... He is alive!

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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?”