Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Evaluations of our Community Pastoral Experience

Friday, May 9, 2008

Evaluations of our Community Pastoral Experience

We have just finished the first part of the evaluation of our three and a half month Community Pastoral Experience(CPE). Sr Teresa Tanko facilitated the first two days and invited us to revisit our experience in a reflective way. We were able to glean our learnings, celebrate our highs, admit our failings and acknowledge the support we received from each other.

The next two days the Team facilated us to look more deeply at our experiences. Each CPE community presented a snapshot of their experience. After which all of us were able to dialogue and engage with the others experience. It was a fruitful exercise where much was learnt. We learned that we all shared a brokenness and fragility, that prayer was central to our lives, that community prayer along with our own personal reflection sustained and energised us, that in ministry we were stretched and invited to address and challenge unjust practices, and that through our daily lived experience in community we were able to understand and get to know each other at much deeper levels.

Over the next week or so we will share more with you of our three month experience.

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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?”