Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Care for the Earth

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Care for the Earth

"Care for the Earth" was our theme for this week in the novitiate.

We began the the week with a prayer celebrating the Earth and the whole universe.

Following the prayer we met as a community to see what we could as a individuals and as a community to care for the Earth. So we adopted the following...

"We commit ourselves anew to seeing the affliction of the earth,

hearing its cry, and knowing its suffering.
We commit ourselves to learning more about the changes that are needed.
We commit ourselves to embarking on that long and difficult road
toward life lived in harmony with all God's creation.
In covenant with God and with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit,
we are called to action in the name of Jesus the Christ."

We have spent the week sprucing up our premises and putting things in place to be more prudent in our disposal of waste, to conserve water and power resources, and to enhance the plant life in our compound by planting more trees and flowering shrubs.

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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?”