Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Wishing all of you a Happy Christmas!

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Wishing all of you a Happy Christmas!

"This is the irrational season

when love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason,

there'd have been no room for the Child."

(Madeline L'Engle)

This is to wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas!! I feel that this quote in so many ways best captures the spirit and meanning of Chritmas.

It is so much about being open to the workings and stirrings of God in our life so that we too might birth God in our world. Each of us is invited to birth God just as Mary did!!

So we pray that each of you will birth God in your lives so that God will be made alive to all that you encounter.

Happy Christmas to all of you and may you birth God to all that you encounter this year!!!

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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?”