Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: "If you only knew what God is offering you!"

Sunday, February 22, 2009

"If you only knew what God is offering you!"

What was Jesus offering the Samaritan woman at well? What was Jesus offering all those he called to follow him?? What is Jesus offering each one of us today?? I believe that Jesus was inviting each of them, as he is each one of us, to share in his intimate experience of God. Discipleship is first and foremost entering into the relationship with God that Jesus had!

We come to religious life only to seek God…even though we might have huge dreams and notions of saving the world and eradicating poverty and injustice… “The religious must be the person who first and foremost, always and forever, in whatever circumstance, seeks God and God alone, sees God and God alone in all of this confusion, in all of this uncertainty and, whatever the situation, speaks God - and God alone.”

Nothing in the life that we have chosen is more important that our quest for God … and “for the person who cannot find God here, staying here is a mistake. For the person who does not seek God here, leaving here is a must. For the person who can find God better someplace else, leaving here will be a grace.”

Philip Pinto, our Congregation leader in a recent address to Brothers said: “The fundamental call of Religious Life is always to find God, to deepen one’s relationship with God. We have been on this journey for years. The danger with this is that for many of us we feel that now we are in a comfortable relationship with God, that the God we have known all these years is all there is to know. We get upset with people who question this understanding of God, who question the Church, who challenge long-held beliefs and belittle the

devotional practices we were brought up on.”

Entering fully into the Jesus like relationship with God ...
- demands that we view life and the world with God’s eyes and through God’s eyes.
- Invites us into a radically different kind of life where our limited and tunnelled world view is challenged
- Moves us to compassion and to seek justice with a passion

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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?”