Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Novices Arrive!

Monday, February 9, 2009

Novices Arrive!

All the young men from the various districts arrived safely on the 30th of January.

The first batch to arrive was from Kenya and Zambia. The plane arrived before time and we were a little late to get to the airport as we got stuck in Accra traffic. But the men used their common sense to hang around for a while and used a phone to contact us. We picked them at the airport and brought them over to the SVD guest house and went over to the Avenue Club for a quick lunch. The heat was already telling on the men!
That night while the men from Zambia and East Africa went out for supper we went to the airport to pick up the men from Sierra Leone. They too got in in good time and were welcomed by a mighty rain shower!! The rain cooled the city down considerably and at least the men from the East could sleep well!! By the time we got back to SVD they were fast asleep. They had had a long day indeed.
I went back to the airport to pick up our one novice from Southern Africa. He was out having completed all immigration formalities by 10pm.

The night was short and sleep was not easy to come by with a loud all night prayer vigil of one of the many evangelical churches in the city of Accra.
We left at 4.30 the following morning and after a long but uneventful drive we arrived Tamale at 2.30pm. Lunch was waiting for us on arrival. After lunch the men got busy settling into their rooms and exploring the environs! The heat is still a hot topic of conversation here!!!

All the men are in fine health and getting used to all things Ghana and Tamale!!

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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?”