Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Embrace of Love

Monday, March 23, 2009

Embrace of Love

If Christ rose from the dead, then indeed he must be living somewhere and I should be able to find him in my everyday life. I am sure that Christ is not found in the Eucharist and the Gospels alone, but in the people I meet every day.

On Friday morning, I went to my ministry - distributing food to the mentally challenged people on the streets of Tamale. One of the ‘mad’ women rushed to me and embraced me and said “I love you”. I was confused and didn’t know what to do or say. The people around us laughed and told me I was a lucky man. I knew they did not mean what they said. I hesitated for sometime, then I gathered my courage and embraced the mad woman and said “I love you too.” I saw the joy and excitement in the woman’s eyes.
I now know I had met Jesus, I now know I am a lucky man, I now know Jesus told me “I love you” and I am glad I embraced him and said “I love you too”.
(Cornelius)

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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?”