Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: God

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

God - Source of our Being

The Life of every human being originates and depends on God alone as St Paul states, “in him we live, move and have our being”. God gives life to all his creatures, who then can claim that he/she lives by his/her own? Jesus came so that we can have life, life to the fullest. Man and woman cannot hereby celebrate life unless God is involved. For such a life would have no meaning.
It’s like a branch which cut off from a tree cannot support itself but withers. Every human being strives towards the Creator because he/she is incomplete and needs fulfillment in God as the psalmist wrote, “As the dear longs for running streams of water so my soul thirsts’ for you my God. God of life, When shall I go and see the face of God. This is our call as Christians and our invitation to look for this God all the days of our life in what we are doing. (Paul Mutuku)

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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?”