Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Accepting the Body of Chirst

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Accepting the Body of Chirst

At the last supper when Jesus said,

"This is my body,"
he probably wasn't talking only about the bread.
He was talking about the community gathered there
About their love and care, about their being together again.
He was talking about Himself,
Christ present as teacher, healer, leader.
He was talking about sharing a meal in solidarity.
He was talking about all the sharing they'd done over the years,
All the words they'd spoken, words of truth. love, kindness.

So this meal isn't just bread and wine. No, it is much more.
It is bread broken and wine poured out.
It is a paschal life and a paschal death.

It is a person's life given for others
And a new way of eating and drinking that will last forever.
In this bread we reverence the whole body of Christ:
The poor, those on the streets, those excluded by our norms, the dirty, the hungry, the children in poverty, those suffering from HIV/AIDS

In a word, we hold in reverence the tax collector, the prostitute, the public sinner

Thus we hold in reverence the body of Christ.

In receiving the bread and wine, I accept the body of Christ,
The community here, the people with their weaknesses and their sins, with their strengths and their giftedness, their differences from me.

Will I accept this body, Will I heal it, feed it, care for it and cherish this body?
Amen. Yes,

I do accept the responsibility of living in the body of Christ
Yes you are my brothers and sisters, and so are those others
All of them

I do accept the body of Christ
Amen, Yes.

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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?”