Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Football at all levels!!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Football at all levels!!

The last day of May nightfall, the Novices had the opportunity to join the masses of Ghanaians struggling to enter and watch an international friendly match between Ghana and Uganda at the Tamale stadium. Tamale had come out in strength to watch the Ghana national team play in the North of the country for the first time since independence!! So with a full stadium shouting for them the Black stars emerged victorious with 2 goals to 1.

This exciting event reminded me of how we were baptized on Sunday 17th May by the Parsih youths. On that day we played our first football match against an outside team. Dressed in our dazzling red jerseys we tried to show the fruits of our everyday exercise and started the game skillfully with the opening goal in the fifth minute. However, things did not continue in that vein and we lost 4-2 in the end. Even though it was a friendly match it was not lacking in intensity. The match experienced three substitutions .. no, not for the players but for the referee!!

In any case, we are back on the training field promising to do better in other matches to come. To me it was also a great time to learn how imperative discipline is in soccer.

I finish off by thanking the formation team members for granting us the opportunity to witness the friendly match live! (It was the first time for many novices to be in the stadium as well as watching a match live)

(Sydney)

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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?”