Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Soaked!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Soaked!

A couple of weeks ago while on ministry distributing food to the mentally challenged and the sick it rained every heavily soaking all of us wet to the bone.
During that period, quite to my surprise, the driver asked us to get down and stay somewhere, so that we would not be soaked with the rainwater. I disagreed with him.
My mind went back to scripture which says, “A Good Shepherd lays down his Life for the Sheep” (Jn 10:11). We continued in the rains with the distribution until the rain was over.
One of the mentally challenged men, named Abu (not his real name) who stays at the back of a certain Mosque was totally soaked with all his clothing wet to the toe. He was harshly asked to move away from the Mosque. One of the men who had come to pray and saw me giving food to the man confronted me and told me that I should send the man away from the Mosque.
“Your man has been making the place filthy,” he said. Shortly, tears almost started running down my cheeks, I froze, not knowing what to do, because of the mixed feelings within me. I felt sorry for the man. From there I recalled “I was hungry and you gave me food” “Homeless and you sheltered me.”
Again, I asked myself, the poor man has been homeless for a long time but why are such people being treated like that and where is our humanity?
(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?”