Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: First day at TICCS

Sunday, July 26, 2009

First day at TICCS

At the end of the first day at TICCS we had discovered a lot about the linguistics in Ghana. It is amazing that many local dialects are spoken here (+ 60 languages) but none is official. The English that seems common, only 40% of the population surprisingly can manage to express themselves in it.

Already on the first day we had a round view of Ghana’s diverse cultures.
African Traditional Religion(ATR) was learnt in depth. It has no founder, no temple/altars/ and is often inappropriately referred to as Ancestor-worshipping, Fetishism, Superstition, Animism, Heathenism, and Paganism amongst many names the early missionaries used. To me all these varieties of ATR because like any other religion, at least they have something they believe in- especially the fact that “nothing has come to be and will come to be without the Supreme Being (God), and put human beings in their hierarchy at the centre of universe.” I think what matters is the attitude towards the given value.

The climax was an afternoon when we visited the Dagomba chief Choggu Naa. I was shocked to see how conservative and traditional some things are. In fact what I witnessed I had heard in stories many a times but I had considered them as myths. For the first time I saw real kola nuts and there is no fiction here. As a mark of respect to the elders, squatting was done as a sign of saluting the chief and we drank water from the host as a symbol of Amaraaba(welcome). The traditional chief is so respected by the subjects that no eye contact is allowed, no crossing of legs and no talking directly to him, but through the representative of the elders. He is said to have fathered 39 children and they speculate that he is 105 years old. Indeed this community is deeply rooted in their traditional way of life.
(Otieno)

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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?”