Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Eid Al Adha

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Eid Al Adha

Today all our Muslim brethren celebrate Eid Al Adha. All around town there is a festive spirit with children and adults dressed in their best flowing gowns. The town is aburst with colour. The morning air reverberated with the call for prayer from the many mosques in town reminding all of us of that moment when the Prophet Ibrahim(Abraham) did not hesitate to sacrifice his only son as an offerening in obedience to God.

According to the Holy Quran, God appeared in Prophet Ibrahim's dream and asked him to sacrifice something that was most dear to him. Prophet Ibrahim decided to sacrifice his own son, Ismail. However, when he put a knife on Ismail's throat, God replaced his son with a goat through a miracle. Consequently, it has become a tradition to slaughter livestock and feed the poor to mark the occasion.

The Bible relates a similar story telling us how God called on Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. And just as Abraham was about to slaughter his only son a voice from the heavens called out saying, "Do not lay your hand on the boy. Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son." We are then told that Abraham sacrificed instead a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket.

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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?”