Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: To Wa!

Monday, November 23, 2009

To Wa!

On Friday 14th of November, long before dawn we left for WA (Regional capital town of the Upper West Region) to witness the wedding ceremony of Cornelius’s brother. I was fortunate to accompany him.
We left Tamale at around 5am. It was wonderful, and the journey took us exactly 7hours. Having just finished a week of reflection on the New Cosmology story, I was so much more aware of the beauty of Africa. It was a long journey on dusty and lonely roads but there was no way one could even read a book because the road is really bad and I could say that the nonsense was shaken out of us.
Eventually, we arrived at our destination a half hour after noon. We received a red carpet welcome and there was this tremendous sense of joy, happiness, and celebration.
We shared our stories and the day’s experiences together! We were really tired after that shake, rattle and roll journey! Saturday was a most extravagant day as I enjoyed local dances, food and drinks.

After the wedding mass we joined in the special wedding dance called “bawaa” .
I learnt and saw much more than I expected from this whole experience. I thank the Beloved and the Tamale Novitiate community for the opportunity given me to travel and see an other side of Ghana. I cannot stop talking about it, I suppose by now everybody in the house is bored but I believe for you the reader it’s something new. We were back in Tamale on Monday.
(Jordaan)

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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?”