Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: Community Pastoral Placement

Monday, December 7, 2009

Community Pastoral Placement

We began, today, our preparation for our 3 month Community Pastoral Placement beginning on the 5th of January 2010.
There will be three communities this year. Paul, Peter Ndivo, Frank and Brian will reside and minister in Shekinah actively involved with the Clinic and the Feeding Program. Jordaan, Likisi, Chris and James will teach at St Monica's and form community in Nyankpala. Sunday, Nicholas, Peter Kabia, Cornelius, Sydney and Otieno will form community in Kanivilli and do thier ministry at Kanvilli RC School and at Yumba School for children with special needs.
We began by spending time reflecting and sharing on the document that outlines the rationale for ministry in the Novitiate experience. This led us into the process of naming our hopes, expectations and fears, and drawing our individual and community goals for the three month experience.
Over the next few days we will look at models of leadership in community, get familiar with budgetting and keeping of accounts, put together what we will need for our three month of experience, and do sessions in the evenings on teacher training and classroom management. This will be an intensive week of preparation that will lead us into the 6 days of reflection beginning on Sunday the 13th.

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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?”