Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: The New Creation

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The New Creation

The greatest challenge I have received from the cosmology work shop is the awareness that each being in the Universe is a product of that original small tiny particle that existed over 15 billion years ago and exploded with tremendous force and energy, and is still expanding forth today. Creation continues! It has been a totally new scientific story for me different from what I ever knew from school, not to mention the creation story that first taught me about the origin of the Earth.
However, the question that is left hanging for me is ‘where did this original matter and the enormous energy come from?’

This is where I feel that the journey made by the scientists to this point of discovery is not yet complete and therefore it gives me room to think that God existed even before the Universe. The existence of this substantial energy is the divine that shaped the stars and galaxies, the sun and the earth, and eventually shaped me and the things around me. This God have I discovered in the workshop - the Source of all Being
(Chris)

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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?”