Today's Novices, Tomorrow's Spiritans
by Barney Kelly, CSSp
On 22 August 1999 I got into a van with seven
novices. We drove from Dublin to Glenstal Abbey, the Benedictine
monastery in the southwest of Ireland, where I was to help them make
their final retreat before profession. We were an international group
with four Frenchmen (one of whom was from Martinique), one Irishman,
one German, one Croat and myself, from Canada, bound together by our
Spiritan calling.
A month later I was master of novices on the island of Mauritius in
the Indian Ocean, sharing the responsibility with a Mauritian
Spiritan who had recently returned from missionary work in Pakistan.
There were three novices, two from Madagascar and one from Mauritius.
The unifying factor was, again, our Spiritan identity and our
involvement in the formation programme of the Indian Ocean Foundation.
Faced with the problem of how to become a novice master, I decided
that I would first just try to be a Spiritan missionary. I see the
current Spiritan missionary profile as something like this. We are
marked out by the quality of our presence to the people we serve. We
listen a lot. We learn the language. We go where others are reluctant
to go. The Holy Spirit precedes us. We discover this presence if we
approach people with respect. We go among people who don't count.
They have a feel for Jesus of Nazareth. We have shed the burden of
having to know everything, of having to decide everything. We open
our heart and we receive gifts untold. There is a lot in it for us.
Just the effort to fall into step with this got me off to a good
start. The rest came from the wide experience of the Congregation
that I am privileged to have and some Libermann studies of 25 years ago.
The fact that I was asked to come to Haiti as novice master was maybe
an encouraging sign of modest success in Mauritius, if only the
request did not have such an obvious note of desperation to it! Here
in Port-au-Prince there are 5 novices, all Haitians. Their average
age is 27. A sixth Haitian is at the international novitiate in
Trinidad. I am assisted by a French Spiritan from Martinique, who has
experience of working in Haiti. My predecessor here was also a
Canadian, Michel Last CSSp from Quebec.
Becoming Spiritans
The principal focus of the novitiate year is enabling the novice to
deepen his Christian life in response to his call to become a
Spiritan. This involves fully taking possession of the grace of his
vocation, developing a reliable rhythm of prayer and work in the
context of community living and becoming acquainted with the Spiritan
missionary tradition. The weekly timetable headings are an indication
of the activities: Eucharist, meditation, prayer of the Church,
meals, conferences, manual labour, lectio divina, pastoral work,
sport, television timeÉ. The year comes to a climax in the
profession ceremony, where the novices publicly profess the vows of
poverty, chastity and obedience, thus achieving their goal of
becoming Spiritans.
It is 47 years since I made my own novitiate. I have reflected on
this time, not to borrow practices of another day, but to try to
rediscover truths about the journey of faith. I mention one, the
importance of peer influence. Ever since the novitiate, fellow
novices and fellow Spiritans have been the ones to bring out the best
in me. For the most part the novices form each other. I try to invoke
God's presence, proclaim God's word, create an atmosphere in which a
journey of faith can take place.
The most important people in the novitiate are the novices. They
already have considerable experience of living, maybe of making a
living. They have been through a pre-novitiate programme and begun
their studies (1st cycle). They are older than in previous times,
more mature socially and sexually. They talk about football and
popular music, but also about world markets and political questions.
They know their story. They are proud of their identity and of their
country's struggle for independence.
It is impossible to hear the stories of the people of Haiti and
Mauritius and not develop a conscious abhorrence of slavery and a
feeling for the struggle to be free.
The modern novitiate
In Mauritius the novitiate is in the city of Rose Hill. Each morning
we clearly heard the
Moslem call to prayer, marginally before our own! In Haiti the
novitiate is in a Spiritan compound in the middle of a shantytown.
Each heavy rainfall sharpens the whiff from open sewers and piles of
accumulated rubbish.
In both Mauritius and Haiti an internovitiate programme enables young
men and women to come together to explore and deepen the sense of
their religious vocation. In Mauritius the novices go once a week to
visit a prison for young offenders. In Haiti on Wednesday mornings,
three novices work in an orphanage. The other two are part of a team
that works with children in deprived situations.
The young men I have met in the last two years are not presumptuous,
not overconfident. Neither are they shy. They are Spiritans, ready to
continue a work that began 300 years ago.
