Brothers' Assembly Cambodia: Accompaniment a key to early
choice
PHNOM PENH: 25th August 2006 -- The Brothers'
Assembly (EAO) is now
drawing to a close. austraLasia hopes to run a résume of the
events
tomorrow, as the participants begin to make their way home around the
region. Today, though, it seems valuable to take up the other
function
of this little 'link' around a scattered region - its formation role,
with an outline of one of the discussions which took place on Day Four:
accompaniment.
Little doubt in participants' minds that
accompaniment is some sort
of key to the initial discernment process. Fr Joseph
Dung, from
Vietnam had spoken of his experience of Salesian accompaniment for the
Brother. Fr Dung is director of novices for VIE: he had been forced to
reflect on the issue by a simple question from one of his novices -
could a Brother be novice master? His off-the-cuff answer was
that by
any reading of the Constitutions, the answer would be yes! But
his
reflection on the question was that its intent was not so much whether
or not it was a constitutional issue, but the role and figure of the
Brother in the lives of those at a crucial stage of discernment in the
context of Salesian religious life - accompaniment by a Brother seemed
important to this discernment.
In practice this seemed to be the case too.
Speaking with recently
professed young Salesians, amongst whom this year were six Brothers,
the newly professed Brothers themselves indicated the importance of the
presence of a particular Brother in their pre-novitiate, as a valuable
factor in their ultimate discernment during novitiate year. That
Brother has now gone off to the missions. Fr Dung mused on what
the
strategic effect of that might also be, given the influence the
individual had had on his young men.
Fr Chrys Saldanha added to the thinking by noting
that while the
documents are quite clear about the various stages of formation, one
element appears to be not so clear - the initial 'harvesting'. He
made
the point that the moment a young man begins to make a choice for
Salesian life, formation has begun. Accompaniment is a key even
and
especially at this stage. How to 'de-clericalise' this important
first
step? An accompaniment that from this early stage provides
contact with
a Brother, presentation of the right model.
And where is all this going in concrete terms?
That element has been foremost in the Assembly's thinking.
Province group discussions have been formulating steps as the
discussions continues, focusing on elements that are core to
consecrated life, consecrated witness, discernment and accompaniment in
real terms.
___________________
AustraLasia
is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific.
It also
functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome. For queries please
contact admin@bosconet.aust.com
Try
out BoscoWiki to be interactive. For RSS feeds, subscribe to www.bosconet.aust.com/RSS/rssala.xm
A separate service entirely is called F/OSSERVATORE
to help us keep abreast of trends in the digital world.
