The Novitiate, a “mythical” time to say “Thank you”
“The first moment, alone, in my new room. The meeting with the Novice Master, the first Mass. The first occasion with the other novices along the carrugi (narrow streets) in Genoa. And the football matches. The vows. Friends and parents visiting!”. Eight years have passed since Cristiano, now a Scholastic, entered the novitiate: two years of discernment to confirm the call to become a Jesuit. This is how, with nostalgia and gratitude, he remembers that precious time, together with three of his companions.
“The memory of that time is always vivid in my heart, the feeling of being a community and experiencing God as close. Finding Him in all things, in ourselves. Being able to tell myself in a transparent way to the Novice Master, intimately to the novitiate companions, without masks in pastoral service”.
“You also bring with yourself the doubts and uncomfortable questions that accompany you”, recalls Andrew, “but little by little your way of looking at things changes”. The dialogues with the Novice Master “gradually teach you to identify resistances, eradicate them, cultivate good desires, welcome the other, really understand how “God writes straight on our crooked lines””.
Ambrozie recalls: “There is a clear diversity among us, each of us is part in a unique way of a design that has “the flavor” of family, that progresses and grows together. A great gift to get to know better one’s own dreams, desires, talents and limitations, but also the Charism, Ignatian spirituality, the Society and its way of proceeding. A wise combination of personal and community times: prayer, sharing, study, pastoral activities. “And then “Thursdays”, a day off, reserved for our outings”.
There are many intense experiences: “From meeting many Jesuits to the pilgrimage in poverty, to the month in hospital, to the evenings spent talking about the Gospels with university students,” Cristiano says. “The Thirty Days Retreat helped me to discover who I really am before the Lord,” adds Ambrozie, “as did the pastoral activities to get to know the apostolic communities”. Then the other experiments: “summer programs for 15/30 days, like the one I experienced in a rehabilitation community for drug addicts, which taught me what nostalgia for freedom means”.
Two years in a well-defined place, the big house in Genoa, made up of small rooms, on several floors, up to the belvedere. “Time to look at the sea on the horizon, at our life. A precious time to learn how to say our own “Thank You””.
The novitiate of the EUM Jesuits, which is based in Genoa, is the initial stage of the journey of formation: two years to confirm in a more profound way one’s desire to follow the Lord. The pivotal points of the experience are: prayer – personal and communal – to build a more mature relationship with the Lord; community life, consisting of study, service, sport and free time; formation in the charism through the reading of the founding texts of the Society and apostolic collaborations, in Genoa as well as those which are organised during summer, which help in the maturation of the style and the way of proceeding proper to the Society.
