- Most influential persons:
- My mother (Mrs Santhosham)
- Thomas Amalraj SDB, my aspirantate Rector
- Salesian Aspirantate community
- Their secret:
(a) My mother faced the many struggles that the family underwent with courage, deep faith and strong will power.
(b) Fr. Thomas Amalraj understood my family financial situation and supported me without making a show of it.
(c) The Salesian Aspirantate community placed so much trust in me and entrusted me with responsibilities.
- Best lessons from my family:
Accepting the challenges and difficulties of life as something normal and moving on. We were a family of eight children. Financial and other problems were there. But they were accepted as something normal and put up with. This showed me the way to live!
Learning to accept everyone: Not all of us had the same temperament! We had our differences, but we learned to accept each other in our differences and we were all united!
Trust in God: That God is our Father, that He will not abandon us, that He will see us through our troubles. This is not the theoretical faith, but I am referring to the faith that we lived.
- Helps in religious life:
- To treat everyone equally without partiality.
- To appreciate others, to value others.
- To critically evaluate things.
- Best help as a religious:
- Most helpful: Atmosphere of the formation community (community life).
- Next most helpful: The person of the formator.
- Third most helpful: The formation programme as a whole.
- What I tried to give to formees:
As formators, our primary concern has been to provide the right ambient/atmosphere for the formees to grow, because formation just happens (values are convincing and are taken in) when there is a good atmosphere of freedom, family spirit and cheerfulness. So we have tried to organize the community on Salesian values: family spirit, treating people with respect without partiality, a balance in everything, prayer, care for the poor, cheerfulness, …
It was my hope and prayer that we, formators, be truly worthy of imitation. So, I desired that the formees saw in me a happy Salesian with no regrets or ambitions and that they saw that it was worthwhile to live such a life.
Formees are looking for (/need) credible examples of what we preach to them in our very lives! They need witnesses of a happy contented religious life.
- Religious less mature than lay persons? How to help them mature:
I beg to differ on this point. Those with whom I have been associated in the formation have demonstrated maturity commensurate to their age, especially when it comes to making an informed decision.
The best way to help them mature is to treat them as mature persons.
- Other suggestions:
- Our personal life (the way we live our vocation: that we are convinced of what we tell them!) matters much more than anything else.
- Treat people with respect: The way we relate with them / the way we respect them is the real formation.
- Be human: The formators should not expect the formees to be perfectly formed already as postulants or novices! Allow them to grow!
- Mistakes to avoid
- Expecting the formees to be perfect already in the initial stages!
- Seeing the formees as competitors!
- Inflicting ‘over strict’ formation that they themselves have been subjected to!
- Qualities of a good formator
- A willingness and happiness to do that ministry
- Live as a good and happy religious
- To be true to oneself/ to work on oneself.
- Should have enjoyed his own formation!.
Fr Pathiaraj Rayappa SDB
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