Rougemont

 

 

Theme 4

 

The Role or the Formation Director

 

 

 Many issues developed in the preceding chapter concerning the coordinator are applicable to the formation director.

 

The formation director is at the centre of all the problems we are dealing with in these pages.

 

She will be the privileged witness to the personal growth of young sisters and to some extent its architect. She will also be the privileged witness to, and architect of their first insertion in the community. While carrying out her responsibility for personal dialogue and counselling, she will weave the first living and enduring threads bonding the young sister to the institute. For several years she will be a point of reference whenever the young aspirants will ask questions about the spiritual family they wish to join.

 

The formation director also stands at the crossroads of all problems concerning the future.

 

She is quickly called upon when a discernment problem arises in relation to potential candidates. These future community members sometimes pass long years under her care. No wonder the quality of her witnessing, her personal example, and her educational work have a direct impact on the institute's future.

 Moreover, the formation director is one of those few women in the community who are called to become, for the sake of others, witnesses to continuity at the spiritual level.

 On the other hand, her knowledge of young people is extremely valuable to the community when problems arise concerning community evolution, mentality changes, or aggiornamento adaptations. Youth must have its say and the formation director is present as their spokesperson. Evidently this presumes the formation director and her role are given their rightful place in the community.

 

The formation director also plays an important role in community recruitment,

. either by her personal ministry or as a team member accompanying young people in search of their vocation (I am acquainted with cloistered nuns who are members of these spiritual accompaniment teams but who never leave their convent);

. either by her personal style which stamps the convent's interior life and has an impact on recruiting;

. either by conversations with young people frequently dropping in or those just passing through;

. or, finally, by her spiritual influence in the community.

Young people visiting our communities may never remember the colour of the stained-glass windows, but they will never forget the sister who listened, read between the lines, and understood their message.

 

The formation director's task is both magnificent and formidable

 

How magnificent is this task ! It is a very special participation in the work of Jesus, the Shepherd, 'who knows his sheep and calls them by their name'.

The formation director strives to help young people at the depth level where only the Holy Spirit can be the master builder. She reaches out to them when each one is at a decisive crossroad in life as a baptized member of the Church. Choices made during the postulate or novitiate stages will orient a whole life of prayer and service, will mobilize all the life forces of heart and mind, and will shape each one's mode of presence in the Church and her eternal physiognomy.

A magnificent task also because of the trust given her by the community, the coordinator, and each young aspirant. And one must add... by the church, who relies on the formation director's discernment in taking major decisions, choosing essential study programmes so that the relationship between the young aspirant and the formation director will, above all, be a faith-filled one, lived in fidelity to the Church, mediator of salvation. Each aspirant could and should tell herself  : "The Church gives me this sister, this one and no other, to authenticate my vocation and to confirm my decision".

Among all the tasks entrusted to a sister by the vow of obedience, that of formation director is no doubt the most noble and the richest in evangelical promises. On one condition: that this responsibility be accepted from the Church with a poor and humble heart, and as a burden that Jesus alone will be able to lighten.

 

A formidable task is that of the formation director. A task, moreover, that no sister should seek.

Formidable, first of all, because the formation director's field of action is the individual's inner life and freedom. The formation director, who has neither the power nor the desire to oblige people to confide in her, always has to work with the bits and pieces revealed in dialogue: fragments of a past life history, happy or unhappy experiences, successes, traumas, a constant or intermittent search for God. Thus, in dealing with a personal history the formation director always finds herself at a downstream point where she receives the upstream residue of risks taken, of constructive and destructive episodes, of marvellous hope in life and happiness, which propels forward even those destinies seemingly the most wretched, the most compromised at the start.

 

Concerning the present, the formation director becomes the confidante of spiritual ideals, contemplative and missionary; confidante of spiritual experiences: meeting God and Christ in prayer; confidante of community life struggles. She is witness to successful efforts as well as failures; aware, on the aspirant's commitment day, of what has been accomplished, what is left to accomplish, and what God alone can achieve. She must take all these facts into consideration without letting them numb her vitality, without giving up hope; she must often seek the true good, the long-term good of that young person without letting herself be tempted by easy solutions.

By sheer patience and openness, honesty and discretion, firmness and availability, the formation director must guide the young sister into taking an active part in her own formation, of becoming the formator's ally for this formation and discernment task. But even when the formation director succeeds in obtaining this result, source of future hope, she still has to shoulder a good part of the dissatisfactions, disturbances, insecurities, and at times the instability and aggressiveness of young people in formation, for she has to govern, channel, and redirect towards a love that is a total self-offering, these emotional resources, still not clearly perceived by the young person herself. She must accompany a whole interior liberation process, which brings her face to face with resistance, stubbornness, even revolts sometimes deeply rooted in past personal conflicts. She will have to confront such turbulence more and more, as her function takes on very powerful symbolic values: she is the "mother", she is the "big sister", she is the teacher whose approval is needed for membership in the community.

 

An immense solitude is the lot of the formation director, who must support others without being supported herself, who cannot share with anyone else the heavy responsibility of accompaniment entrusted to her alone.

Bound by absolute secrecy towards these young people and restrained by it, she can share with the community only a small part of her own problems. Oftentimes, she cannot divulge to the community the reasons for any of her decisions or commands. At times this solitude weighs more heavily on her, especially when she becomes aware of her own limitations: limitations to her perspicacity, her judgment, her powers of resistance. But it is in this very weakness that Christ chooses to manifest his power, and finally solitude becomes grace, for it propels the director towards Jesus alone, Jesus the Shepherd to whom each sheep belongs, Jesus the Friend who wishes to be the confidant of all those working with him to fulfill the Father's plan.

 

Moreover, in her ministry of fostering young people's growth, the formation director must be ready to live a different exodus with each individual, without knowing beforehand the route she should take.

For, teaching programmes such as Introduction to Liturgy, to the Bible, to the Church Fathers can be organized, but conversions cannot be programmed; neither can the experience of contemplative prayer, nor the imperativeness of charity. One must not be surprised by the detours, the slow progress of the sisters, nor the slow responses of God. God alone is the Master of time frames in spiritual life, and often wisdom will consist in not trying to walk faster than the Holy Spirit.

 

One can never repeat often enough that the formation director's work demands a person poor and humble at heart, one with utmost trust in the Holy Spirit, for it is He alone who transform hearts.

Human means are not insignificant; psychological testing and analysis of past experiences have their importance and insure additional objectivity, but nothing can ever replace the quality of the director's attentiveness, which in turn makes demands on her whole person:

. attentiveness to what the young person says, even by her silence;

. attentiveness to what she wants to say even beyond the words she finds or fails to find;

. attentiveness especially to what the Spirit of Jesus makes her see and foresee.

 

The formator's ministry is truly a prophetic one in nature. Prophetic in what way? Formerly we used to say : a prophet is the one who announces the future. Not quite true. In the Bible, a prophet is a man or woman who has been seized by the Spirit, and when strengthened and enlightened by this Spirit, is able to read the present actions of the People of God in relation to their foundation history on one hand, and the promises God made to his People on the other hand. The prophet, above all, is the person who reads the present, the lived experience of God's People, now, today.

The formator's task, therefore, is truly a prophetic ministry: it is a question of reading the aspirant's present life experience in the presence of the Spirit, in the light of important past events having shaped her faith life, and in the light of God's promises to her. It is also a service of consolation.

 

Finally, it must be emphasized that the formator's responsibilities force her to take her own self to task, and often with great intensity.

Community coordinators are well aware that formation directors need to be understood and encouraged. This point has to be emphasized, for communities are not always conscious of this need. Many sisters have no clue whatsoever to the real demands made on those formation directors who take their task to heart and perceive at the very core of their responsibility a call to their own conversion.

 

Already their function places them in the spotlight, thus drawing the attention of the younger community members. The novitiate director must show the way and prove her teachings can become reality. The young, and the community as well, expect her to be a model of good example, whether it concern commitment to prayer, gospel charity, dedication, or active participation in community life.

To be sure, the formation director's obligation to show the way is an opportunity for spiritual growth, but unhappily her entourage does not realize to what extent her vital forces are being exhausted, and the formation director does not always find at her side a community coordinator who will say, as Jesus did to his disciples: "You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for awhile" (Mk 6:31).

 

At a still deeper level, the formation director is called to a continuous search for truth and interior liberation through dialogues with aspirants. And this is particularly true when the religious vows are concerned.

Obedience, to which she initiates young sisters raises questions on her own obedience, and especially so because she has been given greater freedom to accomplish her task.

Poverty that she teaches to others, has no room for any dissimulation, any compromise with a life of comfort.

Chastity of body and heart, object of deeper understanding and of confidential disclosures on the part of young sisters, obliges the formation director to examine her own emotional experiences, her own family and personal history, her own weaknesses.

 

Only a liberated heart can effectively work to free other hearts, and at times the formation director needs to call on all the strength of her love for Jesus the Shepherd, all her trust in Jesus the Saviour, to accept probing the depths of her own desires and fears. It is necessary to have walked down this road of reality and humility, to admit that she too is still striving to achieve total maturity, the true freedom of a daughter of God, and the emotional autonomy proper to a spouse of Christ.

Several years of experience are sufficient to awaken in the formation director an awareness of her own need for interior clarification and the integration of her being as a woman. This integration is necessary, if only for the purpose of taking care as best possible, without harshness or weakness, of the emotional issues brought up by sisters in formation, needs that are often unforeseen but which demand a necessary integration of the human and spiritual growth processes of each sister.

 

 

Community conditions favorable to the formation director's work

 

1.    The formation director must be clearly designated and mandated for the responsibility of forming the young. Ambiguity would not be constructive, neither for the young nor for the community.

2.    Hopefully her efforts and decisions will be received by a community already well-disposed towards her.

3.   When other sisters collaborate in the novitiate formation programmes by giving courses or supervising research projects, the formation director must be able to rely on their complete loyalty. These helpers must always refer to the formation director as soon as a serious problem or discernment situation surfaces during a course.

4.    Wherever the community sisters are permitted to give the formation director their opinions on the novices, or report important recurring events, they must not expect the director to give them a definite answer, and thus risk slipping away from the absolute discretion due to the young in formation. Total reciprocity will not necessarily exist: what the sisters submit will be well accepted, but the formation director can only respond after some discernment of the situation.

5.    It is important that the roles of the formation director and the coordinator be clearly indicated, that the young know what is to be expected from each. Evidently, at no time during the formation period, should the young sisters feel they are pawns in an influence or power struggle between the formation director and the community coordinator.

 

 

The formation of the formators

 

From the reflections on the nobility, the demands and difficulties inherent in the role of formation director, one certainty emerges, one with evidence to support it:

. the novice mistress's work is not a task of improvisation;

. others cannot improvise, produce offhand, a formation director.

 

No matter what our communities were like in the past - there is no question of judging or condemning them - to prepare for 21st century life in the spirit of the post-Vatican II Church, it is absolutely necessary to form formators.

Those of you who had to shoulder this task almost overnight through obedience have experienced the insecurity such a situation can cause. Consequently, numerous institutes understood long ago that the future of congregations depends on the formation given the sisters, and, above all, the preparation of formation directors.

 

In several areas, major efforts were made:

- basic biblical and theological formation,

- initiation to the mystery of the Liturgy,

- deeper understanding of the Founder's charism, and the Tradition of the different spiritual families,

- updating of lifestyle and customs,

- reflection on the vows, on consecrated life, on the role of religious in the Church and in the mission of the Church according to Vatican IT, on the pedagogy of prayer and spiritual life in general,

- and in the last few years, a positive anthropological and theological research:

    on women,

    on women's state in life,

    on feminine prayer.

 

What is sometimes lacking is a specialized preparation to exercise a helping relationship or a spiritual accompaniment. one difficulty that has to be faced is the fact that in this field mere information is simply not enough. There are books - excellent books ! - but they do not suffice. They are a source of personal information and documentation. But nothing can replace a group reflection animated by an expert, and focusing on a lived experience analysis.

The formation director can thus learn not only to decode objectively what the young person confides, not only help her flush out her true motives, her relationship difficulties, she also learns the true measure of her own intellectual, emotional, and vital involvement with the young by the way she dialogues, listens, responds, and suggests a solution.

 

To complete this group reflection, in a team of formation directors only, many religious seek individual supervision of their pedagogical work. The objective is neither spiritual guidance as such, nor spiritual dialogue, although one may lead to the other.

For individual supervision, the formation director will choose an expert counsellor known for her/his total discretion and stationed outside the community, if possible. She will bring to this counsellor her dialogue experiences with postulant or novice, her questions, discernments, directives given but causing uncertainty - all this, in total anonymity, if need be.

These dialogues on the lived experience of a formator enable her to perceive more clearly her own reactions, analyse the fears generated by her enthusiasm more precisely, bear insecurity more courageously, and therefore see more lucidly where the true good of those she is missioned to help and lead to Christ can be found.

 

 

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