Weekend Reflections for 1/1/21

CALENDAR CONFUSION? OR SACRED LIMENALITY?
Have you noticed a good deal of calendar confusion lately, not always knowing precisely what day or date it is? In social science, “limenality” describes the disorientation, ambiguity, or confusion occurring in the middle stages of a time of passage, when people have not yet completed a transition. In many ways aren’t we in such a time of limenality here and now, in the transition from 2020 to 2021, the change of seasons, but also political transitions, as well as the disorienting plague of coronavirus along with the financial uncertainties accompanying this? All around us we may find broken boundaries in our schedules, work, personal lives, family order, even the world order.

In some ways the same is true of the church year, as we accompany the Holy Family from conception through pregnancy, birth, initiation, epiphany and transition into “ordinary time.”

Although for the time being (until we re-open on January 4, 2021) we are unable to offer the Spiritual Exercises at White House, resources such as your White House prayer book may help us through the disorientation and ambiguity we are all experiencing. The First Principle and Foundation on page 1 calls us back to the basics, while the Awareness/Consciousness Examen on pages 43-45 suggests a set of boundary-stretching exercises, new ways and contexts of praying, leading to ongoing discernment of spirits, naming the temptations and the graces inviting us to find God in all things, and let God find us more and more into the unknown ambiguities of the future.

Let us pray for the White House extended community, that each and all of us may patiently negotiate the difficulties and opportunities offered us in this potentially confusing time of sacred limenality.

To everything there is a season…

-Fr. Ted Arroyo, SJ