WHITE HOUSE JESUIT RETREAT

St. Louis, MO 63129

1-800-643-1003

Jesuit retreat center high on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, MO.  Since 1922, thousands of people from around the world make annual three-day silent, guided retreats here to relax, reconnect with God and strengthen their spirituality.  A true gem in the Midwest!  Call 314-416-6400 or 1-800-643-1003.  Email reservations@whretreat.org  7400 Christopher Rd.  St. Louis, MO 63129

Both men's and women's retreats are offered as well as recovery retreats.

Take Spirituality to the Next Level!

Weekend Reflections for 8/14/20

August 12, 2020  /  Joe Parisi

Boundary breaking enduring patterns of social sin: racism and caste. In Sunday’s gospel (Mt. 15:21-28) Jesus breaks his Jewish cultural boundaries by healing the daughter of an outcaste Canaanite woman, perhaps setting an example for Christians struggling to deal with racism today.

In her new book: Caste: The Origins of our Discontents[1] Isabel Wilkerson suggests a paradigm shift in how we address the racism still so shockingly rampant in our world. With many moving human stories, she argues that our racial order is a system of caste—a hierarchical structure of hereditary status. She finds many similarities between the treatment of untouchable “dalits” in India, Jews in Nazi Germany, and African Americans to this day, contending that we might better deal with racism by considering it as a caste system like these other two. She situates America’s race problem in a global context, arguing that we need this shift in order to advance the hard work of annihilating caste and racism. She identifies eight "pillars of caste"[2], which seem to be at the foundations of so much contemporary racism. They also point to many sinful social structures in our world today.

  1. Divine will: the belief that social stratification is God’s will and beyond human control.

  2. Heritability: the belief that social status is acquired at birth and immutable.

  3. Endogamy: the prohibition of dating and marriage across castes.

  4. Purity and pollution: the belief that the dominant caste is "pure" and must be protected against pollution by the so-called inferior castes.

  5. Occupational hierarchy: more desirable occupations are reserved for the so-called superior castes.

  6. Dehumanization and stigma: denial of the individuality and human dignity of lower-caste persons.

  7. Terror and cruelty as means of enforcement of the caste system and control of lower-caste people.

  8. Inherent superiority and inferiority of castes: the belief that people of one caste are inherently superior to those of other castes.

In the Spiritual Exercises which we offer at White House, St. Ignatius guides us to a metanoia, a paradigm shift, a profound conversion from sin through the grace of God. His meditations on 3 types of persons [149-157][3] and 3 kinds of humility [165-168] invite us to Jesus’ self-emptying “kenotic” downward mobility so as to see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly. As we pray with these exercises, may our reflections seek the healing of such pillars of caste, chipping away at, maybe even toppling, pillars of racist caste boundaries by emptying ourselves into horizontal healing of personal relationships and social structures. These “pillars” can provide a framework for our prayer and examen about the sins of racism in our lives, culture, and world.

-Fr. Ted Arroyo, SJ

[1] Random House 2020

[2] Caste, pp. 99–164

[3] [] brackets like these refer to the paragraphs of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.