Weekend Reflections for 1/8/21

Sacramental Growth through Spiritual Exercises

Over 50 years ago, Dutch Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx wrote of Christ as “the Sacrament of the Encounter with God.” Indeed, the Christmas feast celebrates Jesus’ sonship, bodily, in human form. When, in turn, he is glorified and “leaves the world,” at Easter time, Christ’s incarnation continues in the world especially in the church’s sacraments.

Schillebeeckx overturns the image of sacramental grace as something “put into” us humans like some sort of medicine, maintaining that the Church’s sacraments are not “things” but encounters with the glorified human Jesus. This Sunday’s feast of Jesus’ Baptism opens the way for our own ongoing personal relationship with God in the only way in which a person is accessible to us at all, through bodily encounter.

Jesus’ Baptism invites us to recall the graces of our own sacramental experiences. For him this initiation was “once and for all,” for us, thanks be to God, our own initiation is usually an ongoing, gradual process of growth, the type of growth we can nourish through our White House Spiritual Exercises.

The three elements of Jesus’ initiation say a lot about our own process of growth. Water of Creation: dividing of the waters, Birth: your mother and mine knew we were soon to break forth -- water broke, and we were tearing part of her open to enter this world. Cleansing at birth, by water, cleansing of the blood of birth; and a different kind of cleansing at infant baptism, cleansing for initiation into Christian life, a process of continual cleansing through repentance, reconciliation.

May we regularly come back to the river of life, the waters of redemptive grace by our own sacramental life and through encounter with God, to hear God once again say “this is my beloved Son, listen to him” during our Spiritual Exercises at White House. 

-Fr. Ted Arroyo SJ