Schillebeeckx's Anatomy of Experience

Extract

I should like to begin this paper on a personal note. I suppose it was in my late teens that God began to make a really personal claim on me and over the next four years or so I found that more and more of what I experienced and read spoke to me of God — not only the Mass and spiritual books but all my experience and reading: travelling in the London underground in the rush hour as well as visits to the country; my first experience of girls as well as my discovery of contemplation; films, novels, articles in the secular as well as Catholic journals. It was as if my experience of the present enabled me to begin to understand what I received from my culture and Christian past, but also as if what I thus, so variously and fragmentarily, received from the past put in question, corrected and filled out what I experienced in the present. Present and past thus interacted, sometimes challengingly, sometimes consolingly, sometimes shockingly, but vitally. Everything tended to become a medium and an occasion of the experience of God.

Then I entered the Order and was gradually initiated into traditional Church studies, and little by little I had it impressed on me that the right and proper way to become a theologically-minded persdn was to start from the beginning in the person of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and then to move through the various reformulations of this fontal inspiration in the various forms of the Tradition (to be spelled now, I discovered, with a capital T).