A lifetime of pilgrimages leads affiliate to FSPA GATE program

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. – Thomas Merton

by Violeta Abitia
GATE Assistant Director

During the last 16 months I have had the opportunity to journey with others who, having chosen to engage in the Global Awareness Through Education program, have become the recipients of much of the passion, joy and multicultural experience that I carry. Throughout a lifetime of pilgrimages I have been richly emboldened by mentors, sages, teachers, grandmothers and friends. They are still some of the lifelines from which I draw to share in plenty. A most profound privilege has been meeting, engaging in dialogue and breaking bread with some of the wisest, humblest and most courageous indigenous people in the world.

I was born and raised in Mexico City, the biggest city in the world, a metropolis of unfathomable proportions and complexity. As a child, my world experience was lived in rich awareness of the many contrasting realms where my spirit and senses were engaged, from grasshoppers in our lawns to the architectural marvels
of monumental size.

My “cosmic connection,” as Sister Laurian Pieterek would have called it, allowed me since early childhood to touch the beauty of creation and the hearts of humans—insatiably curious and observant, playful, fearful and hopeful alike. I treasured conversations with the man who tended our gardens as much as the nourishment of the indigenous woman, Maria, from Oaxaca, who helped and enriched our household with her hands and spirit. I loved the structure of rigorous schooling. I waited patiently for the monarch butterfly to free herself from her cocoon above the threshold of our home. Someday, this would also become my journey.

I became a pilgrim at a very young age, traveling with my maternal grandmother during the Lenten season into remote areas of Mexico to visit her hometown, Iramuco, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.The familiar comforts of the “capital” gradually faded as we approached the pig farm and farming fields by the lake of Cuitzeo. They were gradually replaced by the most primal of smells, sounds, sensations, sights and flavors of the Holy Week of passion, death and resurrection of Christ among the cultural heritage of the poor and outcast of the land. A seed was planted, a prayer was woven around my head, and I awoke to a reality from which I might have been blinded or protected from within the strict social hierarchies of Mexican culture.

Four decades have passed since those first transformative journeys. Now a holy longing has been cast upon my heart. All the pilgrimages I have made across cultural divides have gradually brought me closer to home, that mythical place we imagine to exist but which in reality lives within. Merton names it in his writings: “Let go of all that seems to suggest getting somewhere, being someone, having a name and a voice, following a policy and directing people in ‘my‘ ways. What matters is to love.” What truly matters is to learn to love well. Human nature is everywhere the same, Christ is everywhere the same. And so I put all this experience into the U-Theory and realize I have lived the heroes’ journey courageously, passionately in full spirit, full mind and full flesh. I am a Franciscan going through a new GATE with an open mind, an open heart and an open will: “Uncovering common intent, observing, observing, observing, presencing, connecting to the source of inspiration and will, going to the place of silence and allowing the inner knowing to emerge, co-creating and acting from the whole.”