A Video Reading of the Poem ‘Mexican Sestina’ by Geoffrey Smagacz

I spent a year in Celaya Guanajuato in the mid 1980s.. was given a home by the wonderful Nena and Dante of the Vencedora Cajeteria, was invited for breakfast with dear Padre Chevy and his kind housekeeper Cheuy for Friday breakfasts and for regular weekends with my friend Conchita and her wonderful family in Leon. It was a life-changing experience. In Mexicio I discovered what real family looks like, what it means to be a mother, what a Catholic community is, and what it takes to build one and to keep it alive, what the Rosary is and what it means to pray it..In other words I was given a providential opportunity to experience people really living the commandments to love God and neighbour and to trust not in our own strength, such as it is, but to His Providence.

Listening to your account left me deeply unsettled. In Mexico, despite the great psychological challenge of the dramatic culture shock which I experienced, I ultimately found genuine love .. i.e not of fame or power, pleasure or success .. but of God and of neighbour , peace and through this I found purpose and vocation. Yet you seem to have found nothing of the kind on your beach.

Part of the Mexican genius is hard work.
Here in the UK we think of Mexicans as lazy but that was not what I saw at all. I’ve never met so many so determined and hard-working people. Those whom I saw worked not for material gain but for the love of God and family ..
They were not lazy.. It was just that they paced themselves. A Siesta is supposed to be restorative.. to make the most of the time of day when you are too hot and exhausted because you’ve been up since dawn.. to work…to recharge… to enable to you better resume work in the evening.

Your account evokes in me an unsettling , suffocating and perturbing sensation ..
it has the opposite effect to a Siesta.. Rather like memories of visiting the London Dungeon in the 1970s…listening to it caused me to wander down a labyrinth of dark passages , past one ghastly exhibit after another, searching desperately for light, direction and meaning and finding none. It left me feeling paralysed in the dark.

I have recently discovered the word “acedia”. The desert fathers apparently called it the ” Noon-day devil” a feeling that nothing is worth while and you should sink into a half-life state and give up. I believe this to be the besetting temptation of the age.

I heartily recommend you wake up, get up off the beach, listen to C.S Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters”
.. Go and spend some time before the Blessed Sacrament and ask Him what He has plannned for your life
and what you should do.

I hope and pray you find the kind of purpose and joy I found in Mexico
and I saw in the often very poor but loving and hard-working Mexicans
with whom I was priviledged to spoend a year,

sincerely,

Karen in Cambridge,
UK