Tag: Immersion

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A Time for Discovery and Transformation: SCS Alumna Reflects on Ignatian Year Pilgrimage to Spain

Mission in Motion has spent over a year shining a light on the significance of the Ignatian Year, the 500th anniversary of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, undergoing his personal transformation that eventually led to the birth of a new religious order and a global network of schools, like Georgetown. A recent post describes a series of pilgrimage immersions in Spain that took place this summer for students, faculty, staff, and alumni who desired an even deeper engagement with the meaningfulness of St. Ignatius’ own sacred story and its relevance today. 

This week, we hear directly from SCS alumna Karim Trueblood, who participated in Georgetown’s alumni pilgrimage to Spain. Mission in Motion has previously interviewed Karim about her reflections on Georgetown SCS, the relationship between Ignatian principles and her professional life, and how the Jesuit Values she experienced as a student in the Master of Professional Studies in Emergency & Disaster Management (EDM) program have shaped her vocation. 

Having taught Karim in the SCS Jesuit Values in Professional Practice course, I can personally attest to how much she has appropriated the principles and characteristics of Jesuit education and spirituality in her life. It is fair to say that Karim’s life has been transformed by her Ignatian experiences, so much so that she is currently pursuing a doctorate in these topics. What I find so important about Karim’s reflection below is the way that she interprets the Ignatian holy sites in a way that respects both religious diversity and the integrity of the Jesuit tradition. 

In this week’s Mission in Motion, SCS alumna Karim Trueblood (pictured second row, middle) reflects on her time in Spain as part of an Ignatian Year pilgrimage with Georgetown alumni. Credit: Javi Valdivieso

As part of the celebration of the Ignatian Year, I recently participated in a Shrines of Spain Pilgrimage following the Footsteps of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. This pilgrimage for Georgetown alums was guided by Jesuits Fr. Mark Bosco and Fr. Jerry Hayes. The trip took us to Spain, starting in Madrid and finishing in Barcelona while visiting influential places in the life of Saint Ignatius along the way. The meticulously curated itinerary provided an array of magnificent thought-provoking stops, delightful people, and delicious food.

 To be transparent about my experience, this was my first time traveling with a group, and to say that I was hesitant is an understatement. Additionally, in our home we share our faith between Catholicism and Quakerism. I have found that the Society of Jesus and the Society of Friends share similar values and were eager to start the journey. I started this journey with 20 strangers and many questions and ended the journey with 20 friends and even more questions.

 It was only after returning home, intentionally reflecting on the pilgrimage and reviewing my notes, that I understood the significance of this unique opportunity. In retrospect, this was a journey to deepen my relationship with God, myself, my husband, fellow pilgrims, and locals that graciously shared their country, customs, and history. Part of my commitment to increase awareness required me to limit the use of technology, so pictures are limited, but there are enough notes and journal entries to write a book.

In addition to deepening my relationship with God and others, I found the experience was closely related to the Jesuit values guiding Georgetown University. It was an opportunity for community building and to practice intentionality regardless of religious background. The visits to sites like the Loyola Castle, Saint Ignatius’ place of birth, or Pamplona, where Saint Ignatius was injured in battle leading to his spiritual conversion, were perfect for engaging our minds and hearts in imagination and contemplation.

Montserrat, pictured here, is a sacred place in the life of St. Ignatius.  Credit: Javi Valdivieso

The visit to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Arantzazu, nestled in nature and visited by Saint Ignatius on his way to Manresa, evoked tranquility while highlighting the importance of Caring for Our Common Home. It was important for the Franciscans there that people felt the impact of nature while in the basilica. From my perspective, the feeling of being connected with nature was undeniable, perhaps one of my favorite places during the pilgrimage. The visit also prompted questions about my role in advancing or hindering environmental justice due to everyday decisions. 

The visit to Montserrat was spectacular and provided the perfect preamble to Manresa. In the Cove of Saint Ignatius in Manresa, where Saint Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises, I found a deeper understanding of the value of learning directly from these places that inspired Saint Ignatius, how a life in disorder and spiritual desolation was crucial to engaging in deep reflection to seek to conquer the self and discern our purpose.  

The pilgrimage was not strictly about religion, but thinking about religion allowed me to reflect on the impact religion has on culture and individuals. The pilgrimage reminded me of the importance of community and how flawed individuals searching for unique answers can come together and become grounded in love. This opportunity was only possible because of Georgetown. I was reminded of the value of discovery and transformation. 

In order to grow, it is imperative to experience new things, engage with different people, and visit new places. Georgetown University is a place with unlimited opportunities to engage in discovery and transformation. Seek more in the spirit of Magis and for the Greater Glory of God regardless of career path or religious background; you might surprise yourself, just like I continue to do even after graduation. 

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Georgetown Pilgrimages to Ignatian Spain Help Bring Georgetown’s Ignatian Year to an End 

A screenshot of the Instagram account of Georgetown’s Campus Ministry. You can follow along a series of Magis Immersion pilgrimages to Ignatian Spain, involving students, faculty, staff, and alumni. 

“The time has come to set out for sacred ground … that will stir our sense of wonder. It is down the path to the deeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey that we cannot Not take. The old hermit along the side of the road whispers, Stranger, Pass by that which you do not love.” ― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred

The Ignatian Year officially ends on July 31, 2022, on the Feast Day of St. Ignatius. Georgetown has celebrated this 500-year anniversary in many ways throughout the last 12 months, including a Storytelling event in the fall semester and a Sacred Lecture in the spring. A University committee came together and, among other things, created a universally appealing bookmark intended to spur discussion, reflection, and action about the Ignatian Year across the campuses. 

And as the Ignatian Year officially comes to a close, Georgetown has embarked on a series of pilgrimage trips to the Ignatian holy sites in Spain during the months of June and July. Separate experiences for students, faculty and staff, and alumni are offering participants a direct opportunity to explore together the sacred sites of the Jesuits’ founder. 

Pilgrimage is an appropriate way to bring this year to an end. For St. Ignatius, all of the spiritual life is essentially a pilgrimage. Ignatius’ own autobiography is described as a “pilgrim’s journey” and details how he literally traveled much of the world and figuratively traveled in his own soul in order to discover the ultimate, authentic purpose of his life. Andria Wisler, Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service, is fond of sharing Cousineau’s quote above at the beginning of Magis Immersion Trips (like this one to the U.S.-Mexico Border). There is a strong link between Cousineau’s images of the pilgrimage as an of real holy ground that stirs wonder and the Ignatian notion of Finding God in All Things. 

For St. Ignatius, no experience is too mundane to potentially become an encounter with the Divine. By paying attention to the details of our outward and inward journeys, whether they be the magnificent Spanish sites of Ignatius’ life or our own daily commutes, we can enter into deeper communion with the transcendent mystery of our lives. It is through this daily pilgrimage, and the discernment that it entails, that we travel closer and closer to our ultimate destination and purpose. 


In the coming weeks, Mission in Motion will share more about Georgetown SCS’s participation in the Ignatian pilgrimages to Spain. 

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Head and Heart Moved to Action: Reflections on a Critical Immersion to the U.S.-Mexico Border

For the inaugural post of Mission in Motion, a blog dedicated to reflections about efforts to animate Jesuit values at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, Jamie Kralovec, Associate Director for Mission Integration, offers a reflection about his experience on the U.S.-Mexico border through Georgetown’s Magis Kino Immersion.

“I will do anything to get back to my children.”

Photo of the Georgetown group walking along the Mexican side of the wall across from Nogales, Arizona

Hearing Ariel’s words firsthand forever changed my understanding of the issues surrounding migration on the border between the United States and Mexico. Ariel lived for years in the U.S. without legal documentation, before being apprehended by law enforcement, sentenced to 1.5 years in a federal detention facility, and then deported to Mexico, a country where she has no family or friends. She left behind two children in the U.S. and a career in health care as a Certified Nursing Assistant. Ariel shared her story with me and a group of other Georgetown faculty and staff at Casa Nazareth, a shelter in Nogales, Mexico run by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) that provides safety, healing, and micro-enterprise opportunities for migrant women. We were in Mexico and southern Arizona in January 2019 through Georgetown’s Magis Kino Border Immersion, an intensive experiential trip with three goals: 1) grow and learn together about the reality of migration issues on the U.S. – Mexico border; 2) consider the implications of this reality for our individual and collective spheres of influence; and 3) reflect together on our roles and responsibilities as faculty and staff at Georgetown relative to the issue of migration.

Each woman at Casa Nazareth had a unique story, but all have been broken in some way by the immigration system, some crossing hundreds of miles of treacherous, uninhabitable desert in the hope of securing a better life. In painful and uncomfortable moments seated around an intimate circle, I ceased to be a distant and passive observer of a complicated policy issue. The unpleasant emotions I was feeling during Ariel’s retelling: sadness, anger, and shame, helped lead me into a deeper, more personal engagement with the persons and events of the immersion experience. With resilience and vulnerability, Ariel invited me into an intimate encounter with her as a person with a story that compels a personal response. As a father of three young children, I suddenly found myself grappling with the personally unimaginable: a life separated from my wife and children by a structure that imposes legal and physical barriers to family unification. This movement: from detached, rational analysis to growing in reverence and relationship with persons our society relegates to the margins, embodies our mission at Georgetown as a Jesuit educational institution committed to social justice. Fr. Greg Boyle, well-known Jesuit author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, describes the mutuality that happens in these encounters as kinship:

Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied.

Facilitated by Georgetown’s Office of Campus Ministry and the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service, Magis Kino models Jesuit education and its interplay of experience, reflection, and action by asking participants to make a sustained commitment to justice as a result of engaging directly with the issues of migration. This approach to learning only works if groups make room for continuous reflection before, during, and after the experience. Reflection helps us make meaning of our experiences by getting in touch with the deeper sources of our sensations, allowing ourselves “to be challenged to change” in the words of former Jesuit Superior General Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. KBI’s approach to immersion trips, designed so that participants humanize, accompany, and complicate their experiences, helped spur our group’s deep reflections at the end of each day. In keeping with its commitment to complicate the issues, KBI also introduced us to a diversity of stakeholders, including law enforcement, the court system, and property owners and ranchers along the border. 

Fr. Peter Neeley of the Kino Border Initiative sharing “holy relics,” objects left behind by migrants along a trail frequently used by migrants near Arivaca, Arizona

One of the trip’s most poignant and physically demanding experiences was a two-hour guided walk of a portion of the migrant trail in Arivaca, Arizona. Jesuit Fr. Peter Neeley led the hike and encouraged us not to reproduce, but to visualize the immigrant experience. It was here that Fr. Neeley presented us with goods he has collected over time left behind by migrants on their arduous journeys. Referring to these objects as “holy relics,” Neeley invited us to grow in solidarity and love for migrants by imagining the people who had once held these objects. The baby bottle for a nursing infant stirred strong emotions and again, like Ariel‘s story, crashed my internal defensive barriers that deceive me into believing that migration does not concern me personally. It pulled me to recognize and affirm the inherent human dignity that I share with the mother and the child who had passed the trail beneath my feet. I will keep these holy relics in mind as I continue to discern the most effective ways that I am called to respond to this experience.

Georgetown faculty and staff eating with parishioners of St. Ferdinand church in Arivaca, Arizona

Pope Francis has encouraged the world to “show some concrete solidarity” with migrants and my immersion experience leads to me to consider ways to express such real solidarity. Four days in Nogales left me with many questions for which I do not pretend to have the answers. I am especially aware after this experience of my own privilege. I will never live on a daily basis with the regular fear and anxiety that migrants carry, or that of our own undocumented students at Georgetown. In spite of this privilege, I cannot proceed without acknowledging that my time in Arizona and Mexico claimed me in a significant way. While there are no perfect solutions to the multi-faceted issues of migration, the complexity does not excuse meaningful action. How might we respond to the needs of migrants and to the social justice implications as individuals and as university community? In the months that follow I will discern this question along with my colleagues at Georgetown. Mindful that individuals are called to respond in their own unique ways, I offer some suggested action steps for anyone interested in humanizing the issue of migration while recognizing its complexity and emphasizing accompaniment of people on their journey:

  • Support KBI’s critical work of education, humanitarian assistance, and advocacy with a financial donation. The organization especially needs in-kind donations of clothing, toiletries, and home goods.
The Georgetown group of faculty and staff on the Kino Border Immersion with hosts from St. Ferdinand and the Kino Border Initiative

The word Magis, rooted in the Jesuit virtue of magnanimity, invites all of us involved in educational endeavors at Georgetown to respond to the gifts of our own lives with gratitude and generosity for others. My brief time on the U.S. – Mexico border moved me to deeper sensitivity and awareness of the suffering experienced by migrants. Jesuit education inspires us at Georgetown to use all of our gifts, including our intellectual inquiry, to engage constructively with the suffering of persons on the margins. I will continue to discern my response to Ariel’s sacred story and her invitation to a deeper solidarity.

Please reach out to Jamie at pjk34@georgetown.edu with any questions or reactions to the post.