Written by Agnes Prieto
Inquirer: First Posted 07:12:00 11/04/2007
Life is a journey traversing valleys and mountain peaks, but “Agape: Maria’s Notebook” by Maria Abulencia is one particular trip that rips the soul apart on one page, then sets it down it gently amidst a field of flowers the next.
It’s a tough and bumpy ride with details of several suicide attempts as well as philosophical underpinnings from Robert Assagioli, Carl Gustav Jung and Rudolf Steiner. There’s mention too of the Christian Liberation Front, international humanitarian thrusts, Philippine theater and free body movement. The settings range from convents to prisons to mountain crags.
Maria Abulencia
The prose is so keen one can almost see the dust mites and cobwebs under the bed where Maria hid while her priest-lover attempts a cover up of their tryst. Despair cuts deep as she mulls her unusual circumstances but joy is luminescent as well when, in a vision, she emerges victorious in a crystalline lake.
“Maria’s Notebook” is devastatingly honest. But more than a personal journey, the book reflects the life and times of a young woman coming into her own in the Seventies. It mirrors her tremendous struggle to achieve “a deeper sense of worth and destiny as a Filipino, a woman, a wife, a mother and as someone beyond all these names.” It is also a reflection of a chaotic and iconoclastic era whipped by winds of change. It was martial law: priests became activists, coeds became rebels and anything that had to do with the system was anathema and had to be destroyed.
A forbidden love story is the window through which we are given a close up view into this time. Maria falls in love with a charismatic leader of the Leftist underground movement, who happens to be a priest. Disguised as “Jacob” in the book, he remains a well-known personality familiar to those in the milieu.
Says Maria of the book: “(This is about) my experience in loving and risking that led me to accept truth, responsibility, wholeness and evolution as the substance of God’s presence in me.” It was love at first “dg” (discussion group), she recalls, when she encounters “Jacob,” whose “eloquence, charisma and genius” made her vow right off that “this is the man I will marry, I sense true greatness in him.” Love unfolds, sweet and almost innocent, except that it is forbidden and Maria must carry the burden.
Through Maria’s eyes, we glimpse “divine wounding and healing.” Her gift is that she does not mince words nor gloss over pain. She walks us through it all, even if at times, the details get too raw and we’d rather look away.
This major relationship becomes the definitive moment in her story. Through vivid prose and lyrical poetry, haunting watercolors, a family scrapbook with a wedding invitation, Maria (or Nini, or Ludette or Lourdes) acquaints us with her struggle in the Leftist movement, the birth of her son Gabriel with the priest Jacob, Jacob’s arrest and detention, the psycho-emotional travails of life on the run, and always, the redemption that follows as she discovers a new aspect of herself . In the process, she shares as well her various endeavors from being a nursing student shifting to mass communications, a community organizer, a stage actress, dancer, bemedaled writer, and a cultural worker perfecting rituals as a modern-day babaylan or priestess.
Today, this is how she describes herself. Through art, dance and healing work these indigenous priestesses have bridged heaven and earth and kept the doors to these realms open. Maria has also set up the Liwanag Institute of Ritual Arts or LIRA, to concretize this initiative, “to establish her babaylan work both as a service and sacred livelihood.”
Maria has danced full circle with “Notebook.” From the faltering baby steps of someone who needed to marry the greatness she sensed in Jacob, she now marries her inner man, finding all that she needs within herself. The book launch of “Agape” was also a wedding celebration of her man and woman within. Wholeness and personal integration is what the book documents with stunning clarity.
I first met Maria in free body movement class more than a decade ago. As she lost herself in rhythm, the Indonesian teacher, Prapto, would chide, “No ecstasy now, Maria… no ecstasy.” But Maria being Maria, she holds nothing back and offers it all to us—the sheer agony and the ecstasy of being who she is.
(Asked to comment on Maria’s book, “Jacob” declares: “That is Maria’s story and she is entitled to tell it in the way that she sees it. We have all moved on… that is the past.” —Ed.)
For inquiries, e-mail maria_abulencia@yahoo.com
