Cursillo: A School of Renewal

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The older I get, the more I want to be new. I know I sound like a commercial, but it’s true. 

Whether it’s cyclical such as a New Year’s Eve resolution or it’s sacramental such as baptism or confirmation, our lives are punctuated by newness. 

I want to be new not because I’m totally unworthy the way I am but because the interior burdens and the external circumstances that prevent me from living like a newlywed in spring make me feel powerless and old.

I’m capable of appreciating that each morning is a new creation, but how do I harness the promise and the purpose of this daily renewal and make it my own?

The answer for me is uncomplicated, thanks to a special weekend experience called Cursillo, although the answer requires a confession and a bit of an autobiographical explanation. 

It’s true that I’m a convert to Catholicism. Growing up in Chicago as a nihilist and dealing with that nothingness through substance abuse until I was either going to die or I was going to accept a second chance, I know how blessed I am to be alive. But I also know that my deep desire to be new is not so different from people who have grown up in the faith. 

Over the last 20 years as a professional writer, a college professor and a father of eight children in northern Westchester, I have experienced the fire of spiritual revival and the power of lifestyle revolution and the renaissance of solidarity with others working for change from the inside out.

But I have to confess that as much as I was enjoying the gift of sobriety and faith interiorly, I was cautious with it exteriorly. I had separated my sacred life from my secular life, and the imbalance between my inner person and my public person made my soul feel old.

Then about six months ago in the basement of my church where I was meeting with a group of guys about starting a men’s ministry, I was sharing this frustration, and my pastor suggested a Cursillo weekend. My pastor said that he himself had made a Cursillo weekend decades earlier, and it remained the most pivotal moment in his spiritual life, because he learned how to move the knowledge of God’s love from his head into his heart. 

“What’s Cursillo like?” one of the men asked.

“It’s a lot like what we’re doing right now,” our pastor said.
 
What were we really doing except sharing our desire to integrate our faith life with our everyday life? 

I can only speak for myself when I say that my Cursillo weekend was the most extraordinary gathering of ordinary men I’ve ever seen.

There I was in a Franciscan retreat house with 20 men like me who were there for the first time, and an equal number of men who were running the weekend as well as clergy there for support.

Then something remarkable happened. We started talking about the essence of God’s love. And the more we talked about God’s love, the more I felt it inside. The more I felt it inside the more I wanted to give it out, and the more I could see God in others around me. 

Before I knew it, I was feeling like a new creation. I made a decision that I wanted to feel that way all the time.


The guys on my Cursillo weekend taught me that before I can share God’s love, I have to allow it to overflow in me. And once it’s overflowing, it’s easier to share it with others because there is more than enough love for everybody. 


I also learned that the Cursillo weekend is only the beginning. I have a simple and proven practice of growing in love through piety, study and action. And I have a whole community of men and women in the Cursillo movement both here in the archdiocese and across the country and beyond—who meet regularly to renew our world with God’s love. 


I learned that love is boundless. That’s what makes love eternal. The great thing about eternity is it never gets old. 

 

Cursillo is a short course in Christianity. Cursillo weekends are held twice a year for men and for women. The spring weekend dates are March 20-23 for men and April 3-6 for women at Mount Alvernia in Wappingers Falls. Information: Karen Tunney at (845) 742-3255, or www.cursillo.org/newyork.

 

Spanish Cursillo: St. Joseph’s Center, (718) 796-4340.  

Writer Rob Ryser is a parishioner of St. Patrick’s, Bedford.