The Three-Day Cursillo Weekend is a unique opportunity to reflect on one's faith
journey and make a deeper commitment to Christ. Thus, the Fourth Day is central to the
Cursillo experience, as it extends each individual's experience beyond the weekend and
into life in the world.
In living their Fourth Days, participants are encouraged to continue to grow in
relationship with Christ in Grace and live as faithful disciples in all of life. An
important and necessary foundation for faithful Christian living is a vital connection to
the Christian community for support, companionship, guidance, and challenge. This is most
available through local church communities, Group Reunions, Ultreyas and Spiritual
Direction.
The Group Reunion is a small accountability group of three to five persons who have
usually participated in the three-day Cursillo weekend and who want to continue their
pursuit of a life lived wholly in the grace of God. Anyone who is willing to use the
ideals of personal sharing and mutual accountability as a means to becoming a better
witness for Christ can be welcomed to participate in a Group Reunion. These small reunion
groups help pilgrims translate the message conveyed on the three-day weekend into a daily
walk with Christ. With the regular support of a few faithful friends, the gift of God's
love in Jesus Christ becomes a lifestyle of Christian discipleship through the threefold
discipline of piety, study, and action.
Group reunions meet at regular times, as frequently as the participants can gather,
weekly is ideal. The meeting consists of persons' sharing the stories of their walk with
Christ during the past week. Members listen to one another, celebrate the grace of God in
each person's life, and reinforce each one's core commitment to living in union with
Christ in all facets of daily life- their Rule of Life, growth in piety. Members express
that reinforcement through gentle accountability, encouragement, and support of one's
stated discipline and plans.
Group Reunions provide a natural launching pad for mission in the community. Shared
engagement in service to others deepens friendships and opens up avenues for Christian
action. Some groups, where members relate to the same church, find a shared ministry
within their congregations. Other groups choose to serve together in supporting a
three-day weekend by cooking or offering palanca.
You have received a sheet with a format of a Group Reunion, beginning and ending with
prayer, structured to enable deep sharing, active listening and spiritual companionship.
This is a guideline that works well to enable all to share and be heard. We are practicing
how to listen to each other and how to share.
Here are some important NORMS for being a part of a Group Reunion:
First, listen, and let each member talk without interruption. Second, allow
each member to tell as much of their story as they are comfortable telling. Third,
avoid giving advice. Fourth, avoid passing judgment.
When this kind of listening, caring, loving and accepting situation takes place, you
and all your Group Reunion members will experience the kind of profound support that a
committed spiritual community can offer its members, empowered to live in the world with
the living foundation of God’s Grace.
On Listening
Douglas V. Steere, one of the leading Quakers of the twentieth century, was a mentor and
teacher in the spiritual life for many. A Harvard Ph.D. and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he
spent much of his life in a quest to know God . . . .
In his classic On Listening to Another (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955),
Douglas Steere has listed four qualities of a good listener. The first is vulnerability.
Vulnerability comes from the Latin words meaning "capable of being wounded,"
"able to be hurt." Douglas reminds how much better the people with leprosy on
the island of Molokai in Hawaii heard Father Damien that morning he began his sermon,
"Brothers, we lepers." And, I should add, how much better Damien heard them
after he contracted leprosy!
The second is acceptance. This does not mean, Douglas says, toleration born of
indifference. Acceptance comes very close to what agape-love means in the New Testament.
Agape is the kind of love that does not try to shape and mold the other person into its
own mold. It accepts the other just as that person is.
The third is expectancy. Expectancy has to do with hopefulness. Douglas Steere was the
kind of person who inspired hope in others. Many are those who would say that, until
Alzheimer's disease impaired his faculties, they never met Douglas without feeling buoyed
up and encouraged. In writing his biography I spent much time trying to discover the
secret behind such experiences. I found two clues.
One is an optimism that pervaded his life. He could always see a ray of light
penetrating every dark cloud. He looked at life from the bright side. Teilhard de Chardin
possessed that same optimism grounded in a conviction that God, Divine Love, is at the
very heart of things . . . . Yes. That is true. And I could go on to add, "We
overcome sickness, we overcome grief, we overcome life by finding God in it."
The other is a sense of mission Douglas Steere had. It was something he learned from
Martin Buber in a Quaker meeting at Haverford College in 1951. During the meeting, the
remarkable Jewish philosopher said that the greatest thing one person could do for another
was to confirm what was deepest in the other. That thought constantly recurred in
Douglas's speech and writing, but more important, it pervaded his relationships with
others. He wanted, above everything, to confirm what was deepest in other persons,
arousing the hope that was in them.
The fourth is constancy. The Latin and Greek behind this word mean "to stand
with" or "stay with" another. Douglas speaks of "Infinite
patience." Really to listen to another, you have to exercise patience. You can't
"ho hum" and start saying, "Oh, you mean . . . ," when you don't know
what someone means but are saying, "If you will say something like this, we can get
on with this and I can go on to something else." To listen is to "stay
with" the other.
Listening is more than hearing words and distinguishing sounds. Seeing is more than
looking at objects. Douglas Steere cited a story from John Woolman, the eighteenth-century
Quaker saint. Following a Native American rebellion, Woolman undertook a dangerous trip to
visit the Delaware Indians at Welialoosing on the Susquehanna River. Initially, he tried
to communicate with their chief, Papunehang, through a Moravian missionary. When that
seemed unsuccessful, he asked the interpreters to let him pray without translation. Before
the meeting closed, he was told that Papunehang had said, "I love to feel where words
come from." (1) The object is to get beyond words and thoughts. Communication has
many levels, and you want to reach the deepest of them.
Within every exchange, moreover, there is more than the speaker and the hearer. There
is also the Eternal Listener, Kierkegaard's Eternal Spectator. God is there. Douglas
Steere cited Psalm 139, that wonderful poem about God's inescapable nearness. In the first
seven verses the psalmist told how intimately God knows each person: "Even before a
word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely" (v. 4). Then in verse 8, this
one who wanted so desperately to escape God summed up his experience of God's unavoidable
presentness: "If I ascend to heaven, you are there." That, of course, is where
you expect God to be. But the other half, "if I make my bed in Sheol, you are
there," that is what rolls over you.
Two things in that jump out at you. First, the psalmist said, "If I make my
bed," not if I trip and fall in. You can't mess up your life so badly that God will
not be there. Second, Sheol is by definition in Hebrew thought where God is not. But for
our psalmist there is nowhere God is not.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (Ps. 139: 9-12)
What do you do with your listening and your seeing? Douglas Steere contends that, if
you really listen, you may listen another person to a condition of awareness of the
Eternal Listener's presence. And if you really listen, you may become aware of the Eternal
Listener.
Excerpted with permission from Spiritual
Preparation for Christian Leadership by E. Glenn Hinson. Copyright © 1999 by E. Glenn
Hinson. Published by Upper Room Books. All rights reserved.
If you would like to learn more about Douglas Steere, read his classic book Dimensions
of Prayer: Cultivating a Relationship with God.
NOTES
(1) John Woolman, The Journal of John Woolman (New York: Corinth Books, 1961),
p. 151.
