What is the Walk to Emmaus weekend Cursillo retreat?

In the early twentieth century, there was a movement in Catholicism to develop what they called a “cursillo”, which means a “little course” (as in a course of study). A cursillo was a three-day weekend retreat, grounded in a series of talks delivered by both clergy and lay people, aimed at personal spiritual development. After the weekend, participants are directed to take what they have learned and share it with others. They also return at regular times for reunions to continue their spiritual growth. The first cursillo was started in 1949 at the monastery of Saint Honorat in Mallorca, but it became so popular that this model was copied across much of the modern Christian world, including by many non-Catholics (for example, here, here, here, and here!).

How did the Walk to Emmaus begin?

The Walk to Emmaus is a specific cursillo that started in 1978. It was started by Fr. David Russell, who believed there was a need for a retreat that allowed lay women to minister to and meet the spiritual needs of other lay women. After being denied the request to form a cursillo in his home parish, he reached out to Myrna Gallagher to develop one. They decided on a retreat that was specifically themed on the passage from Luke about Christ’s walk to Emmaus, and it too become so popular that there are now many non-Catholic versions of it, some even copyrighted by various Protestant denominations.

If you’ve never been to a spiritual retreat, or just a series of concentrated lectures over a weekend, it’s difficult to explain how impactful such an experience can be. It’s like a convention in that you’re gathering with a bunch of people who share the same interests as you, but it differs in two important ways. First, the content is much more about mentorship, as the lectures focus the retreat on something more purposeful rather than just being a place to hang out and meet new people who share your interests. Second, because of the spiritual content of these retreats, that focus is not really about shared interests – like hobbies or media – but about the ultimate truths, and so tends to have a lot more gravity and impact. The Walk to Emmaus retreat is specifically about deepening one’s spiritual life, and you can imagine that that’s fairly impactful for the people who attend it. Many spiritual retreats are like this.

The Walk to Emmaus in the Bible

But what was the walk to Emmaus originally? The Road to Emmaus was an episode in the New Testament (Luke 24:13-147) where Christ appears to his disciples after his resurrection. What’s weird about the encounter was that, for some reason, his own disciples didn’t recognize him, even though he has the same physical body he had before his death and resurrection. In other places where Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection (like Matthew 28 and John 20) the disciples immediately recognize him – even if sometimes they’re worried he might be a ghost. But on this trip to Emmaus, they don’t recognize him at all and, thinking he’s a stranger because he asks them what they are discussing, proceed to tell him everything about the events surrounding Jesus. They only recognize him when he sits down to eat with them, and then all of a sudden he disappears. What’s going on?

The way the early Christians read this passage was that it was full of spiritual meaning, what they called “typological”. Typology is kind of like an allegorical reading, except in typology, it’s understood that the things depicted really did happen. It’s not that the story is made-up just to make a point, it’s that the story contains deep spiritual truths that are communicated through “types” – where one thing stands for another and in doing so reveals the spiritual or cosmic meaning of the passage.

Indeed, this idea that there are deeper spiritual meanings to everything is in fact the major theme of this passage. Notice how Jesus’ disciples know all of the data about what’s gone on with the events surrounding Jesus’ life: they know his was a prophet “powerful in word and deed” (24:20), for of course they heard not only his teachings but witnessed his miracles. They know he was crucified and buried, and they had been previously warned by Christ that he would die and rise again. They even had the report from the women who visited Christ’s tomb and found it empty, and were told directly by the angel that Christ had risen. Yet, as Luke tells us, the disciples “did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense” (24:11). In other words, they were warned by Jesus himself that all of these things would take place, and they had all the signs that the events were unfolding just as Jesus warned, yet they still were slow to understand.

Jesus’ reply is fitting: “How foolish you are,” he tells them, “and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (24:25), and he then goes on to interpret the Hebrew scriptures for them to show them that all of the writings they already had access to explained all of these things. The disciples clearly had all of the intellectual, head-knowledge necessary to understand the truth, but they weren’t able to grasp it because they were still missing an important ingredient: participation.

What we have to understand about ancient religion, and the early Christians, is that religion in this time period wasn’t primarily about beliefs. Modern people are obsessed with belief. Among modern Christians, perhaps the most common evangelical question is, “Do you believe in Jesus?”, and believing in the right thing is how people identify that they are part of a particular religion. This way of thinking about religion is really a mind-first way of approaching Christianity. It’s based on the belief that the physical and the spiritual are largely separate, and that what’s most important is the spiritual.

But ancient people did not think like this. For ancient people, the spiritual and the physical were intrinsically related: all physical things had spiritual content, and (almost) all spiritual things were tied to something physical. The reason for this is simple: you yourself are both physical and spiritual. The disciples had all of the physical and logical information available to them: they believed in Jesus, they heard his words, they saw the evidence, but because they lacked a spiritual understanding, because their hearts were not in the right place, they weren’t even able to recognize Jesus when he was physically in front of them!

The upper room at Emmaus

But the physical is also a central ingredient in the spiritual. We see this in how the disciples suddenly recognize Christ only when they sit down to eat with him, specifically when he breaks the bread. The bread is a “type” for the Eucharist – what we commonly refer to in the West as “communion”. Communion is itself a physical thing that has spiritual content, namely, as the body of Christ. Eating the Eucharist was the central activity that joined the early church together, and the church services that they practiced had this ritual action at their very center, around which all of their church worship was built. And of course the first communion meal was done by Jesus at the event of the last supper. So when Jesus broke the bread with them in the upper room, the disciples suddenly realized who he was.

In other words, they came to spiritual insight through participation in a physical act. Notice how Luke describes this: “then their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (24:31). Luke didn’t say, “then their minds were opened and they believed everything he said”. Luke uses the physical language about their literal eyes because of this relationship between the physical and the spiritual.

Suddenly Jesus vanishes from them, and they go to Jerusalem to assemble with the other disciples, where Jesus meets up with them. Here is another typological meaning. In the breaking of the bread, Jesus is present with the disciples, but in vanishing suddenly he is going ahead of them to Jerusalem. The typological reading of this is that the earthly Jerusalem is a type for what scriptures calls “the New Jerusalem”, i.e., the kingdom of heaven that’s coming when Christ returns in his second coming.

You’ll notice that even after Jesus comes back from the dead, he doesn’t immediately introduce the kingdom of heaven. He stays with his disciples for forty days and then ascends to heaven, promising to return – and at that time he will bring the kingdom of heaven in its fullness. There is a sense in which the kingdom of heaven has already arrived, because Christ has defeated death, but in another sense the kingdom of heaven is still coming, because Jesus is going to return and usher in that new kingdom. Just as he vanished from the disciples after the breaking of the bread and went ahead of them to Jerusalem, so too he ascends to heaven to “go ahead” of us. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

The kingdom of heaven is, in a sense, both already here and also not here yet. The New Testament is full of Jesus’ sayings to this effect. In Luke 17:20-21, when Jesus is asked when the kingdom of God will come, he replies, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ’Look, here it is!’ or ’There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you”. Yet Jesus also insists that that kingdom of God is “at hand”, meaning it’s very near but not yet here (Matt 4:17). The kingdom is both “already” here among us, has “not yet” come in its fullness.

St. John of San Francisco

This apparent contradiction between the already and the not yet is perhaps most clear in the lives of the saints. I had the opportunity to visit the relics of one of the few American saints of recent memory, St. John of San Francisco. He is one of those saints whose body is incorrupt – meaning that his body was not embalmed but even so has resisted decay. This happens from time to time with certain saints, and to various degrees.

When I visited his church in San Francisco, I was able to see his body in the glass casket they had him in. I leaned down to kiss the glass (which is an Eastern Orthodox practice of asking a saint to pray for you) and saw the hairs on his arm – a man who had died in the 1960s. His body had certainly decayed somewhat – he had still died. But it was decaying at a supernaturally slow rate, without any embalming or preservatives. This kind of thing is a blessing from God, a witness that Christ has overcome death. And yet, St. John was still obviously dead. But a foretaste of the life in Christ – the life of the kingdom – was present in him. The life of the kingdom was already beginning (in part), but had not yet come in its fullness.

This tension between the “already” and the “not yet” became even more pronounced when I talked to the people who looked after his body. I learned that they took St. John out of the casket periodically, to wash him, comb his hair, and – intriguingly – change his shoes. When I asked why they changed his shoes, they replied – as though it were the most obvious thing in the world – “well, the soles wear out”. I was shocked. The soles of his shoes wore out just as they would if he were walking around in them on a daily basis. And of course, they explained, St. John did miracles all the time, even after death. He was known to appear to people, give spiritual advice, perform miraculous healings, and so on.

But of course they didn’t mean that the body was physically getting up and walking around at night. His body stayed there in the casket – it didn’t move. But in another sense – in a spiritual sense – St. John was always “getting around”: healing, helping, and loving the people. Yet, because the physical and spiritual are intrinsically related, the soles of his shoes wore out anyway, even though they weren’t being used in a literal, physical sense.

So is St. John of San Francisco alive or dead? In one sense he is clearly ”dead”: he’s in the casket and he stays there. But in another sense he’s completely alive: he’s very busy and active all the time ministering to the people – so much so that his shoes wear out! This is a perfect example of the “already, not yet”: he is already alive in Christ, but also not yet, at least not fully. When Christ comes in his glory, everyone will be raised from the dead. But the kingdom of God is coming, and even now, St. John is alive in Christ.