Every year, almost without realising it, the Church picks up the thread of a time both ancient and always new: Advent. And although we know it well, it always arrives like beloved visitors: quietly, yet filling the house. There is something in these weeks that moves us to walk, to ready the heart, to look a little further ahead. And when one thinks it over slowly, this season has much in common with the Cursillo Movement: it begins within, grows in community, and always ends in an encounter with Christ that changes one’s life.
Advent does not burst in; it whispers. It is a promise that begins softly, like those moments of precursillo when a person begins to awaken, almost without noticing, because someone hints that perhaps God has something prepared. That is how this season begins too: with a murmur that says, “Rise, set out, something new is on the way.”
At times, Advent resembles the beginning of a Cursillo. Not the great enthusiasm of the first day, but that earlier heartbeat, when the person arrives not quite knowing what to expect, yet sensing that something might change. Advent is that threshold. And year after year, it invites us to cross it.
These weeks carry an ancient gesture of the Church: waiting. A waiting that is neither passive nor resigned, but similar to that of the first group of cursillistas who discovered that grace was already ahead of them. Hope is like that: it does not arise from our own effort, but from the certainty that God is coming. And that “is coming” is the essential verb of Advent and also of the MCC. For if Cursillo has understood anything, it is that faith does not begin with our movement towards God, but with His movement towards us.
The road of Advent also speaks of community. One does not walk alone. Christ has never been awaited alone. The entire Church advances, Sunday after Sunday, lighting candles whose flames sustain one another. And how can we not see in this the cursillista way of walking: in group, with names, with stories intertwined, with that friendship which is not sentimentality but a place of grace. Advent reminds us that no one reaches Bethlehem alone, just as no one journeys through the Fourth Day without a group to support them.
As Advent moves forward, joy appears. Not the loud joy of festivities, but another kind—gentler, deeper—the tone of a God who draws near. It is the same joy cursillistas recognise when they discover that everyday life becomes a place of encounter. A joy that does not impose itself, that is born of knowing oneself sought, accompanied, sent. Advent is a time that smiles before speaking. A time that reminds us that Christianity, at its root, is good news.
And if one keeps walking this path, one discovers that Advent is almost a story in four chapters. Each Sunday opens a different window, as if time were unfolding slowly so as not to overwhelm us with light all at once. The ancients said Advent is “active waiting”. Cursillistas like to speak of process. In the end, both languages say the same thing: what matters is allowing oneself to be led.
This article simply wishes to be the doorway to that journey. In the Sundays ahead we will speak of watchfulness, of voices that prepare the way, of inexplicable joys, and finally, of a young woman who said “yes” and opened the history of salvation.
But today, it is enough to remember this: Advent is a path that always begins in smallness, as the MCC began; that grows in community, as cursillista friendship grows; and that ends in finding Christ in an unexpected place, as so often happens in the Fourth Day.
Every year Advent returns. It returns so that we too may return. So that the heart, which at times grows sleepy, may stand up again—like that cursillista who discovers once more that God calls him by name.
And this is how the story begins: with a promise, with a road, with a God who comes.
The rest, we will tell Sunday by Sunday.
De Colores.
