Come to be Renewed!

In June 2022, fifteen women attended our first Renewed healing retreat.  The retreat was held at the Marian Shrine Retreat Center in Stony Point, NY, and led by Fr. Jorge Obregon, LC. This women’s retreat was given in Spanish. The next women’s retreat will be offered in English, and the spring retreat will be for men and women and offered in English.  Click here for more info. Fr. Eric Nielsen, LC, Fr. Jorge Obregon, LC, Luisa Mendoza, and Event Coordinator Carolina Cordova are featured in the image to the left, clockwise from the upper left.

Regnum Christi member Luisa Mendoza shares her experience of the first Renewed retreat:

I just came back from the weekend retreat called ‘Renewed’ given by Father Jorge Obregon, LC.   It was a retreat geared toward learning more about ourselves and our personal identity. The goal of the retreat is to provide a way to help people who have been hurt and broken by situations in life. Whether the wounds are emotional, physical, or spiritual, the invitation is to come to experience the healing love of Jesus Christ. As I have learned through my spiritual growth, we were made to flourish, and in order to flourish as human beings, we have to heal our wounds as we grow in our love for the Lord. Some wounds will start disappearing as we grow spiritually, find comfort in the Lord, and feel more personally the Lord’s love for each one of us. Other wounds are harder to heal, and we have to put our personal effort in order to heal them so that we can flourish as the person God intended us to be.

This retreat was a profound experience for me. I am someone who has suffered a lot in life, both as a child and as an adult. For me, the most painful aspects of my suffering have come from wounds caused by family members.

Life is challenging for everyone. It seems like we live in a constant battle, always trying to solve our next problem. Sometimes we get to solve old ones, but then new ones come along. Sometimes it gets to a point where we don’t know what to do next, and that is when we recognize that we need help. For me, I started to feel burned out. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. It took me a while to recognize I was hurt, wounded, and broken, and it was at that point that I was ready to start healing. I wanted to forgive, to liberate myself, but I didn’t know how or where to begin. I wanted to be freed from bad memories and let it all go.

But how can we learn how to forgive? Forgiving entails an internal process, and learning how to forgive is what this retreat is all about. The retreat begins by helping us get to know ourselves better, so in that way, through guided meditations and talks, we can go ahead and look deep into our wounds to start healing them. It is a process and what is essential is that we are open to it.

Father Jorge guided us through this process by helping us to go back and see those moments when we were hurt, to ask what happened? Who hurt us? What were the circumstances? Why did I fall? How deep did I fall? What are my wounds? What wounds and rancor am I still carrying? Did I forgive the person who had hurt me? There are many questions to ponder.

After we identify moments when we were hurt, we contemplate these situations in the presence of Christ. As we all know, Christ is always with us. And today, Christ is with us to help us heal our wounds. We have hope and faith that Christ will heal us, and we know Christ wants to heal us!

We then start the process of healing in the presence of God. We are reminded that our true identity comes from God; it doesn’t come from what others think of us. We are reassured that God loves us the way we are. The Lord loves me in my brokenness, but He also wants me to thrive. We learn that through prayer, forgiveness, and the Sacraments, we can be completely healed by God. When we start healing, we also start becoming a better person; we start flourishing.

During this retreat, we learned more about ourselves. We learned how to look at our wounds, and we were given the steps to heal our past wounds so that we can become free to be able to love our Lord deeply, our Blessed Mother, and all those people we have around us. For me, the experience of the Renewed retreat was liberating, and I felt so freer to love more profoundly all those people that I have close to me. I finished my retreat feeling renewed, refreshed, and recharged, feeling lighter and loving more, with a deep certainty that God is always with me no matter the circumstances, and this has given me so much inner peace and inner joy!

-Luisa Mendoza