Healing

Healing: Liturgy Of The Holy Spirit

Liturgy of the Holy Spirit Hold fast to the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of Heaven’s peace. We are bound together by the love of Christ. Prayer for faith Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, cast out demons. Anything is possible if a person believes. Help us grow our confidence in your power. Jesus, you laid hands on the sick and they were healed. You said: The one who believes in me will also do the works...

The Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen

Henri Nouwen wrote a book.

Spiritual vs. Physical

When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked...

The Difference Between Knowledge And Understanding

Somewhere, sometime, someone turned the light on us. To my mind, it all began with Freud, with his glaring assertions that he could look inside me and tell me who I am. And then came the obsession with everyone, everywhere, telling everybody else everything there was to know about them. When I was three, I tripped over a tree root in the forest and got a bloody nose. And so on. It came, I think, from the belief that things known,...

Using The Lord’s Prayer To Breathe

It was an oddest assignment for contemplative prayer. I was to take the Lord’s Prayer into the meditation, and as I let myself be guided by the vision, I was to intone the prayer.  Word by word.  Out loud. Speaking aloud during contemplative prayer was not the most unusual aspect of the assignment, I thought.  It was using the Lord’s Prayer, itself, during such an exercise. Not that I have not had experiences, both in...

Finding Home (or, the secret)

(Warning: you may not want to read this.) I have lived most of my life with a waste container just outside my active imagination.  It is a container for the toxic waste of my life. Recently, due to circumstances beyond my control, otherwise known as God, the container has moved inside the realm of my thoughts, and has taken up a sizable portion of the room that once was dedicated to contemplating the flittering of cardinals or the...

The Force Of Love

If I just let go of all my pushing and pulling the threads that the study of love tangles me in, I find clarity.  A simple, easy understanding. If we love and God loves, then we, in this matter, are the same.  We are as one.  Human and God. It isn’t that often that we can align completely with God. The difficulty is that we, as humans, do get tangled up by the threads of love.  What does it mean?  How do I apply it?  Why do I...

On The Path To Hell

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into Heaven.  (The Apostle’s Creed) Why hell?  Why after all that he endured did he have to go to hell?  Did he go to the frozen blackness, put on ice, as it were, until the necessary...

Jesus, A Companion On The Curb

I find myself in the crotch — all right, fine, prong — of one of these ironies of God.  All my life, I used to call situations like these, God jokes.  But somehow, and for some reason, as I’ve aged I’ve mellowed, and find that the word, irony, is a more mature way of referring to this type of situation wherein I think I’m headed in one direction, but really, I’m still smack in the middle of the opposite way I...

Forgiveness and Judgment

It isn’t very often that accomplishing the process of forgiveness doesn’t wind up feeling like a waste. Because after it is all over, after we’ve cried and wrung our hands, pulled at our hair and tried to look the other way; after we’ve said, enough is enough, I don’t hold it against you any longer, it’s too much work to be this angry at you; after all that, we’re still left with the shadow of...

The Twelve Realms — Cathedrals (or possibly the greatest barrier to healing on Earth)

I don’t want to count how many years ago now, back during a very extended flight, I was “handed” my next packet of study.  And there before me for my internal, eternal eye to see was a board table.  Board as in board of directors.  A large, wooden table set out for twelve places.  This didn’t make sense to me, essentially, because I was there in the room.  I was not one of the twelve, so where was I supposed to...

The Magnificence of Absolution, or the tale of two confessions

Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed. It is a soul changing experience to be forgiven.  To have a tender and loving hand laid on your head, and to feel, through the ministration of the priest, God’s loving and absolute acceptance of your erring and scarred soul, and to feel his nod of understanding, even in the face of your own horror at the way your soul has...

Four Steps to Healing, or the look of fear

I think that the hardest part of forgiveness is identifying the wound.  For me, not understanding that I have felt wounded has a lot to do with shame: most of the time, the things that wound me, frankly, embarrass me.  I was overwhelmed with sorrow when my father gave me a hat.  (For those who might be confused by this, I wrote about it in a post entitled, SPIRITUAL DIRECTION: Hunting the Jabberwock on The Value of Sparrows.) I think...

The Life of Death

I couldn’t begin to count the times that I have read these words, in books, in prayers, in personal writings: Why did God let him die? or I prayed for his health, but he did not get better. Instead, he died. I remember specifically right after September 11, 2001, how many people called out how God did not want this to happen. As though God wants nothing to do with death.  Or with those who have died.  Or, indeed, that healing,...

The Art of Breathing

I’ve been thinking a lot about breath lately.  I’ve tried reading about it, meditating on it, and looking around me for inspiration about it.  (Thank you, thank you.) Today, then, as I looked up at this giant machine arching over my head, I heard its voice — the machine’s voice — in a rather confusingly seductive voice, tell me to stop breathing. Is it all just as simple as that, I wondered?  Just stopping? It was a...

Compassion’s Touch

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. – Thomas Merton I went to college at the University of California, otherwise known as, Berkeley.  When I was there, the school year was divided into three: three ten-week trimesters.  This meant that not too many days after the course began, work on the...

The Confusion that is Pain

Hebrews 5:7-8: Christ, in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared, though he were a son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered. Seemingly, from the very beginning of the Bible to its shattering end, pain and suffering is  very much the bulk of the matters being discussed. And so it...

The Great Circle of Life, includes the lesson of recreation

When I meditate on healing, and what helps us to stay alive in the face of all that we are faced with, I keep seeing circles.  I don’t think this is for just any reason.  I have a lesson that deals with circles and with healing, it’s called the lesson of recreation.  (Not recreation, as in, sitting on the beach, but re-creation: to create anew.) This lesson is tied to the number eight, which, as you know, is made up of two...

The Matters of Life and Death, and a Tale of My Own

It can be said that healing and prayer are the same functions.  After all, both seek to bring something we want into reality through God.  It may seem that they are the same, but they are not. Healing is an almost infinitely profound concept, whereas the mechanics of prayer can be delineated.  A unique factor of healing, that differentiates it from prayer, is that you can heal into life.  And you can heal into death.  In truth, there...