OUR CHARISM

 March 3, 2008 "It Is All About Love"

 This will be entitled "The Experience of Inner Healing" and we will try to give just a simple introduction.  Actually, inner healing isn't that simple because we are not simple.  We are very complicated.  We have layers and layers.  God just takes us in stages.  Inner healing is a process like everything about life and in the spiritual life.  It is a process. 

The bottom line of the experience of inner healing is that it is an experience of love.  It is only love that heals.  And if it is an experience of love, it must be  an experience of God, because God is love.  In Ephesians 3:16-17 Paul says, "Out of his infinite glory, may He give you the power through His Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ might live in our hearts."  That is a beautiful Scripture.   Paul understood that for inner healing, the inner man has to be renewed, and he talks about the hidden self.   This is very much that Nazareth self, the interior life, when we talk about spirituality.  And he said it has to grow strong so that Jesus can really live within our hearts. You may recall that beautiful song we sing "May Christ find a dwelling place of faith in our hearts."  That is the hard part - to really believe that He is there.  He takes us where we are and He will start increasing our faith.  As the Scriptures say, "Lord, I do believe but help my unbelief."

 St. Paul recognized the shadow side  of our nature, the dark side, the unconscious part of our minds and that needs to be set free if we are really truly to be one with Jesus. 

Inner healing is simply asking Jesus to walk back to the time when we were hurt and to free us from the effects of that wound in our present life, in our present time, in the now.  It is very interesting. We want Him to free us from the effects of that wound in the here and now.  This is important.  Many times (maybe 95% of the time) we do not  know what the original wound was, or from where it came,  but we can begin to see the effects that it is having in our lives now, the way we respond to something, the way our attitude is, the way I think, the way I feel.  All of a sudden I can maybe start having ,as we say, a theophostic moment.   "God, You are here now and You are showing me the way I am reacting now.  There is a root to this somewhere."  And so I think this is why some of the people that are much more into inner healing, the experts, tells us that Jesus really wants to set us free from the effects of the wound. 

This involves bringing to light the things that have hurt us.  It sounds simple doesn't it? Just bring it into the light.   Jesus is the light.  There are a couple of ways to do this. 
We can ask Jesus to flash that divine flash light and show us through His light.  We can even talk it out with another person, a person that we would trust.  That in itself can be a healing process, because at least we are getting it out into the light.  Sometimes when we get it out, we start to see it a little bit differently than when we remain in it, allowing it to go around and around within us in the dark.

This is why we ask people to journal. Journaling gets your feelings into the light.  It involves bringing things into the light and then praying to the Lord to heal the effects of the hurtful incidents of the past.   Hurtful events of the past cannot be ignored if we are to become fulfilled with the love of the Father. That is important.  We want to be full of God's love so we must look at the hurtful memories of the past, because they are taking up space.  They are taking up room; they might be taking up a place where we might even be afraid of God.  So inner healing is really not an option if we want to be free, if we want to be full of God's love. 

I am beginning this particular talk tonight on God's love, because that is the very heart of this charism.  This charism has so many different expressions, doesn't it?   It has intercession, it has deliverance, it has contemplation, it is Marian, it is devoted and consecrated to the Sacred Heart, it is charismatic.  It has everything that Jesus had in His life.  Sometimes when we try to tell people what our charism is,  we can we get away from the basic simplicity that it is love.  It is all about love. 
Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "Introduction to Inner Healing," Omaha, 2004