May 26, 2008  

 Jesus is the Key

Because God has given us Jesus and because He has loved the world so much, Jesus truly stands at the door of each heart and He is still knocking.  He still wants to come in to our inner room and to bring with Him His healing light.  It was dark in the womb.  It is still dark in the room within, isn't it?  There is darkness in different areas within ourselves.  Do not worry if you do not have the key to unlock the door within yourself.  Jesus only wants our permission.  He is the key.  The key is not the problem.  Jesus is the key.  He is the key of David.  He is pure love and He will enter into any area of our heart, any area of that deep mind, to unlock that memory and to heal it.  But He wants our permission.  God will never violate our free will.  We have to invite Him to enter into our hearts and to touch any painful memories that we have stored there.  Even if we cannot recall anything which might impede our spiritual growth, we can still ask the Holy Spirit to direct Jesus' healing. Consciously we are very limited, but God is not.  We can ask the Holy Spirit to have Jesus touch any and every past experience that needs to be touched.

The Lord may not erase these traumas from our life immediately.  What He will always do, though, is transform them.  He will always transform them so that they will no longer have the power to keep us in bondage.  It is very interesting that when you go to confession you need some material for the Sacrament to be valid.  We need to take something of a sin there.  And what does God do?  He transforms it.  He changes it.  He takes us constantly, day by day, and changes us. He loves to do that.  He will take our memory and He will transform it.  He can take any negative fear, any feeling of anger, any feeling of sadness, any feelings of guilt, any kind of pain and, through this inner healing process, He can heal it.  Because He is the Healer and the Light, He can immediately change it.  He can change years of suffering in one prayer.  He can do it.  Or He can do it over a process of extended time.  It will always be a step toward wholeness whichever way the Lord chooses to work.  He is God.  We have to allow Him to be free always to do it the way He wants to do it. 

There is a beautiful canticle of creation a part of which I would like to share with you, because I think it fits with God's Word and God's touch within us.  It goes like this: "In the beginning, You alone, my God, existed.  Eternally One and yet pregnant in the fullness of unity, You were full to overflowing.  Your words became flesh in the shining stars, the sun and the galaxies. You, my God, spoke and Your Words became flesh in the sun, the moon, the earth, the seas, the mountains, the gentle hills, the rolling rivers and the sided streams.  Yes, You, my God, spoke and Your Words became flesh in the winged bird, in deer, in elephants, in turkeys, in the grazing cow, the racing horse and the fish of the deep.  Your word, so unique, so very filled the world - with the rabbit, the squirrel and even the ants.  All Your Words were beautiful and all Your Words were good.  Holy Spirit, divine Breath of Life, unseal my ears that I may ever listen to Your continuous canticle of creation.  Open my heart. Open my whole self to sing in harmony with all its many voices.  Teach me to commune with Your first Word, made flesh throughout all of Your creation, that I may be able to unravel the wonders of Your second Word made flesh, Jesus - this Jesus, through Whom, with Whom, within Whom, I may see myself as another word - another word of Yours - made flesh."  We want the Lord to continue to speak but the word.

"Speak but that word, Lord, and I will be healed." 

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "The Healing of Memories," Omaha, 2004

May 19, 2006 

The Source of My Self Image

In order to understand why we function as we do, we have to look at the sources of our self- image.  We have to look specifically at the time in our mother's womb.  For all of us, this was a time of intense, emotional and spiritual forces, which came from our mother and our father.  These emotions, which occurred back then, begin to mold our very sensitive emotions, which, one day, will become our adult self. 

Our emotions are very sensitive in the womb as little ones because we are just all emotion!  We do not process things through the mind yet.  If we ignore these significant first nine months in our mother's womb, they will come out in our day-to-day life.  Often times, this is where the basic root of fear will be - fear out of which I might be operating right now or which is causing frustrations in my present life.  Maybe the root of it is guilt which I picked up right in the womb.  Loneliness can be picked up in the womb.  The insecurity that comes from rejection, and inferiority, can go back to the moment of conception.  These blocks can really control us if we do not deal with them.  So self-knowledge is really important.  "To know You my God and to know myself," St Augustine said. These are the barriers that will prevent us from coming into that place of being able to really accept ourselves and experience a personal Bethlehem - that peace on earth - in my earthen vessel.  It is a phenomenal peace and good will toward all, which God wants me to have.  This can happen if we are experiencing that beautiful babe of Bethlehem within us, if we can truly find the child within us - the child within the temple- once again.

I had a very dear friend who told me that for all of her life she had lived in a sort of inferiority dimension.  I asked her, how it manifested itself and she told me that she could not speak up or speak out, even in confrontational issues, even when she knew it was the right thing to do.  She said, "I would go to a school meeting for my children and would be told this or that.  Even though I knew it was not true, I could not say anything."   She could not take a stand against anyone publicly. This had been a terrible cross for her all of her life.  I said, "I have no idea why you are so reticent to even speak truth but there is a root here somewhere."  So the two of us asked the Lord very simply, "Would You show us why she acts this way?"  And the Lord did - much to our amazement.  It is always amazing when God answers prayer.  You never quite get used to it.  It is always new and exciting.  He showed us a time when she was in the womb.  We were both were getting the same image.  We were both experiencing almost the same thing.  She heard this conversation over and over "Oh I hope it is a boy! I hope it is a boy."  In those days, they did not have all the testing that they have now so nobody knew anything until the birthing.  Her parents had picked out a name for a little boy.  Right there, she became withdrawn.

"I am not a little boy." 

I do not know how we know what we are in the womb, but she knew!  She knew that she was going to be a tremendous disappointment to them and so she was withdrawing already from wanting to come into the light, from wanting to come and face her parents.  This fear was forming back then.  The Lord showed us that this really set the tone for her whole life of withdrawing and of not being confrontational or assertive even when she needed to be.  When she was born, she was born at home.  There was a midwife present.  The minute she was born, the midwife handed her to her mother.  And the Lord showed us exactly what happened next.  She looked right into her mother's eyes.  The first thing she saw was the face of her mother.  She saw immediately the disappointment in her mother's eyes because she was a girl. She saw it.  About a minute later, the mother realized, "Oh my goodness!  I have a beautiful, healthy baby girl!" The mother was just joyful and happy and my friend had been loved all of her life by both parents.  She had a beautiful childhood but that memory had governed and controlled her life up until this time. She must have been at least in her forties when I met her.  She literally wanted to go back into the womb.  She did not want to be born.  It can be something just that simple! It can be an innocent thing that we remember which keeps us in bondage.  We can remember a lie - something that we misinterpreted - something that really was not true!   God healed her of that.

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "The Healing of Memories," Omaha, 2004

 May 12, 2008

Memories

Our faith is very much founded on what we remember.  It is also founded on the future, which brings hope because that has to do with memory too.   Now, like everything else, there are obstacles which appear when we try to recall a memory.  What are the obstacles to some of our memory of the past?  The greatest obstacle to our ability to remember appears when the memory is protecting itself from the wounds it carries within it.  It is protecting itself.  The wounds inflicted by others, and perhaps the effects of our own sin, still lie hidden in our inner being.  These wounds are like black and blue marks on our psyche.  They are areas too sensitive to touch and they can impede our movement into deeper union with God.  Our Lord wants to heal these wounds either by taking them completely away, which is what He normally and most often does, or by taking away the fear of them - the fear of them - so that we can live in a simple acceptance of our weaknesses and limitations.  No matter what the source of the wounds, they can be means of union with Jesus, whose wounds still shine gloriously in heaven.  Even now, our weakness can make the glory of God more manifest.  Saint Paul, himself, pleaded with the Lord to take away whatever the thorn was which he carried.  Remember what God said.  "My grace is enough for you.  My power is at best in weakness."  God may totally remove the memory of the pain, whatever the wound, so that we can come more fully into His presence or He will remove the fear of that memory, which will still bring us into a loving relationship with Him.

In the healing of our memories, the source of some of the blocks that we may notice in ourselves, might be fear of God.  It might be shame before others; it might be some of our attempts to compensate for these feelings.  Whatever it is, it can all be traced to the unhealed wounds left in our unhealed being by incidents of our pasts.

Some of these events of our past may be conscious; we may remember them.  These, too, need to be brought into God's healing light.  Some may be kind of half conscious; we get vague intuitions when something happens.  I might wonder to myself, "This thing seems kind of familiar." But I do not yet have the full conscious recall of it.  Many memories may not be conscious to us at all; they might be totally locked away in the subconscious. 

At this point, let me mention that, when you are praying with someone, God may not bring the subconscious memory into the consciousness of that person.  He may not bring it to you either.  That is all right.  He does not have to bring the memory to either of you.  God is God.  He can heal in the subconscious as well as the semi-conscious or in the total conscious.  But you will know that you are healed because you will react quite differently.  Have you ever had something happen, which made you think "My, that does not seem to bother me anymore.  Really, it used to kind of get to me."  That means there is a healing that has taken place.  Those of us who minister to people see this happen so often.  God never surfaces it.  He has reasons.  It might be that if He surfaced a memory, it could affect other people that are in that person's life.  It could cause other wounds, other hurts or divisions.  God has His own reasons.  Often it is that He simply wants to heal.  He wants us to be free.

How does one proceed, then, to allow the Lord to heal these memories?  There is more than one way.  I am going to suggest three. The first step is individual prayer and the second is confession, which achieves a particular power if it is Sacramental.  The third is community, whose deepest source and most powerful presence is the Eucharist itself. 

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "The Healing of Memories," Omaha, 2004

May 5, 2008

The Sacrament of God's Presence

There comes moments in our lives when those experiences which have hurt us or have twisted us somehow, must also be brought to awareness and healed so that our prayer life may deepen and we become more conscious of God's presence. Our unhealed memories, our unhealed emotions, are brought into this awareness dimension.  This will definitely deepen our prayer life and our union with God, because we will be more conscious of God's presence.  Simply put, this process is called the healing of memories.  Some call it the healing of our inner being. 

Memory is actually a sacrament of God's presence.  Most of you have heard that before.  Memory is practicing the presence of God, the sacrament of the present moment.  Our memory serves to retain the wounds of the past that are imperfectly healed.  But our memory also carries, deep within it, the effects of God's actions in our lives, those moments in our lives that, in a special way, make up my personal salvation history.  Memory is very important. When we allow ourselves to enter, once again, into those deep recesses of our being where the awareness of God's action is still a living thing, we put our present experience into perspective. We are putting it right into God.  Deeper than this, the memory, this action of God, is living in us as a sacrament of His presence.  Because of that, we, through the memory - through the union - are entering into the knowledge of where we come from.  Our past, in other words, actually becomes like a chalice containing our awareness of God.  Isn't that beautiful?  It is so important that we get in touch with this.

There is a beautiful Psalm - Psalm 63 - in which the psalmist is saying, "O God, You are my God!  For You my soul thirsts.  For You I long.  For You I pine. " Then the psalmist says, "Upon my bed I remember you."  He remembers.  When we remember, when that memory clicks in, it brings us right into the presence of this beautiful God.  He says, "I remember You in the watches of the night.  I dwell in You."  The psalmist knew that.  Through memory he is coming right into God's presence.  "Yes, You are my help.  In the shadow of Your wings, I shout for joy."  He was coming right into the presence of the Spirit - right into the presence of God.  The remembering of God really brings us to songs of joy, tremendous joy.  We also find ourselves protected in this vast expanse of His overshadowing wings.  That is what contemplation is all about - coming into that phenomenal presence of God.   In this sense, our memory is our access to awareness of the presence of God.   We become aware of Him who has made us and saved us.  We become aware of Him for whom there is no time and who, at this very moment, is holding us in existence and giving us His life.  Remember: He is the God who was, who is and who is to come.  He is always present.  So when are brought, through memory, into His presence, we enter the tremendous vastness of the memory of ourselves.  Read about that in Revelation 1:4. 

When we remember what God has done we become aware of the effects of His saving act and how it still exists in us by the mystery of His presence.  There will always be mystery.  Through what God has done, we can speak to Him who is present.  And when we speak to Him about what He has done, we are actually in His presence.  We know, as Saint Paul said, that we shall see Him as He is.  Even when we see Him face-to-face it will still be present, won't it?   Even though we can remember things, which happened previously, and we can remember the whole bridge which we took to get to that memory - even though we remember everything - it will always be in the present moment.  We will recognize God.  We will recognize that He is a God who has always been with us.  He has always been with us.  It is extremely important to remember this.  So many times in inner healing, we find ourselves asking God, "Where were You?  Where were You?" That question causes a lot of pain.  Through our inner healing we are going to come into the awareness that He is always present as He heals our memories. He was there then and He is here now. 

Now, Jesus gave a command at the Last Supper and we hear it all the time when we go to Mass.  It is in connection with the Eucharist but it also applies to the memory.  Remember Jesus said, "Do this in memory of Me."  "Do this in memory of Me."  You may want to ponder that.   He is calling us into His tremendous presence, past, future and right now.  "Do this in memory of Me."  He will take us into His presence and into His whole life. In other words, "Remember Me."  "Remember Me, so that you will always be in union with Me and you will always be aware of My presence within you."

Excerpt from Mother Nadine's, "The Healing of Memories," Omaha, 2004