LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

a seed of new life in the hard soil of this broken world. From that point his healing was available for the whole of creation. The love and power of Christ healed people, and Jesus wants to heal us today.

      His love can penetrate our lives and touch the wounds in our lives that are in areas so deep we don’t even know about them. Do you remember the woman who crept up in the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak? She was forgiven and healed of a deep inner illness (see Mt 9:20–22). This is what Jesus can do for us. We can approach and touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak, too. Just as he turned and looked on her with compassion and knew all her problems in an instant, so he can turn and look on us with that same compassion and healing love.

      How do we get in touch with the healing love of Christ? It’s not easy. The way to Christ is full of obstacles. We can’t see him clearly because of our misunderstandings. Sin blocks the way. We want his love and healing, but we are also afraid of what this might entail. We want him to heal us, but we’re not sure we are ready for the total transformation that his healing will bring us. We’re afraid of the total commitment he demands. Other duties crowd our lives; other interests distract us from his love. We’re full of doubt, fear, anxiety — and we lack the faith and trust required to really reach out and touch him.

      We can approach Jesus’ healing power in various ways. First, we need to approach Jesus through the sacraments of the Church. If we want his healing, we first need to receive him regularly through Communion. If we want this to be a complete meeting with Christ, we also have to meet him in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. There Jesus meets us and deals with the sin that blocks us from the fullness of his healing love.

      Jesus also wants to meet us in the more intimate and personal aspects of our lives. He invites us to walk with him, and to meet him face-to-face. The best way to do this is by meditating on his life. When I say “meditate,” I don’t mean the type of meditation practiced by Eastern religions. That type of meditation involves emptying your mind. Christian meditation is different. Instead of emptying our mind, we fill it with the life of Christ. We do this by meditating on the Gospel, and the best way to do this is through the Rosary.

       A Mother’s Prayer

      A mother’s prayer is an especially intimate one. From the fullness of her love for her children she is able to pray precisely for their needs. A mother’s love for her children is simple, deep, and unconditional. She loves her children simply because they are her children. She can’t help it. Loving and knowing them so deeply is all part of being a mother. Because of this, a mother’s prayer is especially intimate, simple, deep, and unconditional. A mother prays simply by lifting the child up to God as a daily offering. “Here he is, dear God,” the mother prays. “Do with him what you will. Heal him, love him, use him, and bring him to the fullness of your glory.”

      The Rosary is a simple way to put ourselves into the life of Christ, with Mary his mother. With the Rosary, we go through every stage of Jesus’ life. With Mary, we go with him and make contact with his saving love. The Gospels say that Mary saw all that was happening in her life and in her Son’s life, and that she pondered these things in her heart (see Lk 2:51). As we pray the Rosary, we “ponder these things” in our heart with Mary. As we do so, we go with her to meet Jesus, and through her prayers for us we experience his healing love in a powerful way.

      Finally, our meditations bring us to the foot of the cross with Mary. From the cross, Jesus says to us, “Here is your mother” (see Jn 19:27). Because Mary is the perfect woman, she must also be the perfect mother. If she is the perfect mother, then her mother’s prayer must also be the fullest and most whole and wonderful there is.

      Mary is like the mother who goes with her injured child as they enter the hospital to be healed. Mary is like the loving sister or aunt who sits by the bedside as we endure a long illness. She is like one of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who care for the dying until the surgeon can come. She doesn’t heal us. Jesus does. She is there as the vitally important sister, mother, nun, nurse, and friend. Her prayers are those of a mother for her children.

       How I Met Mary

      I first discovered the healing power of the Rosary when I was an Anglican minister. As a young man, sin played havoc with my life. I went through some dark times and spent time in counseling. My counselor was a wise old priest who advised me to start praying the Rosary. I discovered that the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary took me into the first stages of Jesus’ life and childhood. As I prayed through those stages, something mysterious happened. God’s love began to seep into the early stages of my own life, and I began to experience healing from the deep hurts I had received in the very earliest foundation experiences of my life.

      What I went through wasn’t easy. God had to take me apart and put me back together again. Jesus was doing some serious spiritual surgery, and I was in spiritual intensive care. In the midst of it, I felt an abiding presence of love and concern by my side. I felt this as a feminine presence. Because I was from a Protestant background, I didn’t know who or what this was. It was only later when I told my priest counselor that he smiled and said, “Our Lady’s prayers for you have been so powerful!”

      “Of course!” I thought. “The presence through all this was that of a mother. That’s what it felt like!” Suddenly the floodgates opened, and the emotions I had been holding back gushed out in a fountain of healing. Only then did I begin to realize and accept the ministry of Jesus’ mother in my life, and since then my devotion and love for her activity in the divine plan has grown through every aspect of my life of faith.

      The Rosary has become an important part of my prayer life because it works. Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Lk 1:46), and that is exactly what she does through the Rosary. She used the word “magnify” to mean “praise” or “exalt,” but she “magnifies” the Lord in another way, too. “Magnify” means “to make larger,” and that’s what Mary does in our lives: She makes Jesus larger and more real to us than we could ever imagine.

       Every Step along the Way

      Through the Rosary, we go through every stage of Jesus’ earthly life. Through the power of meditation, the Holy Spirit actually uses our minds to take us into the saving events of Jesus’ life. Because he was sinless, Jesus’ life was all that a human life should be. It was full, complete, and whole. It was mature, healthy, fulfilled, and balanced. Because he was God in human form, Jesus was radiantly alive, totally free — and abundantly, overwhelmingly human.

      Because of this, when we enter into the stages of his life through the Rosary, we experience a life that is totally and abundantly whole. We experience life in its fullness, and we participate in the health, wholeness, and goodness of being fully alive and free. By entering into the wholeness of each stage of Jesus’ life, we begin to share in his wholeness and health. As this happens, we are healed and made whole at a very deep level of our being. Pope Saint John Paul the Great said about the Rosary: “The Rosary does indeed ‘mark the rhythm of human life,’ bringing it into harmony with the ‘rhythm’ of God’s own life” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, n. 25).

      Long before I had read Pope Saint John Paul II’s words, I had discovered this simple principle through my own experience of the Healing Rosary. I discovered the truth that as the meditations take us through every stage of Jesus’ life, so they take us through every stage of our own lives. As we remember, with Jesus and Mary, the stages of our own life, all that was broken, faulty, or wounded at those stages of our lives can be healed.

      By praying the Rosary in this way, we can gently pry open the dark cupboards of our hurt memories, fears, and sins. Once the injuries, sins, and painful memories from each stage are accessed, Christ’s healing can begin. As Pope John Paul II teaches: “It becomes natural [through the Rosary] to bring … all the problems, anxieties, labors and endeavors which go to make up our lives. … To pray the Rosary is to hand over our burdens to the merciful hearts of Christ and his Mother” (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, n. 25).

      As we do this, we are praying not only for ourselves, but for our families, our nation, and our world. If each of us, as individuals, goes through progressive stages of growth, so do groups

Скачать книгу