Fr. Vincent Cosatti
This is a vast subject and 45 minutes is not nearly long enough to offer a complete overview of it. So I intend to present a only a few important and fundamental aspects of prayer for healing. I will refer to certain authors who have been very active and influential in this area in recent years. Father Emiliano Tardif, in particular, is someone who, as you know, said of Vassula and True Life in God, “I believe she is a sincere and authentic mystic: it is certainly the Lord who who speaks to her. True Life in God is full of treasures”. So it is by holding on to this treasure in the messages that I will attempt to show that the combination of prayer and healing is a fundamental theme of our spiritual life and consequently is at the heart of the Hymn of Love of True Life in God, and one of its preferred themes. In the message of May 1, 1989, the Lord says, in fact:
“I have come to you, to heal you and console you; I have come to bring you Peace and Love;”
And a little further on he adds:
“ah, beloved ones, I have come to heal your sores, your wounds and your infirmities, all which were so savagely inflicted upon you in this darkness; no, beloved ones, your sores are not past healing, your injuries are curable, for I-Am-With-You and ever so near you;”
We define woundedness as an attack on our personal integrity, it prevents us from fully enjoying the life that God gives us and from carrying out the work He entrusts to us. According to Biblical anthropology, the unity or integrity of the person consists of a harmonious interaction between the three constituent levels of his or her being: spirit, soul and body. Any assault against this integrity constitutes a wound which we experience as a suffering.
“May the God of peace make you perfect and holy; and may your spirit, life and body be kept blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” » (1Th 5:23)
Although Paul differentiates between the spirit, the soul and the body, as if the spirit were different from the soul, most of the great mystics, like St Therese of Lisieux or St Francis de Sales, for example, do not separate the spirit from the soul, but consider the spirit in some way the high point of the soul. Having said this, it is in these three ‘areas’ that we can experience failings and therefore have need of healing. The spirit is what distinguishes us from animals and makes us spiritual beings, capable of faith, hope and love.
Let us ask ourselves first of all which illnesses we are to be healed of, and let us consider then which are the instruments that have the power to restore our health.
Physical illnesses are innumerable, there are thousands and thousands of them, small and large, simple and complicated, serious and trivial.
As for the sicknesses of the soul, these include all our disordered tendencies, the world of emotions, our fears and anxieties, the various bonds that incapacitate and imprison us, bonds from our recent or remote past, bonds of bad habits, voluntary or involuntary bonds, our failures of love, the traumas of childhood, of birth, of adolescence, all the different kinds of dependencies, aggressiveness, self-absorption, insensitivity, hostility, escapism, complexes, and so on.
And finally there is the sickness of spirit. They can be summed up as sins against faith, hope and love, or living as if God did not exist, despair, and hatred.
God’s Visitation
For over a century, since the beginning of the charismatic renewal, starting with Protestants and then Catholics, the phenomenon of healing has continued to increase. Sight has been restored in an instant to the blind, perfect hearing has returned to the deaf, the lame have left their crutches and their walking sticks behind, the sick have risen from their hospital beds completely cured. In brief, the signs that Jesus identified for John the Baptist seem to be repeated again on a grand scale:
“Go back and tell John what you hear and see; the blind see again, and the lame walk, those suffering from virulent skin-diseases are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life and the good news is proclaimed to the poor;” (Mt 11:4-5) These signs were very abundant at the start of the apostolic ministry. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that, “any signs and wonders were worked among the people at the hands of the apostles […] so that the sick were even taken out into the streets and laid on beds and sleeping-mats in the hope that at least the shadow of Peter might fall across some of them as he went past. People even came crowding in from the towns round about Jerusalem, bringing with them their sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and all of them were cured.” (Acts 5:14-16)
The charisms of healing are even more present in the West were even more present in the 4th century but largely disappeared in the following century. But then throughout the centuries miracle-working saints have sprung up manifesting the gift of healing. People like St Anthony of Padua and St Roch.
It is undeniable that the Spirit of the Lord is currently visiting His people in a very special way, often independently of the personal holiness of individuals. It is surprising that the Church does not always realize it:
City! whom I came to visit to proclaim My Love through you to all of you, and to heal your sick inhabitants (May 13, 1991)
how is it that My Holy Spirit cannot be noticed among so many of you? the deep and the earth tremble at My visitation. (December 23, 1993)
What has been and what is still our response to this visitation? Is the Church not committing the same mistake as those who 2000 years ago did not recognize the visitation of the Messiah? “If you too had only recognised on this day the way to peace! But in fact it is hidden from your eyes!” (Lk 19:42) and we know what calamity was the consequence of such blindness.
what I once said to Jerusalem I tell it to you now with sorrow: “if you in your turn had only understood the Splendour of My Message of Peace! but, alas, it is hidden from your eyes!” if you in your turn had only grasped the Splendour of My Holy Spirit, bestowing blessing upon blessing on all of you … but, alas, you neither see nor hear the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father sends in My Name, teaching you and reminding you of all the truths I have given you, because the prince of this world is using your freedom for your own downfall; (June 27, 1991)
The deeper our understanding of the ministry of healing the more we must realize that God’s designs go far beyond the miracles themselves. Its main aim is to bring us to a greater love, a more intimate union with Him. Because however important the healing may be, we must never forget that the essential is to find ourselves one day near the Father to sing God’s praises for all eternity.
For those who still doubt, the Lord affirms and promises his desire to heal us:
I want to heal your poor soul, I want to rest your weary soul. (October 10, 1989)
I want to heal your disloyalty, I want to heal your apostasy and give you all a pure heart. (July 15, 1996)
And Jesus’ ministry of healing is still active in our time:
My Blood was shed for your salvation; I was on earth in flesh; I lived among sinners, healing the sick and raising the dead; I have not forsaken you; for I am still among you, healing you; come to Me to be healed, I will raise your souls to Me (February 2, 1987)
How will God go about healing us? The answer is very simple: through our prayer. “Pray to the Lord and He will heal you.” (July 22, 1990) So let us look at the conditions of this prayer.
1) The gift of faith
Faith is purely a gift from God. Nobody can receive this inestimable gift, this unshakeable conviction without God’s grace. The same is true of Love and Hope. Faith is the condition sine qua non of healing. Why? Because it is essential for humility and love: it acknowledges and proclaims the supremacy and omnipotence of God. It is this openness to God’s freely given gift that manifests our love of God.
In the miracles that we find in the gospels[1] faith is present in very different people. One of the most beautiful examples is the woman with the flux of blood for twelve years, who touches the fringe of Jesus’s robe and is healed immediately. Jesus felt a power of healing go out from Him. And He said to the woman “My daughter,’ he said, ‘your faith has restored you to health” (Mk 5:34). Faith may be that of the minister, as the example of the man with the withered hand shows us. There is nothing that tells us that this man had faith. The miracle of healing or liberation is sometimes obtained not through the faith of the person concerned, but indirectly, by the intermediary of others, as we see in the healing of the paraletic: “Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘My child, your sins are forgiven… I order you: get up, pick up your stretcher, and go off home.’ ” (Mk 2:5.11)
if you believe and offer Me your will, surrendering to Me, I will enter in your heart and heal you. (August 18, 1988)
At the beginning of the Catechisme of the Catholic Church, it affirms that “We begin our profession of faith by saying: ‘I believe’ or ‘We believe’.”[2] But there are also other terms to express the dynamic of faith. In fact, the Catechism goes on to say “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself [3] the response to this attraction which is communion and intimate dialogue with God is a way of expressing our faith. That is why St John the Divine often uses the expression “coming to Jesus” to express faith. “No one who comes to me will ever hunger; no one who believes in me will ever thirst.” (Jn 6:35) Similarly in True Life in God :
approach Me; I will embellish you and purify you; I will heal all your wounds; I will restore you, My child. (April 7, 1988)
come to Me when the fever of this world rises against you and burns you; come quickly to Me, your Abba, and I will heal your blisters (September 19, 1991)
And so it follows that living in faith means to live in intimacy, to come to God with confidence, as a child, a brother or a friend, with an open and free heart:
daughter, every soul can be freed but only when they themselves will open and be willing; I have given each soul this freedom and their will belongs to them only; now if a soul is adamant not to open herself to Me, how will I enter in her heart? I am the Lord and God, but I have given you all your freedom and your will; if you believe and offer Me your will, surrendering to Me, I will enter in your heart and heal you; I will not enter by force; I am at their door and waiting for them to open it and welcome Me in. (August 18, 1988)
Faith implies trust. To believe is to trust in God the only source of Grace. Emiliano Tardif used to say “one of the dangers of the ministry of healing is putting one’s trust in the person who apparently has a particular power to heal. This is a serious error in fact, because only Jesus is health to the sick. It is Jesus who has all the power; people are only channels fo His grace.” And he gives us this image that it would be good to have present each time someone prays for healing: “When someone lays hands on a sick person, they are like a pair of gloves with Jesus’ hands in them. It is Jesus who acts though them.”
This is what one incident in the Acts of the Apostles teaches us (Acts 3:1ff). Peter and John had just healed a cripple when the crowd “was astonished and perplexed at what had happened to him.” So Peter addressed the people, saying : “Men of Israel, why are you so surprised at this? Why are you staring at us as though we had made this man walk by our own power or holiness?”
Let us then keep our gaze fixed on Jesus Christ alone. “I, Yahweh, am your Healer” (March 4, 1994) “Cut off from me you can do nothing.” (Jn 15:5)
yes, you see, Vassula, you seem now to understand Me better; if I give to you, who is indeed the most wretched of My creatures, what would I then not give to those who truly merit My graces, those who honour Me and those who sacrifice for Me! ask, beloved ones, and