I once witnessed a Catholic priest use his gift of healing in a packed church on parishioners who had come to seek a healing. One by one, the parishioners fell into the arms of a man standing behind them when the priest raised his hand above their heads. It didn't take long before the aisles of the church were filled with people, young and old, sprawled on their backs.
With an aching shoulder, I had gone into the church to seek some kind of relief from the priest who had a reputation as a healer. So, when he passed my pew, I leapt into the aisle, thrusting myself in front of his path to get what I had come for. Extremely skeptical, with every muscle in my body as tight as can be, I watched him raise his hand to work his magic on me. Surprisingly, I didn't fall into the arms of the man who was working with the priest positioned behind me. Instead I took a few steps backwards after feeling a powerful energy emanating from the palm of his hand. I never went down and always joked to myself that I withstood the priest's (a priest who had knocked down whoever he approached) best punch. Did the pain in my shoulder vanish? I believe it did at the moment but returned a few days later.
There was also a man in the church who had a bad heart, and he had come for a healing too. I remember watching him walk up to the altar where the priest shocked him with a dose of healing energy. The man ended up lying on the altar for a few minutes before returning to his pew. The next day the man was found dead in his apartment. Whether it was just his time to go or whether it was from the jolt of energy coming from the priest's palm, I really don't know. But, taking from that incident, I tend to think people with bad hearts should avoid the jolting energy (I may be wrong though but have to used what I have witnessed as an indicator).
See below for detailed information concerning healings. (Anyone interested in the topic might want to pick up Gordon Turner's An Outline of Spiritual Healing: Copyright1972).
Gordon Turner (1961), a contemporary of Harry Edwards, spoke of an inexhaustible source of energy that flowed through him. He designed and participated in many experiments to measure both the direct and distant effects of his healing energy on people, animals and plants.
Good luck.
Awakening the Healer Within - Empowering Spiritual Healing
by Elizabeth K. Stratton, MS
(Reprinted from The International Journal of Healing and Caring)
September, 2001
Touching Spirit Center
Abstract
Spiritual healing in the past twenty-five years has evolved from a model in which healers could heal with the instantaneous power of their touch, to a model in which healers facilitate the awakening of a person’s inner healer. This shift in the awareness and practice of spiritual healing can today be seen in almost all modalities of energy healing, from a simple laying-on-of-hands to Reiki, bodywork, acupuncture, meditation and guided imagery. It is a change in consciousness from a focus on the power of the healer to the empowerment of the inner healer that has revolutionized the interface between medicine and holistic health.
Historical development of spiritual healing
Spiritual healing in the past twenty-five years has evolved from a model in which healers could heal with the instantaneous power of their touch, to a model in which healers facilitate the awakening of a person’s inner healer. This shift in the awareness and practice of spiritual healing can today be seen in almost all modalities of energy healing, from a simple laying-on-of-hands to Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, bodywork, acupuncture, guided imagery and various forms of meditation. This change in consciousness from a focus on the power of the healer to the empowerment of the inner healer has revolutionized the interface between medicine and holistic health.
Renowned healers of Great Britain and the United States practiced a somewhat different model in the last century: Harry Edwards, Gordon Turner, Ambrose and Olga Worrall, Agnes Sanford and others. They were able, through the sheer power of touch, to effect healing changes at a physical level that were often rapid, permanent, and required no additional treatment. People who went to see them were often healed of serious diseases and conditions, such as cancer, back problems and mental illness.
Harry Edwards (1963) felt that spirit guides assisted him as he did his laying-on-of-hands with forty to one hundred people a day. He placed his hands on each person for several minutes, usually in silence, while others waited their turns. People came to his Spiritual Healing Sanctuary in Surrey, England from all over the world. He was able to cure many chronic diseases, including arthritis and cancer. In addition to laying hands directly on people, Edwards sent distant healing to people who wrote to him for help.
Gordon Turner (1961), a contemporary of Harry Edwards, spoke of an inexhaustible source of energy that flowed through him. He designed and participated in many experiments to measure both the direct and distant effects of his healing energy on people, animals and plants.
Ambrose and Olga Worrall (1965), American healers who were husband and wife, believed they were channeling a universal energy, the source of which is God. Prayer played an important role in their healing work. After Ambrose passed on, Olga continued her laying-on-of-hands on Sunday mornings in a Methodist church in Baltimore, Maryland. She would place her hands on each person’s head as they came forward to the railing. Usually the healing took place in silence, but sometimes she would whisper a word or two of comfort. Olga had manifested healing abilities by the age of three, when she placed her hands on a person with kidney disease and healed him. She had also been clairvoyant and clairaudient from that age, and was able to see deceased relatives. In her healing ministry as an adult, she would often receive a diagnosis or information that would be helpful to the person receiving the healing. Occasionally, she would speak to the person individually after the service to describe a vision she had of a deceased relative. Edwina Cerutti (1977), the author of several books and articles in the medical field, wrote a biography of Olga Worrall.
Agnes Sanford (1947; 1966; 1969), another American healer, also believed strongly that her healing gift came from God. She would see people individually, and insisted she could tell whom she could work with effectively and who needed to be referred to another healer. She believed, from personal experience, that God’s nature is love, and that God is immanent and not just transcendent. In one of her books, she stated, "Learning to live in the Kingdom of Heaven is learning to turn on the light of God within." She had great influence on other healers of her time, including Father Francis MacNutt, a priest who reignited the Roman Catholic charismatic movement.
Agnes Sanford’s son, John A. Sanford, the Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest, wrote several books (1977; 1978; 1992) on the inner movement toward wholeness that takes place within the individual psyche. He believed in a healing relationship between body and soul, and felt that this movement was sometimes expressed in both illness and healing. Sanford’s book on the healing power of dreams describes how dreams can often be expressions of this process. He believed that dreams could contain information that would be useful in the healing process. This tradition of seeking healing through dreams has a venerable history. In ancient Greece, pilgrims would travel to the temples of Aesclepius, where they would bathe, sleep and find healing through dreams and the treatments that they suggested and foretold.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1984), while not a hands-on healer, believed in the power of the soul’s inner journey toward God as an expression of wholeness and healing. He had a great influence on me from the age of eighteen, when I began my studies in Jungian psychology. Jung believed in the obligation of the psychotherapist to point the patient toward his or her inner sources of healing. Dourley (1981), in his comparative study of Carl Jung, and the theologian Paul Tillich, quotes Jung as emphasizing, "The medical psychotherapist today must make clear to his more educated patients the foundations of religious experience, and set them on the road to where such experience becomes possible."
All of these healers believed their healing abilities were God-given gifts that could neither be taught nor learned. Their focus was on healing others. Few, if any, ever mentioned self-healing. Several healers, when asked if they used their healing abilities for themselves, said they took an aspirin or went to a doctor when they felt ill.
Developing my own healing gifts
These healers were my role models when I first became involved in spiritual healing as a hands-on healer twenty-five years ago. I read, and reread, every word of their books in an effort to understand why my hands were spontaneously getting hot when I stood next to someone who was ill; why I could feel someone’s pain in the same location in my body; why I received information on the origins of the person’s illness; why I could feel the emotions someone was struggling with; and why I could feel the presence of each person’s soul.
I was a questioning and "reluctant" healer. I had grown up in a Protestant family where no one to my knowledge had any unusual intuitive gifts. I found my encounter with my own healing abilities both wondrous and a bit unnerving. I wanted to use my healing gift with as much integrity as I could.
These other healers all seemed to have to have two things in common: First, an unwavering faith in God or a Higher Power; and second, an ability to channel a limitless supply of healing energy, sometimes without speaking a word. Their books were replete with stories of people healed from serious physical illnesses as well as emotional and mental disturbances. It seemed to me that all they needed to do was to put their hands on someone’s head or body and the illness would disappear.
I opened a small private practice in my apartment in New York City in 1976, where I saw people individually for sessions of one hour or more. During the first few years of my practice, many healings took place, sometimes instantaneously. Pain would vanish, tumors would disappear, and necks would unlock after twenty years of immobility. I was able to feel the emotional and spiritual struggles underneath the physical symptoms. I could literally feel the person’s pain in my own body, along with the emotions, beliefs and fears associated with it. With an undergraduate degree in Religion but no initial background in counseling, I attempted as best I could to describe to people what I was sensing from them. Most people related in a deep way to what I was describing, and the information seemed to help tremendously in their ability to integrate healing at physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
One of my friends advised me to practice the laying-on-of-hands, but not to engage people in a discussion of their feelings. He was encouraging me to follow the old model, where a brief hands-on healing was all that seemed needed, and maybe a word or two of encouragement. There were times when I tried this approach, but it never felt right to me. Not only was I spontaneously and intuitively receiving more than a word of two of information, but people genuinely seemed to need to talk about their feelings. I can remember "Claire", a woman in her sixties who had called for a healing. She spent the entire session confessing a secret that she had harbored her entire life. Claire needed someone to hear her confession and help her hold it. Carrying it by herself had become too much for her. I never saw Claire again, but that confession provided her with some peace of mind and heart. Her need to share her burden, even with a stranger, led me to a deeper understanding of the importance of confession as practiced in the Roman Catholic Church.
Religious views of spiritual healing
All world religions place great importance on healing the soul, but few have addressed the issue of physical healing. Christianity was founded on the healings performed by Jesus. There are over forty of them in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The touch of Jesus, or someone touching him, had the power to heal physical disease, mental illness and even raise Lazarus from the dead. Yet healing of illness through touch had all but disappeared from Christianity over the centuries, to be replaced with an emphasis on healing the soul. The Protestant Churches practically outlawed spiritual healing. Dr. Wade Boggs (1956) promoted the thesis of dispensationalism, which explained that the healings performed by Jesus and the apostles were only meant to last until the Christian Church was founded, and once established, these dispensations were withdrawn.
There were, of course, fringe groups like the Pentecostals and Christian Science, and individual faith healers like Aimee Semple McPherson and Katherine Kulmann. They kept the healing tradition alive on the Protestant side, despite the United Lutheran Church in 1962 warning its two and a half million members to steer clear of religious healing.
Morton T. Kelsey (1973), an Episcopal priest, wrote a definitive volume that traced the tradition of Christian healing from ancient to modern times. In the final two chapters, Kelsey makes an argument for the place of spiritual healing in the modern world, and outlines a five-step plan to reintegrate healing into the Christian churches. I discovered his work when I went to graduate school in the mid-1980’s to earn my master’s degree in pastoral counseling. I was so inspired by his perspective on healing in the modern world that I attended one of his weekend retreats, where I joined him in giving laying-on-of-hands. This opportunity made me aware of how our experience of God, and the community most people associate with a church or temple, can be transported to any location.
Father Francis MacNutt (1974) was one of the first priests to ignite the charismatic renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1967 he discovered the healing work of Agnes Sanford and other Protestant healers. He came to realize that the basic Christian foundation in healing needed to be re-explored in the Roman Catholic Church, and went on to establish a healing ministry.
Father Ralph DiOrio (1981, 1984), another Roman Catholic priest, unexpectedly discovered he had the gift of healing, and joined the charismatic renewal already taking place within the church. During the early years of my work I attended several of his gatherings, where hundreds of people went forward to receive laying-on-of-hands. Many people were "slain in the spirit" and fell to the floor unconscious. Amazingly, no one ever seemed to get hurt, and many people experienced instantaneous healings from cancer and paralysis. I watched as people got out of wheelchairs, threw down canes, or found they could hear after many years of deafness. Father D’Orio writes of how these healings were followed up and validated with medical exams.
The waters of Lourdes in France are famous for inducing such healings, but most Roman Catholics associate miraculous healings with saints. I once had a former Roman Catholic priest (who was obviously going through his own period of healing) question me with decided skepticism about my healing gift. He did not believe that God still worked through priests, much less lay people, to heal the sick, and outlined for me the view that healing stopped with Jesus and was not active in the modern world.
I obtained my master’s degree in pastoral counseling at an Irish Christian Brother’s college, where I was one of the lay people in the program, and where I was met with a mixture of interest and skepticism among my classmates and teachers. One of the priests thought I was a witch. Another said he also practiced healing touch, but talked about it with only a few people. During the entire three-year clinical program, hands-on healing was never mentioned in any of my classes, nor did I find it discussed in any of my texts. When I wrote my master’s thesis, I decided to outline how I combined pastoral counseling with the laying-on-of-hands, and described its foundation in Christianity. I also compared Carl Jung’s views on the healing of the soul and its journey toward God with the practice of pastoral care and counseling.