“Every day I see people who are experiencing some type of possession, some manifestation of the spiritual battle,” a Catholic psychiatric nurse-practitioner from Georgia, Kimberly H. Littrell, president of the Promedical Psychiatry Group and Research Center in Loganville, told me.
“There are things that are clearly out of the diagnostic categories. Most people in the field want to give it a nice psychiatric code and move on. But the enemy is not just imbalances in dopamine and serotonin [neurotransmitters]. It is Satan.” In one case, says Kimberly, a strange voice challenging the nurse erupted out of a woman who had an abortion. In another a patient coughed up a nail.
When there is attack or pain in our lives, often God is calling us to reflect and re-evaluate. He wants to draw us closer. Once we get back to who we really are, there is well-being (even, as I said, with suffering). Perhaps He is indicating to us a weakness through which yet greater problems may enter.
When the priest elevates the Precious Blood, plead for Him to break bondage.
According to the late Father John Hampsch, “troubles in love, financial problems, marital difficulties, anxieties, tension, depression, obsession, and other sufferings may in some cases be rooted in the forgotten or never-recognized past. Many persons are afflicted with excessive fears and phobias or aversions, rage, anger, resentment, outbursts of temper, pouting, overwhelming sense of guilt feelings, addictions to drugs or alcohol, many types of sexual perversions or sexual drives that are very difficult to control, strong temptations to infidelity and fornication, adultery, many types of relationship problems that affect deep levels of the psyche. Sin is both contagious and hereditary. Yet, it is not really correct to say that sin is contagious or hereditary. It is really only sin’s consequences that are contagious or hereditary.” Most damaging, says Hampsch, is the occult, which “will invariably have serious consequences within the family tree.”
It’s not always spirits. “I learned,” claimed a near-death experiencer named Betty Eadie, “that all thoughts and experiences in our lives are recorded in our subconscious minds. They are also recorded in our cells, so that not only is each cell imprinted with a genetic coding, it is also imprinted with every experience we have ever had. Further, I understood that these memories are passed down through the genetic coding to our children. These memories then account for many of the passed-on traits in families, such as addictive tendencies, fears, strengths, and so on.”
If so, these too must be cleansed through the Blood of our Lord.
Bring Jesus into your midst. Beseech Him for a personal relationship.
As Father Hampsch, an expert on generational healing from California and trained as a psychologist, pointed out, the fact that some ills have a spiritual root hardly means that they all do; I must underscore this. He notes that when Jesus’ disciples asked, “Who has sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” the Lord answered (John 9:3):
“Neither this man nor his parents have sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” We see here that Father Hampsch is not advising you to forsake regular medical care but rather offering an additional possibility for healing “intractable” illness.
“Sometimes specific ailments are assigned to specific sins, for example, the offspring of adulterers are often infertile, or die young (Wisdom 3:16), and the descendants of those who practice bribery often have defective eyesight (Job 17:5),” claimed the priest, who has spoken and celebrated healing Mass in all fifty states and more than thirty nations. Many are the biblical references, he notes, to the handing down of the wages of sin.
“The fruit of your womb will be cursed,” says Deuteronomy 28:18 (referring to those who do not obey the Lord). We need not live under oppressions from the past, concludes Hampsch. “When persons give their lives over to God and repudiate the sin in their lives, they can dispose God to break the curse, and in the place of that, the blessing of the Lord is manifested.” He suggested that those who think they may be afflicted pray to recognize any such problem; repent of and confess all sin and failures; confess the sins of ancestors (Leviticus 26:40, Nehemiah 9:2 and Psalms 106:6); grant forgiveness to all members of the family tree; pray a prayer of deliverance over past generations; appeal to God for healing angels; and place the Cross of Jesus between each of the generations (asking Jesus to pour His precious Blood through each stratum and destroy negative patterns).
The priest further said that the most powerful time to do this is at Mass during the Consecration, during the lifting up of the species, when the great “Amen” is sung, during the closing Eucharistic prayer, and just after receiving Communion. A family chart with the names of ancestors to the third or fourth generation can be placed on the altar. This should be followed by frequent Bible reading, great persistence in resisting evil inclinations, and — when temptation does come — recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which is a prayer of deliverance.
The Lord heals through His Sacred Heart. He stands there next to you, when you ask Him to.
Paint the picture of health on the canvas of your anatomy and attack what blocks you. Stress. Anger. Resentment. Pride. Pride feeds cancer in the same way that sugar does. Pry these out. Dispel them. They are decay that attracts rodents.
As Saint Teresa of Ávila wrote in Interior Castle, “I do not know if I have explained this clearly: self-knowledge is so important that, even if you were raised right up to the heavens, I should like you never to relax your cultivation of it; so long as we are on this earth, nothing matters more than humility. And so I repeat that it is a very good thing — excellent, indeed — to begin by entering the ‘room’ where humility is acquired rather than by flying off to the other rooms. For that is the way to make progress, and, if we have a safe, level road to walk along, why should we desire wings to fly? As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God: let us think of His greatness and then come back to our own baseness; by looking at His purity we shall see our foulness; by meditating upon His humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble.”
Humility draws the help of Heaven.
Yes, saints intervene. As first reported in Newsday, then in a publication called the National Herald, “In 2013, Michael approached Father Dimitrios Moraitis, formerly of St. Paraskevi Greek Orthodox Shrine Church in Greenlawn, New York, wanting to walk his guide dog around the church property. Unbeknownst to Michael, in the Greek Orthodox Church, St. Paraskevi is the patron saint for health, specifically of the eyes. In the late 1960s, a family from the Church built a shrine in the saint’s honor and brought back holy water from a natural spring that flows from a church built at the place of St. Paraskevi’s martyrdom in Asia Minor. Both St. Paraskevi and the water were thought to have healing powers. Since the shrine’s conception, hundreds of people have reported receiving miraculous cures from the holy water, Moraitis told Ancient Faith Radio. Moraitis invited Michael to walk the property and invited him inside the church for a prayer service and anointing. When Moraitis put his hand on his head and read a prayer, he says a vibration went through his body and Michael shuddered. They both cried, as Moraitis helped him up and led him to the shrine for another service. After Michael washed his face with the Holy Water, Moraitis says he took a step back and said, ‘There’s a woman here!,’ pointing at the icon of St. Paraskevi. He turned to Moraitis and remarked, ‘I see the color of your eyes! I haven’t seen a color in seven years and I see the cross over here and I see this round icon.'”
Michael’s doctor was dumbfounded.
There is the case of a woman from Long Island who had a short leg. This occurred at Medjugorje. She went on to explain that on Tuesday evening during the apparition (which at that time was taking place on the left tower of the church), “she happened to be standing at the door to the tower; and her left leg, from her knee through her thigh, began to burn,” said a woman named Aidan Kane, who saw her. “And the burning sensation continued right up until the Consecration at the Mass, which could have been an hour. And after the burning sensation ceased, her legs were the same length! She told me this story, but she said that it wasn’t the whole story. She said that was only the physical miracle! The actual miracle in her situation was a healing of the memory, the healing of a guilt that she carried for some thirty years. Back then, she was going to a disco in Dublin with her sister (she was about fifteen or sixteen) and a drunk driver ran into them. The sister was killed outright, and as a result of the accident, the growth in her leg was stunted. She carried this for thirty years, this guilt [of surviving what her sister had not]. So not only did she get the healing of the memory and of the guilt, but she also got the growth back to her leg!”