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City of the Lord Inner Healing Team

“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. ... And you have to start from the ground up.”
Pope Francis in America Magazine

“Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christianity. When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of redemption.”
Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth

Inner Healing Principles

(adapted from Dr. Ed Smith, Dr. Karl Lehman, Neil Lozano, and Father Ignatius Mazanowski)
innerhealing@cityofthelord.org

God is Love.

 Holiness requires our capacity to receive God’s love to increase and then to share the overflow of God’s love with others. The more of God’s love we are able to receive, the more of His love we can share with others.

God wants us to be rid of the obstacles that are in the way of us receiving more of His love.

 Some of the more common obstacles to receiving God’s love are unforgiveness, anger, lies we have come to believe about ourselves, and sin patterns we have developed. Most of these obstacles are connected to past traumas and hurts.

Forgiveness is releasing another from the debt they owe us. 

Often, the offender has either forgotten their offense or been completely unaware of having offended us. The only one harmed by our unforgiveness is ourselves. “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.” Another analogy is that if we forgive someone the $5 they owe us, we are $5 poorer. However, the $5 debt no longer consumes our thoughts. We let it go and move on.

Anger is a normal reaction to injustice

Anger is a normal reaction to injustice

 but holding onto anger can bind us up and take away our freedom to receive and give God’s love.

Our feelings are important clues

 of what we genuinely believe, often replacing or
overriding what we know to be true in our minds. If we believe a lie about ourselves, another person, or our past, the consequences will be much the same as if the lie were true.

To be free of the lies,

we must own them rather than deny them. Denial can be on a conscious or subconscious level. For example, staying busy, avoiding certain situations or people, filling our lives with books, movies, etc. can be good things, but if done excessively can be a form of denial.

Sinful behavior

 is often a vain attempt to manage our emotional pain. We sometimes mask the pain with alcohol, drugs, pornography, adultery, food, etc.

If we see ourselves as a victim,

we will never receive freedom from the lies that afflict us. If we choose to remain a victim, and continue to depend on others to rescue us, we
will not be able to move forward.

The ultimate goal of inner healing prayer is to learn to perceive Jesus always, in our past,
present, and future, in our hurts, our joys, our wounds, our failures, and our triumphs.