Fr. Burke Masters is one of the leaders of a healing ministry in the Diocese of Joliet. His hope is to create opportunities for people to experience God’s mercy and healing love, which is usually tied to forgiveness, where people are able to not only forgive themselves but others. This allows the Holy Spirit to move in our lives, paving the path to the freedom of being whole.
Healing is an important part of our journeys in life, and it plays a part in being missionary disciples. Click on the audio above to listen to a short audio segment as Fr. Burke talks about the importance of opening yourself to receive God’s graces through healing and healing’s intersection with missionary discipleship.
He recommends you read two books on the subject of healing to learn more. Here are links to each:
Unbound by Neal Lozano and Be Healed by Dr. Bob Schucts.
This is part one of a two-part series on healing and missionary discipleship. The next issue of the newsletter will have part two.
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“Here it is worth reflecting on the problem of pride. We are all born with a deep wound, experienced as a lack of being. We seek to compensate by constructing a self different from our real self. This artificial self requires large amounts of energy to maintain it; being fragile, it needs protecting. Woe to anyone who contradicts it, threatens it, questions it, or inhibits its expansion. When the Gospel says we must ‘die to ourselves,’ it means this artificial ego, this constructed self, must die, so that the real self given us by God can emerge.”
— From Fr. Jacque Philippe’s book, Interior Freedom
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Question: What is the “wholeness” God wants to restore in us?
Dr. Schuchts: Wholeness is becoming who God called us to be, what He had in mind in creation and redemption. To be restored to physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Jesus and Mary are the models for our wholeness. Wholeness comes from growing in communion with God.
Wholeness is best expressed in this passage in the Bible: “May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Th. 5:23)
Question: Your contention is that “in all the places where our hearts have been broken by betrayal and loss, Jesus desires to tenderly minister His healing touch to restore our capacity to give and receive love.” But what if someone has given up on God entirely precisely because of the suffering in the world and, probably, in his or her own life?
Dr. Schuchts: Quite a few people do turn away from God because of their suffering. There is an implicit blaming of God due to distorted understanding of who God is. These distortions are often projections from the person’s family life. They end up seeing God as mean, distant, and uncaring, so they don’t turn to God for help because they don’t expect Him to meet them. This is where the Scriptures give hope. Jesus (and His followers) respond very differently to suffering and give us a path to follow.
— From an interview with Dr. Schuchts in the National Review
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The following is from a blog called Embracing Your Greatness by Christina King:
“A stronghold is any pattern of behavior in your life that you know is against the will of God but continues to persist even when you try to change it,” said Dr. Bob Schuchts.
This pattern is a result of the barriers we have built around our heart, brick by brick, lie by lie and vow by vow in an attempt to protect ourselves from being hurt or suffering in some way. The problem with putting up walls around our hearts is that we keep out the good along with the bad. We become like a prisoner within a castle and the stronghold keeps us there.
Counseling can bring us temporary relief, can teach us coping skills and can give us a means by which to deal with the distress symptoms that result from us believing the lies, but they cannot change the stronghold or bring it down. Medication can offer us some relief as well, perhaps helping us manage our anxiety that is related to the stronghold, but this is not a chemical imbalance we are talking of. A stronghold is an action of our free will, and, unless we take it down with our own free will, it will not be moved by medication. Praying is helpful and is definitely a step in the right direction as God is the one that can help to expose the lies so we know where to start, but unless we are using the weapons spoken of by St. Paul then we are only managing the our pain rather than finding true freedom.
Dr. Schucht’s goes on to say that “Every thought and imagination that exalts itself against the knowledge of God results in a stronghold.” So in the name of Jesus Christ, through the power of God we can break strongholds. Without the power of God we are just using our will to do something or not do something. If we try to overcome stronghold by own own sheer will, we will end up frustrated or giving up all together.
As you can see from the image above, the 7 deadline sins are pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. Dr. Schucht’s reminds us that “it is interesting to note that they are dispositions or attitudes of our hearts before they are sins. These are attitudes of our hearts that orientate us towards sin. Each one of them has an idolatry of something that exalts itself above God.”
Anger is an idolatry of control.
Pride is an idolatry of self.
Greed is an idolatry of things.
Lust is an idolatry relationship.
Gluttony is an idolatry of substance to comfort.
Sloth is an idolatry of comfort to avoid pain.
Envy is an idolatry of the status position or privileges of other people
To explain this further, let me clarify the relationship of sin, idol, wound, lies and vows. When the enemy proposes a lie, and if we accept his proposal, we then turn away from God. When we turn away from God, we then are turning toward something else. This “something else” becomes our idol. If we are feeling powerless, the enemy may propose the lie that “we must be in control or we will be hurt.” We then accept his proposal and profess to him our vows to unite ourselves to his lie. Our vow may be “I will make sure I always remain in control,”
My idol is now control and not God. When I am feeling powerless, I no longer turn to God and believing that He will protect me and His hand is guiding my life for my well-being. Instead, my heart has closed itself to God; instead my new idol of control is what I live by to protect myself from feeling powerless. I have exalted control above God. When I cannot control a situation and begin to feel as if I am losing control, the result is my anger. I sin out of my anger in many ways, and they are the distress symptoms. You will see my outbursts, my nit-picking, my perfectionism, my passive-aggressive means of manipulating others you will see me rage. For every wound there is an idol and for every idol we worship we manifest sinful actions. …
Once your identity a sin in your life that you cannot seem to get free from, you must then begin to identify the lies that you believe. You must then renounce those lies and ask Jesus to forgive you for making a false idol in an attempt to deal with your pain alone rather than to open your heart to God. This is where healing comes in. If I have truth to undo the lie, if I believe the Scripture that tells me that I should not worry about what I eat and what I wear because I trust in God’s providence, then all of a sudden I can have security, real security because the stronghold lie begins to crumble. In asking forgiveness for making a false idol and renouncing the lie in Jesus’ name, the enemy’s power is broken. Now the drawbridge has been lowered so that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete can come in and be the divine physician.
So how do we begin? First you must ask the Holy Spirit to come and help you. God knows what you are ready to deal with and where you must first get free in order to have the strength and courage to press into the other wounds. If you go into areas you are not ready to deal with, it will feel as if the enemy were rubbing salt in your wounds, and you may be too afraid or feel too incapable of handling the pain associated with it.
I started with a distress symptom, an area of my life I felt was creating a pattern of sinful behavior that I just could not seem to get free of. I then asked the Holy Spirit to show me what he wanted me to know about it. For me, he showed me a memory. I then asked the Holy Spirit to reveal the lie in my heart that I believed. I then asked him to reveal the judgment I had made about God and about the other person.
I then asked God’s forgiveness for the believing the lies, making the judgments and for turning to a false idol instead of to Him. I then asked God to help me forgive the person for what they did. As for the lies, I renounced them in the name of Jesus Christ. It was as if I broke off my union with the enemy had re-united myself to my true Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. The effects were immediate. The peace was beyond anything counseling or anxiety medications or alcohol or food had ever done for me.
When I contemplated the lie again, I laughed out loud because it sounded, AND FELT, so ridiculous. It no longer had any hold over me. Who would have thought that freedom would and could be so instantaneous? This is because it is by the power of God. So why did this work when nothing else seemed to? Because God does not and will not violate our free will. He can supernaturally heal us but before that we must first surrender our will to God and invite Him in. It is, to use the castle analogy, as if we must lower the drawbridge to give Him access.
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