THIS CHRISTMAS, CLEANSE YOUR FAMILY WITH HUMILITY AND A 'PRAYER' FOR TOUCH OF LOVE

This Christmas season, try the prayer of the touch of love.

Send God's light to everyone. Touch everyone with love -- and humility. During prayer, see each person and bless them.

What power this has -- for them and for you! Humility.

"I have been making a Holy Hour for each year of my life, beginning with my conception to birth, and so on, for all my life," a viewer who was at our New Jersey retreat informed us. "At each Holy Hour I lift up the particular year, and ask Our Lord to shine His Light and Love throughout that whole year and to repair it!"

When we pray this way we can cleanse family disturbances. We can clean the "family tree." We can halt tragedy. We can rectify past areas -- times we didn't love.

And with it we gain supernatural logic: when we cleanse our interior lives and pray with love, we understand more of God and figure things the way they are meant to be figured. We begin to transcend the earth's blindness. The entirety of this test called earth becomes more available and lifts us from sorrows and repeating mistakes.

We see progression where others see personal disasters. Tragedies are not then always so "tragic" -- unless we don't learn from them.

Often, when prayers are not answered -- when we pray and pray and they seem to simply bounce off -- it's because first we must remove evil. We must remove pride. That will block you!

Too often -- instead of a deep cleansing, instead of surgery -- we use band-aids.

This leads to frustration. It can also lead to a series of unfortunate events.

Now, not all tragedy is because we are doing wrong. There are the tests of life. But:

Just as God tries to warn society (through world events, through storms, through quakes), so does he send us first tremors. One hardship may be followed by another (and intensify). That's because God views what is best for your eternity.

The answer is to pray the prayer of the power of love and turn our sights into the deepest interiors of ourselves and our families -- praying to cleanse and then praying for a bubble of protection.

What a Christmas gift this is: love -- and deliverance -- in our families!

Especially, cast out pride. Pray to see where it hides.

Few things are more dangerous. Few things attract as much "bad luck."

They say that pride goes before the fall and that's because pride is the oxygen of the devil. It is spiritual octane. It's like pouring gasoline on embers. The metaphors! It puffs up.

It causes a fall and we could also say that it creates a barricade that bounces away supplications.

What is pride? It is seeking to be above others. It is an orientation toward self. It is putting self-interest above the interests of others. It is to believe what we achieve has been achieved solely through our own efforts or "talents" -- discounting that really any good we do is from gifts we have received from the Lord.

It is feeling inflated and it is to judge by numbers and it is to be jealous when we perceive someone as having what we deserve.

Pride is arrogant. Pride is celebrity. Pride is seeking notoriety (instead of the hidden way of Therese the Little Flower, pictured at the top, left). Pride is seen as the skull in the vanity mirror.

Pride can not bear to be wrong.

Pride prohibits contrary opinions.

Pride forms cults.

Pride declares the truth to be an insult.

Pride causes one to attack another (to speak harshly and self-righteously).

Pride is violence against the spirit because it proclaims one person as worth more than another.

Pride is also deceptive; its greatest deception is upon the one who possesses it.

The spirit of pride can manifest as jealousy, haughtiness, superiority, materialism, conspicuous consumption, gossip, stubbornness, fashion, self-righteousness, and the need to control (which is the urge behind witchcraft). "I will also break down your pride of power," says Leviticus 26:19. "I will also make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze."

If you are under duress -- ill fortune, or attack -- see first if pride is empowering it.

Then, defeat it with humbleness.

Humility was the lesson of the manger.

Humility loves and pride hates and pride fuels the enemy because he is the prince of it.

If God seems absent, cleanse pride and pray with love and see things through the supernatural (as opposed to the worldly, which is what got you into trouble to begin with). "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world," says 1 John 2:16.

Do you have "blocks" in your life? Do you find yourself with intractable problems?

When we have pride, others have trouble praying for us. There is a resistance. There may even be revulsion. Pride builds in and around us. We are "sealed tight" by it (Job 41:15). "There they cry out, but He does not answer, because of the pride of evil men," adds 35:12. During exorcism the demon is exposed as having a wall of "pretense" that acts as a shell.

That needs to be broken or God will move to do so for you.

"A man's pride will bring him low, but a humble spirit will obtain honor," adds Proverbs.

Pride goes along with "deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, and foolishness" (Mark 7:22). We have pride in our looks, in our cars, in our homes, in our smarts, in our jobs, in our schooling, in our neighborhoods, in our religiosity, in our friends, in our wealth.

It is to compare, hoping always to have better. It is to compete instead of to cooperate.

It is clever. It is at the deepest levels of our souls. It is exhibited in ways we don't even see -- especially through any sort of facade.

This Christmas season, find out where it is.

This Christ-Mass, focus on expelling it.

Replace it with humility, with which (coupled with love) you will make life merry all year round and defeat darkness.

[resources: The God of Miracles]

[Resources: Michael Brown retreat, Mass in San Antonio: coming times, the afterlife, spiritual protection]