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MYSTERIES OF YOUR LIFE CAN BE REVEALED AND HEALED THROUGH MYSTERIES OF ROSARY

Here is an astonishing book. It's astonishing, especially, because it's written by a priest. The subject is what grabbed our interest: healing deep spiritual ailments through the Rosary.

It is what our Church so often lacks: bringing prayer and the sacraments alive in a way that truly and personally affects us.

The premise of the book -- Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing -- is that through the Rosary -- with Mary, meditating on the life of Jesus -- we can be taken through our own lives, healing hurts as they occurred.

Is anything more hopeful than that?

"I first discovered the healing power of the Rosary when I was an Anglican minister," writes Father Dwight Longenecker -- who assists at a parish in Greenville, South Carolina. "I discovered that the joyful mysteries of the Rosary took me into the first stages of Jesus' life and childhood. As I prayed through those stages, something mysterious happened. God's love began to seep into the early stages of my own life, and I began to experience healing from deep hurts I had received in the very earliest foundation experiences of my life."

Now isn't that an amazing thought: that meditating, for example, on the very Annunciation could take us back to our own conception -- and clear spiritual debris that may have lingered over our earliest formation? Father Longenecker does not just speculate; he presents actual examples of many who have been healed this way.

Take a young man named David who went to the priest for help.

"He had suddenly developed an irrationally rebellious streak," writes the priest. "This was combined with an obsession with cars, and he had already been caught stealing cars for joyriding.

"His parents were at their wits' end. In talking to them, we discovered that David had been adopted, and that he had been conceived when his mother was fifteen, in the backseat of a car.

"We had a Mass of Reconciliation, in which David (by God's grace) forgave his birth parents. His irrational behavior stopped immediately, and real harmony was established with his adoptive family.

Father Longenecker forcefully argues that the foundations for our lives start right at conception. "Many people believe the conditions of our conception actually influence our personality and the course of our later development," he states. "If we were conceived in love, security, warmth, tenderness, and the sacramental grace of marriage, then the foundation of our life is one of love, security, confidence, tenderness, energy, and grace.

"If, however, the sexual union was negative, it is possible that the negativities will be at the foundation of the child's life. If we were conceived outside marriage, or in a moment of immature or drunken lust, then these negative elements may be at the foundation of our being."

The answer? To go back through our lives with the Blessed Mother in meditating on her life and that of Christ. How powerful!

Astonishing that (as far as we know) no one thought of it quite like this before.

Take too a middle-aged woman named Alice.

During her whole life, she had been subject to two irrational fears: choking to death and having her throat cut. Later, she developed a growth in her throat that was slowly choking her to death -- and would require surgery (having her throat cut).

Father Longenecker came to learn from an aunt that the woman's mother had tried to abort her -- first by holding her breath, then with a sharp knife. "This had happened in November," says the cleric. "Alice's phobias were always worst in November. We had a healing Mass for Alice, in which she forgave her now dead mother. The next week Alice had another x-ray, and the growth in her throat was gone."

So many mysteries of which we are not aware -- unless we deeply pray, unless we let loose the full powers of the sacraments!

Do you have a low level of self-worth, or cynicism? Do you have phobias? Does anxiety strike you irrationally?

In life, says the Catholic priest, we suffer due to sin -- sins we ourselves have committed, sins that are committed by humanity as a whole, sins in the way of things we have left undone, and the bad things that were done against us.

It may be time to let the Holy Spirit reveal secrets in your own past. As John Paul II once said: "The Rosary does indeed 'mark the rhythm of human life.'" We can use it to place our rhythms in sync with God's.

That's when healing occurs.

Have you been wounded by someone in your life? Have you fallen for a lie and been drawn into an occult or sexual subculture? Have you fallen under the spell of someone who was feeding you lies for his or her own pleasure?

Do you suffer from some weakness or failure that you can't seem to get the victory over?

Or, are there any unresolved deaths in your family? Is there a miscarriage, a stillbirth, or an aborted child who has never been properly mourned? Do you suffer from prolonged bereavement?

Do you fear death? Are you anxious?

"I wish I had space to tell all the stories of healing and reconciliation that have happened through the miracle of the Mass," says the priest. "I have seen families converted, broken marriages restored, and deep wounds from the past healed. I have known inner peace restored, bitterness of heart replaced with sweetness and hope, a cold faith rekindled, and the burden of guilt totally lifted."

[resources: Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing; our highest recommendation]

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