32 HEALING MEDITATIONS FOR A WOUNDED WORLD

By Francis W. Vanderwall

32 Healing Meditations for a wounded world -

Deep within us resides the dwelling place of the Divine Healer- found in our own psyche or soul.

Reaching this place appears often elusive and beyond our grasp amidst the distractions and lures of daily living.

This book offers a choice of 32 portals through which, when entered, gives access to that place of healing that can bring a lasting peace to our often anxious, fearful, and so wounded lives.

Welcome to the Healing Place!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684985630

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. God’s Dwelling Place

2. From Acceptance into Joy

3. Love

4. From Manger to Cross—for Love

5. The Divine Indwelling

6. Into the Desert

7. The Embrace

8. Into the Safe Pasture

9. Into the Abyss

10. Fulfilling the Yearning

11. The Ending—for Joseph, Age 22

12. Repent and Believe in the Kingdom of God

13. God Alone

14. Ash Wednesday

15. Palm Sunday Adulations to Easter Sunday Resurrection

16. Holy Wisdom

17. Into the Cave

18. Compassion

19. The Lotus

20. The Process

21. Meditating in a Time of COVID

22. Out of Darkness

23. The Kingdom and the kingdom

24. Truth Beyond Understanding

25. Choices

26. The Spirit of Jesus

27. Listening to Autumn

28. December

29. A Time of Waiting

30. A Review of Our Journey

31. Journeying Upward

32. Come Holy Spirit

Suggestions for Prayers to Conclude the Meditations

Books by Francis W. Vanderwall

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Some of these meditations were written for a Sunday Sacred Prayer Circle that I was invited to facilitate at a spirituality center called with the somewhat whimsical title, the Red Shoes, after Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s fine short story of the same name. They are presented here with some adaptations to the status that we find ourselves in around the world: a place of pain, of jarring woundedness from an invisible enemy, a virus that has taken so many lives the numbers are incomprehensible, and from the comprehensible ravages of war.

I pray that these meditations will be of some benefit to those who use them in their prayer. The names of the group who helped me pray through these exercises are Jeanne George, Sandy Patrick, Lynne Olinde, Debbie Morrill, Lois Warrington, Barbara Michelski, Tom Lastrapes, Roberta Guillory, who founded the center, and Sandy Brown, as well as to my mother, Pearl S. Vanderwall, who was ninety-six years old at the time and then took them with her in her heart a while later as she journeyed homeward to a God of love and infinite compassion. I can never be grateful enough. Thank you very much.

I also thank Gloria D. Vanderwall, my companion in life, for doing the typing and editing of these prayers. To her I am forever grateful.

Introduction

During difficult times in which we always look for an Easter, I am offering you thirty-two healing meditations for a deeply wounded world. As we battle the COVID-19 virus and witness the repeated revelations of brutality by the strong against the weak and the loss of integrity by the powerful with climate change, figuring topsy-turvy weather patterns causing death and destruction, we find ourselves in a very disturbing and challenging environment.

As we engage in social distancing, adapting to living with our family members all the time, relating to neighbors and friends through the phone, texting, Facebook, and all the social media at our disposal, we find the need to ask ultimate questions about life and death like we have not in a long time. As more and more people die around us, we question the veracity of our lifestyle, the very meaning and purpose of our existence, the effectiveness of tools we use to manage our lives. And with time on our hands, idleness, a constant threat, we are directed inward toward a part of ourselves rarely investigated, let alone relished.

So, here, I offer you thirty-two meditations or ways to enter into that innermost self that we so rarely engage, let alone entertain. For most of us, it is a world infrequently peered into, but I believe, if engaged, can bring peace and a meaning to our lives that can make this time of frustration and uncertainty imbued with healing and joy as crazy as that may sound.

I have seen the Spirit of God mostly as feminine, knowing of course that God is above gender; switch it back to male if you wish. You will find repetitions in these meditations as in life. Allow them to further interiorize the points being made. Repetitions are a very important part of prayer as St. Ignatius of Loyola knew and called for in his Spiritual Exercises as they help provide a deeper understanding of the message and, hence, make that message more and more a part of one’s spiritual life and daily life, and they allow the Spirit to get through to our frequently obtuse mindsets like a jackhammer working hard rock!

How do you wish to enter this process? I can only share with you what I do, and I hope it helps. I first choose a time to spend for meditating. Here is a curious phenomenon: I love to pray but come up with an unimaginable number of excuses not to do it when the time comes. So I must discipline myself to do so. Then I must find a good space. By this I mean a place without distractions, including the one I am clasping in my hand! Set it down and off. Then I get comfortable but not