Spiritual Healing

(Excerpt from the book).

Cornelia Duryeé Moore is a thirty-nine-year-old actress who is studying to be an Episcopal priest. She works in the field of healing prayer and also has FM. She and her husband have two sons, and they live in Seattle, Washington. She believes that prayer can help heal those with chronic illness.

I have been a practicing Christian for twenty-five years. I became interested in healing prayer about fifteen years ago when I took a two-year course from a healing prayer counselor, Reverend Tilda Norberg. She teaches a course for ministers and others who work in counseling and want to learn how to pray for people in a healing way. She is a Methodist minister, one of the first female ministers ordained in this country. Her seminar sent me on a wonderful journey into healing.

Here's one example of how healing prayer has affected me and my family. I had been sick with FM, multiple chemical sensitivity, and endometriosis for some time. Before I got married, the doctors who had been taking care of my endometriosis said they did not think I would ever be able to conceive or carry a child. My friends and coworkers in healing prayer had an all-day prayer session for me-what they call "soaking prayer." Three women gathered around me as I lay just under the altar in the church. They prayed for me, they sang, they put their hands on my stomach for hours at a time. (They were praying for my fertility.) It was one of the most glorious times of prayer I have ever experienced. The women were so loving and so generous, and I felt that the Spirit of God was really there. My son was born two years after I was married. It was miraculous.

Soaking prayer can be one of two things. It can be a marathon session, like the one those women did for me. Or it can be praying day after day, week after week, just being in the presence of God and inviting God's will to come into your body. And miraculous things happen and the healing that takes place isn't always just physical. God's agenda may not be the same as ours. Healing can come in all sorts of forms. My agenda is not always dealt with in the way that I think but God's agenda always will be. God affects healing in our spirits and souls in addition to our physical bodies (or instead of, in some cases).

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Copyright (c) 1999 Mari Skelly and Andrea Helm. From Alternative Treatments for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Insights from Practitioners and Patients. Published by Hunter House Inc., Publishers, Alameda CA; excerpted by arrangement with Hunter House. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.