I might continue with the psychiatrist’s comments, in case they’re of use to anybody else.
Who are these incurable people? In my experience the people who suffer from unresolved problems in their family tree often show these characteristics:
They are naturally sensitive
They are spiritual
They are family oriented
They are motivated towards helping others
They tend to take on the burdens of other people
When we look at the suffering arising by unresolved issues in the family tree, we find it usually falls into three categories:
Suffering caused by not being loved and cared for by parents, who had too many personal problems themselves. We usually find that when we judge our parents and refuse to forgive them we bring suffering on ourselves.
Suffering caused by trying to avoid repeating the wrong behaviour of previous generations. In this case, we find that the generational sins will keep repeating down the generations, until an innocent person suffers for these sins. That is, someone becomes the Christ, and stops the transmission of these sins.
**Redemptive suffering. ** In redemptive suffering, the symptom represents the way some member of their family tree died, or an unresolved issue that some family member did not deal with before that person died.
I’ll just repeat this. An innocent person is suffering from symptoms (or behaviour) that cannot be medically explained. The symptoms (or behaviour) are medically untreatable. There is no satisfactory response to medication. Then someone looks into the family’s history. Lo and behold! there is someone who has died and the manner of that person’s death is represented by the incurable symptoms of the sufferer. And there is usually something unfinished in the life of that lost soul. Maybe it was suicide. Perhaps the lost soul was an aborted baby. Maybe the person who died had hurt the family so much that they didn’t go to his funeral.
As soon as we identify the connection between the suffering of an innocent person and the lost soul, we celebrate a communion service and draw the attention of Almighty God, the situation of this lost soul. We make whatever apologies seem appropriate. We ask God to have mercy on this soul. And sometimes the person suffering from the incurable symptoms is healed of these symptoms. Sometimes the person doing the suffering has no knowledge of the person who died. Therefore the symptom cannot be explained by the sufferer pyschologically identifying with the lost soul. We can then see that the incurable symptoms were like a signpost pointing to the needs of the lost soul for help."
To give one peculiar example which eventually came to have a literal connection with this forum, I once had my old pastor say to me (probably 20 years ago now), “I think you’ll be doing some cleaning. You won’t be doing it for long, and you won’t like it much, but I think the Lord will just want you to hear about a ghost.”
Now by that time I knew how accurate he was, but even so I thought that was ridiculous. But in 2006, I was doing some cleaning, and at an old store in Ipswich west of Brisbane, I heard about a ghost. It was a former manager who allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself (downstairs in the 1960’s I was told).
I only did the cleaning for about four months, and didn’t like it much (split shifts, 600 kilometres weekly driving to do it all, and didn’t particularly like cleaning anyway), and I heard about a ghost. Another prophetic strike to the pastor.
Eventually I got around to ringing the Ipswich priest, who said “Leave it to me.” So I did, but I wondered if he took me seriously. So was a mass said for the suicide or not? I couldn’t give any details other than what I’d been told by staff at the store, and I had no name to offer.
So as this was preying on my mind, what should happen on this forum but an associate priest from Ipswich happened to do a post, and I happened to see it. So I sent him an email, and received an assurance the mass would be said, along with a comment that in his experience such things could happen.
Now I wonder what the odds are of a pastor making a peculiar prediction like that, and my chancing on a priest from Ipswich, Australia, on this forum just to make sure the mass would be said.
You might call it co-incidence. I don’t. I think “The Lord will just want you to hear about a ghost” as my old pastor said. And he was clearly right. It took a while, but it happened, and even then God managed to create a connection with Catholic Answers Forums.
