Forgive first, get healed later: ‘miracle’ nun’s advice

By Anthony Barich
FORGIVING others leads to God’s healing according to a Presentation Sister who says she was miraculously healed from being deaf, blind and in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Few would believe Sr Eileen Jones when her spine was damaged falling down stairs in her Victoria convent in 1956 and three discs in the top of her spine were crushed in a head-on collision in 1964, but it was only when she forgave them all that she was healed, she said.
By the time she was prayed over by a charismatic priest four days straight for 30 minutes each at a retreat at her Congregational leader’s house at Elsternwick, Victoria from 14-22 May 1977, an eye specialist had predicted she should have been completely blind from the nerve damage in her spine.
When the priest first saw her he told her: “The Lord is going to heal your spine, and when it is healed it will be like a line of white fire burning through every nerve of the spinal system and bring it back to life.”
She didn’t take much notice at the time as she knew nothing about the healing ministry. She has since been touring with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal for the past 30 years, her latest gig speaking at Masses and leading a seminar at Balcatta Parish from 14-18 March.
After the fourth time of the priest praying laying his hands on her head, “while I just sat there peacefully”, she just looked up and said, “I forgive all the people who said there was nothing wrong with me.”
The priest replied: “Eileen, you can now forgive, the Lord can now heal.”
At the first reading during Mass that day, “it was as though the chiropractor had jerked my neck into place and I could turn my head for the first time in two years”, she relates.
“The next night I didn’t mind not getting any sleep. One by one, the nerves in my right leg and hip came back to life, and when the sun rose the next morning I could see everything clearly without my glasses for the first time in seven years.”
“Unforgiveness is one of the biggest blockages of God’s healing – whether it’s physical, spiritual, emotional or psychological,” she told The Record, “and that goes right back to the womb.
“Our spirit knows everything that’s happened to us once we were conceived, though our body and brain doesn’t yet.”
When The Record noted that this concept would be a key argument against abortion, she nodded and said she had been involved in the pro-life movement since 1972.
After her first fall in Rutherglen, she waited three months for a bed in hospital and was put in traction – a band strapped to the right hip and a 22-pound weight attached over the end of the bed to straighten the spine.
When she eventually got a bed, the specialist said it had been set up badly. Having physically manipulated her on New Year’s Eve, the next day he told her to go home – “the treatment failed, there’s nothing we can do for you”.
She was put in a steel brace – two bars of steel down the centre of the back strapped around under the arms and just below the waist.
By the time of her car accident, driven by her cousin in Hotham, she had already started losing the capacity to walk easily and the pain was getting worse, she said.
Gradually, her sight was failing but she continued to work as a teacher – her Order posted her to Ferntree Gully where she taught Grades 4-5, which was when she was finally diagnosed as having her spine crushed two years later.
In 1970, the Order moved her to Chiltern as a primary school principal teaching Grades 3-6. All the while she was travelling 50km twice a week to Albury to have spine manipulations and all her teaching was done from her desk as she couldn’t lift her arm above her head to write on the blackboard, she remembers.
Her eyesight deteriorated greatly and, on 14 February 1974, she came out of school, “never to do another day’s work as I could scarcely walk or see”. By the following year, she says she couldn’t turn her head and was seeing an eye specialist every six weeks
In December 1976, the specialist said she’d be blind in two years. “We can’t save your sight,” she remembers him saying. By March 1977 he said it’s only a matter of weeks.
After what she calls her healing, the eye specialist said, “Sister, I’m an agnostic and I’ve done every eye test possible. There’s no way you should be able to see – light or dark – but today I’ve got to acknowledge that there is a God and He Himself has healed you,” she related to The Record.
“Looking back,” she said, speaking at the Presentation Sisters’ Iona Convent, “I guess the Lord was allowing me to suffer to lead me into the ministry to which He was calling me.” Throughout her sufferings she never lost her faith in God, nor blamed Him. “I still believed in God. Even if it was in Eternity, I knew people would eventually believe me.”