The Eagle and the Rose by Rosemary Altea Read Free Book Online Page A

book we had been given. The hymns we were to sing that night were listed on the wall, and Paul was looking to see what they were.
    Opening the book to the first hymn listed, he grinned, nudged me, and handed it to me. The words seemed to leap up from the page and bounce in front of me, and I laughed out loud as I read the written message.
    “The Lord is my shepherd.”
    For the next few years, each time I questioned or doubted myself and the work I had begun to do, I would hear those voices, those angels singing, and always the same hymn. The Twenty-third Psalm.
    The following Friday I again made my way to the Denhams’ house, and this time I was quite looking forward to the evening. Although I was a little nervous about seeing all those people who had witnessed my odd behavior during the previous meeting, my curiosity was now fully aroused.
    As I had no baby-sitter that night, I had brought my daughter, Samantha, with me. Paul and Irene had made up the beds in the spare room, and I had agreed to stay overnight. Even though it was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Denhams’ house to my own, I had been pleased to accept the offer to stay, as I expected Samantha, who was just eleven years old, to fall asleep during the visit and didn't like the idea of disturbing her.
    This evening's speaker was a gentleman who for the last five years had been president of the spiritualist church in Doncaster, and he had been a practicing healer for several years. He was short and stockily built, in his mid-thirties. He spoke with a northern accent and gave a solid and down-to-earth appearance.
    Paul and Irene had invited him to give a talk on healing, which turned out to be fascinating. He explained that, as a healer, he did what is known as “laying on his hands,” much as Christ had done. After placing his hands on his patient's shoulders, or simply holding his patient's hands in his, he would offer up a silent prayer to God and to the universe for help to still the spirit of his patient, for healing to be given, by God, to the spirit self, so that the patient would discover an inner peace, an inner calm, enabling him to deal better with his physical or mental ailment. Although there are occasions when healing is obvious and instantaneous, often for the onlooker there would be nothing to see, no outer evidence that anything unusual had taken place. No drama, no great and visible cure, but a quiet and gentle way of healing that only the healer and the patient would be aware of. He further explained that it was his belief that only when the spirit self had been calmed, quieted, through healing, only then could healing of the physical body take place. He was a humorous speaker, and as I knew nothing at all then about this subject, I was spellbound. Afterward, while we sat with coffee and biscuits, many of the group asked questions about healing and how it felt to experience healing.
    We were all obviously so interested that he offered to give each of us, in turn, a minute or two of healing in what he called a group session. Even though I was intrigued by this, I wasn't too happy about being directly involved, and I was very wary of diving headfirst into something I might not be able to handle. But I had no choice, as Irene, suspecting I might bolt, grabbed my hand, insisting that a little bit of healing was just what I needed.
    The first thing we all had to do was join hands while the speaker said a prayer, asking for healing to be given. Then he stood in front of each of us and, one by one, took hold of our hands, and, standing quite still, asked God again for us to be given healing.
    He had begun with the lady who was sitting next to me, and as he went slowly around the room I was able to see, quite well, all that he was doing.
    No mumbo-jumbo, no peculiar chanting or strange rituals. Just an ordinary man, giving his love to each and every one of us in turn.
    Carefully I watched people's faces, trying to assess their thoughts; and