Year of Grace - Daily Story Pieces

Story Piece 1 Our Beginnings Years 0-6

Still yourself for a few moments, praying for openness to grace.

The beginning is about beginnings, so this would seem to be the right place to start, but for us the beginning is largely lost to awareness. We may have heard stories of our birth, or seen images, but much is behind the wall of our memory. Even before our beginnings at birth were our womb days. Our frame was forming as we waited, curled up in being, floating and weightless. Submerged in living, life-giving fluid, we sensed the muted world through it. Dulled sounds and glow-light imbued our world as our mother’s movements and changes swirled around us. We sensed her temperament. The emotions she felt flowed in our blood and raced our small heart. We received the world interpreted and filtering through. Her mood and circumstances shaped our expectations and prepared us to know pleasure and pain.

Who was there with us, who, knowing and shaping our being?

Reflect prayerfully on Psalm 139:13-18.

Journal any intuitions and feelings that come up for you.

Write a response to God, who was present with you in the womb. What do you know of your mother and father’s life while you were in utero? What issues was your mother concerned about and what sort of emotional character did she have? Were there any traumatic events that may have stressed her and so affected you? Begin to write in your Journal, the re-storying of your life as you know it now.

End: Write a prayer of protection for this new life and all it will face.

Today: Ponder your womb days and what emotional profile you might have received from your mother to which you added your own flavour.

Story Piece 2 Our Birth Years 0-6

Still yourself and ask for the grace to be centred and sensitive.

Birth was, for all of us, a most traumatic experience. Into what had been an undisturbed and benign existence came a crisis of rejection and pain, threatening an end to the only life we had come to know. As we emerged we felt extremes we had not known - too cold, too bright, too dry, too loud, all of it too much, and then we were at our mother’s breast... Thankfully most of the painful detail is lost to our memories and we are left with the awareness that we survived this time and made our entry to the outer world. Beneath our present consciousness, however, may be much that still has an effect on us when certain feelings are triggered. For instance, we may now fear intimacy because, at a time of deep oneness in the womb, we were suddenly rejected, as it seemed to us. At the threat of conflict or separation we might panic and withdraw, or subvert a relationship ourselves, to avoid further pain. Reflect on your relationship patterns for a while and notice any things that may link to your birth experience. You may have a fear of being in small spaces, of being confined or of falling, which echoes the feelings of those fearful moments. How do you react under pressure and in pain? You survived birth, but what became of your trust?

Reflect on Psalm 22:9-11.

How was your sense of trust restored by your mother? How have you come to re-learn trust from and in God?

This is a time to ask anyone who may know about your early days what they remember. Get what details you can about your mother as she carried you and then your birth, the time of labour and the way you looked as you took your first breath and nestled with your mother, or were whisked off, bawling, to a side room to be checked and measured. Ask further how long you were breast-fed and how your early months unfolded. What is remembered of your dawning awareness and early movements? Write up as much as you can, as the foundations of your being were being laid in these tender months. End: Think of yourself now as coming back to meet and get to know your small beginning self. What would you say to each other and to God?