The Joyful Mysteries of My Life

RELIVING YOUR MEMORIES can be a method of prayer. It is called the prayer of reminiscence. If you wish to do the prayer of reminiscence, find a comfortable spot where you won’t be disturbed, relax and become centred before you begin. Read through the prayer first before you begin and then put the sheet aside. Spend around 10-15 minutes on a particular memory and then move on to another.

The prayer of reminiscence is very simple: allow your consciousness to wander to any memory that seems important at the present. After asking the guidance of the Spirit, seek to understand this memory and explore ways in which this has affected you. To jog your memory, you may like to consider some of the following:

Mount the stairs of the home in which as a child you lived longest; go in the front door, walk through the living room with all its old furniture, through the dining room ready for a meal, through the warm kitchen smelling of tasty food and out the back door; or be present at a family meal; or

Take the short cut across the yard, past the shops, to your primary school; or

Walk through the classrooms of your secondary school; see the playing fields, your friends, the teachers; or

Walk leisurely through a day or a week of the first job which you ever held, or your first day at university.

Recall the place where you first met some of your closest friends.

When a memory arises, let it develop fully. Go with a memory which attracts you. Don’t hurry through it. Stay with a strong memory for 10 to 15 minutes—as long as it develops in you. But don’t moralise about it. Don’t say to yourself: “I should have been more…” Then move on to another memory.

The four stages of the Prayer of Personal Reminiscence

There are four stages to the Prayer of Personal Reminiscence. In the first two stages you consider only those stories that are a source of happiness and joy. These stories are a form of prayer that can fill you with a sense of God’s love for you through others and strengthen you to look at the hard things of your life later.

The First Stage is to consider only those memories in which people do good for you and to you.

The Second Stage is to consider only those memories in which you have poured goodness into the lives of others and helped them to love and become more human. For example, encouragement you have given; listening you have done; letters you have written; people you have helped. This is not vanity but an honest looking at your ability to do good. Stay with this for as long as you can.

The Third Stage: Once you feel secure in the love God has shown to you through others, then it is time to look at the memories of the injustices that have been done to you. It is hard to admit that we have been hurt deeply by those whom we love the most. We are inclined to suppress such memories, but they still operate and can make us unfree.

The Fourth Stage: Then, finally, you look at the hard things which you have done to others in your life — lack of acceptance, failure to listen or inability to understand, hardness in your heart which you’ve passed on to others. This entails looking at where you have been unjust to others. The great freedom to be searched for here is that God loves you as you are even when you have been in the wrong.

Praying about a moment of my life history

Scripture (Deuteronomy 1:29-32)

“And I said to you: Do not take fright, do not be afraid of them. Yahweh our God goes in front of you and will be fighting on your side as you saw God fight for you in Egypt. In the wilderness, too, you saw God: how Yahweh carried you, as one carries a child, all along the road you travelled on the way to this place.”

Imaging

With Deuteronomy 1:29-32, I imagine myself on a journey with the Lord as my companion throughout my life. I pay special attention to the blessed moments of my life.

The grace I seek

I want and desire to be present to and know my life story as it is lovingly told by God that I may more generously love and respond to God.

Points

I consider my history in terms of the blessings of my family background, childhood, school years, work years, my growing sense of God, my mission.

I remember different persons, places, situations and the historical state of the world at the different times I am remembering.

After this time of remembering I ponder the continual presence of God with me during these years.

Personal reflection

Take one key moment of your life and ponder it. Re-live the event by seeing the persons, hearing the words, observing the actions. Can you discern elements of your unique identity, vocation, mission that shone forth in that moment?

The Joyful Mysteries of my life[1]

Saint Paul writes: “Three things last, faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The love that we have experienced in the past lasts and is, in some mysterious way, an enduring expression of God’s love. It can continue to nourish us. Each of us carries in his heart an album of lovely pictures of the past. Here is a way of entering deeply into your joyful memories:

Return to a scene in which you felt deeply loved… How was this love shown to you? In words, looks, gestures, an act of service, a letter…? Stay with the scene as long as you experience something of the joy that was yours when the event took place.

Make sure that you don’t just return to these scenes and observe them from the outside, so to speak. They have to be re-lived, not observed. Act them out again. Let the fantasy be so vivid that it is as if the experience is actually taking place right now for the first time.

It won’t be long before you experience the spiritual and emotional benefits of this exercise. You will become less resistant to accepting love and joy from your community, your friends and the people you work with. And your capacity for experiencing God and God’s love will also increase.

Questions to reflect on and write about after the prayer: