The Gift in the Story:
Creating Community Within Family
by Chris Belding

Editor's note: The author, who lives near Grand Rapids, MI, is a Certified Sage-ing Leader and a Certified Crone with over 60 years of life experience. She finds spiritual sustenance in nature and in her circle of friends and family. She relishes sharing her gifts as coach, teacher, and holder of stories.

Family is at the center of my life. No matter how far I roam in my outer or inner landscape, my family history trails after me like a ghostly vapor. I spent years living in my family’s physical space and even more years away, trying to find the “me” apart from that first and most powerful community.

As often happens, life took me full circle and eventually I settled near my original homestead. I sensed I had work to do to realign myself with my family in a new form of community that included and expanded our original bond. Over the years my three sisters and I had created a tradition of visiting our mother in early June, near her birthday. Now I wanted new ways of being together; I wanted to create opportunities to risk more intimacy. In the last several years prior to my mother’s death, I became more intentional about my time with my mother and sisters. It was not without trepidation that I extended my first invitation to stretch our boundaries a bit:  let’s make masks together. I was delighted by the positive response I received and we all thoroughly enjoyed the process, even my mother who chose not to participate. I watched her watching us and could see her joy in our creative process — she received the gifts of our stories.

My family became intrigued, wondering what I might propose next. With the confidence of my first success, I stepped a bit further outside our usual way of being together the next time we gathered: we created an altar, each of us adding items that had special significance to us. I called us into a circle near the end of our time together that year and invited everyone to speak about what they had added to the altar. This time my mother did participate, and it was clear to me that we had now moved into sacred space…that timeless place in which a person’s shy soul is coaxed to show her face.

There were many gifts in these family experiences. After our reunions I received notes or calls from one sister or another in which they said that being in that “sacred space” together was the most meaningful part of the time we shared. We all glimpsed aspects of one another we had not been privileged to see before, and we all expanded beyond the labels of our earlier years together. During our circle after creating the altar, I was spellbound by one sister’s eloquence in expressing her spirituality. In our traditional way of relating, she tended to be reserved, and I had not before seen that inner part of her so fully. Another sister, who had carried the label of the “funny one,” risked exposing her tender heart and her tears as she shared in the circle. We all marveled at seeing our different ways of being creative — in speaking, in writing, and in weaving together the strands of our lives.

During what would be our last June reunion with our mother, I facilitated a creative writing experience. Everyone eagerly accepted the invitation and we gathered on Mother’s tree-shaded deck on a beautiful early summer afternoon. Each of us wrote our own mythic journey based on a series of questions that were designed by a friend of mine. There were 20 questions in all, beginning with “What kind of journey will it be?” and including “Who is the main character — the hero or heroine?” and “How will your main character travel?” After each question, there was time for imagining the journey and writing it down. As I looked around the circle, I was delighted to see the involvement and focused concentration.

After responding to all 20 questions, each of us was invited to read her story. When it was my mother’s turn, she began to read and soon was unable to continue, due to the tears and emotions her story evoked. I finished reading it out loud on her behalf. She had written about foreseeing her death, or for her, “the call to come home.” Each one of us in the circle was deeply moved and there was a sense of reverence for the gift she gave us…a glimpse into her private musings, her desire to be reunited with her now-deceased loved ones, and a clear sense of her expectations after her death. For me, the gift was especially meaningful because it was the one and only time my mother alluded to her dying in my presence. She died in February of the following year. The story she had written on the deck that day helped me to accept more gracefully her death and her empty place in our circle.

After my mother’s death in 1998, my sisters and I all wanted to stay intentionally connected and agreed to continue the tradition of annual reunions with now just the four of us. We have been faithful to that agreement for the past 8 years, and each year we have gathered in different locations to share stories, food, games, and walks. But recently there was another shift in the circle: my oldest sister decided she no longer wants to be a part of our special annual gatherings. As my other two sisters and I grapple with this major change, I sift through my grief for an answer to the question, “Well, what is the gift in THIS story?”

Our community changes again, and I grieve again. Yet I’m also eager to learn anew — as my mother did, as each of her daughters has done — what sort of community are we becoming now?

What is the gift in THIS story?