An Introduction

The Sanctity of Repetition: A Series

Repetition has a way of making us restless. We want the new, the exciting, the different. We measure our lives by milestones and breakthroughs, not by the steady rhythm of the everyday. And yet most of life is repetition: waking, eating, working, resting, loving, forgiving, beginning again.

In the life of faith, repetition is everywhere. We pray the same prayers, return to the same sacraments, walk through the same liturgical year. We confess our sins each week, though they sound suspiciously familiar. We hear the same words at the altar: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

To modern ears, this can sound like monotony—at best tradition, at worst stagnation. But what if repetition is not a sign of failure, but the soil in which holiness grows?

The God of Scripture is not a God of one-time encounters. The psalms circle back again and again: “His mercy endures forever.” Morning after morning, Lamentations promises, God’s compassion returns (3:22–23). In the Benedictine tradition, monks chant the same psalms on rotation not because they’ve run out of words, but because words repeated become prayer woven into the bones.

Repetition does not mean lifelessness. It means constancy, faithfulness, a rhythm steady enough to carry us when we falter. It allows mercy to meet us, not once, but as often as we need.

A Series on the Holy Work of “Again”

Over the next ten weeks, I want to explore this sanctity of repetition. Each Sunday, a new reflection will take up one facet of how repetition shapes our faith and our lives:

• the mercy of beginning again

• daily bread and the repetitions that keep us alive

• psalms and the sanctification of time

• beads and prayers that circle endlessly

• the Eucharist as the holy “again” of remembrance

• the return of grief

• the monotony of work as prayer

• the circles of creation

• repetition as formation

• and finally, repetition as the rhythm of resurrection hope

Together, these reflections will consider how repetition is not dull routine but a sacramental rhythm—a way God makes ordinary life holy, again and again.

This will not be a series about how to escape the cycles of days, but how to inhabit them differently. How to see the beauty in the ordinary loops, and how to trust that even the hard repetitions—sorrow, struggle, loss—are not wasted in God.

So, each Sunday for the next ten weeks, you are invited to return with me. To circle back. To begin again. To discover, together, the mercy hidden in the rhythm of “again.”