Repetition is not redundancy
There are very few things that I've returned to over and over again.
Pretty much anything by Wes Anderson (especially "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Rushmore"). T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" and to some extent "Ash Wednesday"), "We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes" by Death Cab for Cutie. Hemingway's "A Movable Feast". Bad habits.
And it seems the older I've gotten and the more time has seemed tyrannical, I've returned less and less to even those things.
Over time, I've come to value new things more than things I've already read, watched, listened to, and experienced.
There's an almost insatiable hunger for the new.
Like a child, I'm constantly chasing after shiny objects.
In many occasions, I can't even finish what I'm currently engaged in before I have a massive desire to move onto something else.
So this quote from the Christian mystic James Finley stopped me in my tracks the other day:
"Repetition is not redundancy."
Finley has a very interesting story. He came out of an abusive household, and joined the Abbey at Gethsemani, which is a Trappist monastery. Trappists are a Catholic religious order that is cloistered and take near vows of silence, discouraging idle talk.
Trappists life revolves around ora et labora, that is prayer and work. As such it is highly contemplative.
Finely spent six years as a monk under Thomas Merton, whom you may have heard of. Merton was highly prolific as a writer, and his most famous book was his memoir, "The Seven Storey Mountain".
Later, Finely got involved in buddhism and other forms of mysticism, became a clinical phsycologist, and eventually returned to the Catholic Church. He currently works with Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation and is faculty at Living School.
So, he has some experience with thinking deeply about things.
I ran across Finley when looking for podcasts on Merton. This led me to Finley's podcast, "Turning to the Mystics".
The podcast is centered around the teachings of different mystics in the Christian tradition, and a new episode is released weekly.
Finley's suggested approach to his weekly meditations is a great antidote to our hustle and bustle culture.
He suggests listening to each episode once a day, meditating, and journaling. Seven days listening to the same reflection over and over again.
By the end of the seventh day, he says your journaling will have unearthed depths your first day did not.
What Finley is proposing is a form of lectio divina, which I practice daily. The whole of lectio divina is broken into four parts:
Lectio - Reading a passage multiple times carefully
Meditatio - Meditating on the passage, what phrase, image, or word sticks out to me, and applying to my own life
Oratio - Opening up a conversation with God on the passage. What is God trying to teach me?
Contemplatio - Sitting silently before God for a time to absorb the prior steps
I've used this style of prayer as part of a poetry project I'm working on based on the daily readings, and I can say that I've plumbed the depths of the readings at a much deeper level than if I had done one, cursory reading. Not surprising, I'm sure, but easy to forget in our consumeristic culture.
The US capitalist machine runs on the new. New shows. New clothes. New cars. New books. New posts. New everything. It is a machine designed to force feed you a continual torrent of content and product. And much of it simply runs through our system.
So Finley's words are a needed admonishment, "Repetition is not redundancy."
There is a way in which we're pre-conditioned to think that repetition is waste. But really it's the only way to let something take deep root in us and actually change us.
If you want to be a novice, by all means continue to consume the new.
If you want to be a master, it will require returning again and again to revisit and recast what you thought you already knew.
In my quest to be more mindful, I plan on taking Finley's words to heart. Less new shit. More of the same please.
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