As a beginner in prayer, I sometimes wondered what the purpose was in going back and praying the same passage or exercise I had done just a few hours earlier. This was one of the spiritual practices that St Ignatius of Loyola recommended, particularly during the 30-day Spiritual Exercises. When I first of this I thought that praying like this would so boring, but I was wrong.
“Repetition is the return to a previous period of prayer for the purpose of allowing the movements of God to deepen within the heart. Through repetitions, we fine-tune our sensitivities to God and to how he speaks in our prayer and in our life circumstances. The prayer of repetition teaches us to understand who we are in light of how God sees us and who God is revealing himself to be for us.”
We often get that same sense of repetition in the lectionary – the assigned readings for the weekday and Sunday masses. In John 15 and 16 Jesus seems to be going around and around saying the same kind of thing 3 times over. Imagine trying to preach on that and sound original each time! If Jesus repeated something then it must have been important, and we should probably pay more attention to it. If the editors of the lectionary have given us the same or similar texts to read and reflect on then it is probably worth our while struggling with the text, even if it seems boringly similar.
We are being invited to deepen our encounter with the Lord in the scriptures by revisiting both the highs and the lows we experienced in the prayer. Often our first take on a scripture passage in our prayer can be superficial, or rather, be focused on the explicit and the obvious. If we go back to that same scripture and pray it again, we can often go deeper. We can begin to make connections between the scripture and our own lives. Repetition can unlock for us doors that we have locked childhood or otherwise negative experiences/memories behind.
This returning to the text in our prayer results in a deepening awareness and appreciation of what has gone before. If we can move past the boredom and risk vulnerability, we will be able a deeper understanding of we are, and why we are, and where God has been in the journey.
The same is true when we reflect on our lives, possibly using the examination of consciousness which St Ignatius proposed. Socrates is reported to have said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think that what he was trying to say is that it is only through examining our life, our history, our experiences; and our thoughts and feelings in response to all of that, that we will be able to truly grow as human beings, in all our multifaceted dimensions.
We won’t be able to grow as human beings, in our relationships with God, ourselves and others, unless we are prepared to do the hard work of repetition, the continual looking at God in us and the world, and where that Spirit of God might be leading us.
