In the 2019 biopic Tolkien, there’s a moment when the young novelist, fresh from the horrors of trench warfare, talks with his father in the faith, a priest who walks with families through grief after the carnage of the Great War.
“I spend my every afternoon with mothers, widows,” the priest says. “What can I say to them? Your sons have died in the war to end all wars.”
“What do you say?” asks Tolkien.
“Words are useless,” he replies, before catching himself. “Modern words, anyway. I speak the liturgy. There’s a comfort, I think, in distance, ancient things.”
I speak the liturgy. Ancient things.
He’s referring to the powerful combination of something foreign yet familiar, something old yet fresh, a comfort that comes from relying on time-tested patterns instead of searching for a novel approach. There are moments when modern words prove useless. We need the formula. The old vocabulary.
Our Need for Repetition
For a liturgy to have power, there must be repetition. But in evangelical circles, we tend to think repetition means ritual which means stale, dry, or even dead. That’s why we feel the need to spruce things up, to liven up the atmosphere, to do whatever it takes to keep things from becoming so familiar we wind up (Lord forbid) just “going through the motions.”
Of course, there’s something right in the desire to see afresh the beauty of the faith, and there’s something noble in doing whatever we can to apply old truths in fresh ways as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission. We should be ever on the lookout for new ways to express old truths. Surely we don’t want to become the people described by Jesus—honoring God with our lips while our hearts are far from him.
But this desire for sincerity and passion can lead us to prioritize whatever is new, often at the expense of the old. And here we go too far, for repetition is one of the most formative elements of spiritual development.
In Deuteronomy 6, the children of Israel are told to commit the words of the law to memory by repeating or reciting them over and over again, all throughout the day. Repetition is part of spiritual formation. It’s likely Jesus’s disciples knew all the psalms by heart. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents to follow the New Testament, instructed believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.
Repetition can lead to a cold-hearted formalism, but it can also work against it. The deeper I dive into the meaning of familiar words, the more likely my heart is to be transformed. The constant search for novelty can be a setback, like wearing a new pair of shoes every day—they may dazzle on the outside, but we stumble around in them. We don’t give ourselves time to adapt and align our hearts to the truths we profess.
When You Need Words
The day will come when all that repetition—memorizing Scriptures and reciting prayers and singing the same songs—will be a balm to your soul. Those truths you know in your head you will need more than ever in your heart.
In Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren recalls the harrowing account of a complicated miscarriage. In the hospital, with nurses scurrying around recommending a blood transfusion, Tish cried out to her husband, “Compline! I want to pray Compline!” (That’s the every-night-before-bed portion of The Book of Common Prayer.) “It isn’t normal—even for me—to loudly demand liturgical prayers in a crowded room in the midst of crisis,” Warren writes. “But in that moment, I needed it, as much as I needed the IV.”
Moments later, the familiar rhythms of Christ-centered exaltation were flowing: Keep us as the apple of your eye, Hide us under the shadow your wing. . . . Lord have mercy, Christ, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. Later, Warren reflected, “Why did I suddenly and desperately want to pray Compline underneath the fluorescent lights of a hospital room? Because I wanted to pray but couldn’t drum up words.”
This is where repetition becomes a blessing. When the world goes crazy and the roof caves in, you can slip into the familiar, well-worn grooves you’ve established through the constant repetition of Scriptures and prayers. When the well has run dry, you still find furrows in the desert, plowed through years of praying the Word deep into your heart.
No one at a funeral is looking for the pastor to deliver a creative twist on an unusual passage of Scripture. There’s a reason we go back to Psalm 23 or John 14 or Revelation 21. We need ancient salve applied to fresh wounds.
This is why I’ve come to appreciate structure in my prayer life, something that goes beyond a particular pattern to the very words I hope to plant deep in my heart. In praying through the psalms in a month, or through the life of Jesus, I feel the power of repetition—the familiar phrases and prayers, the scriptural songs, and the words of believers who have gone before me.
Need for a Worship Canon
Repetition matters for singing too. The average lifespan of a widely sung worship song is about a third of what it was 30 years ago.
Attending the memorial service for Tim Keller last month, I was encouraged by the hymns he’d chosen for the occasion and what he’d written about each song. But most meaningful was the closing song, a newer hymn but one with great resonance for the people there—“There Is a Redeemer” by Melody Green. This was the song that Redeemer Presbyterian Church sang at the end of every service during the early years of Keller’s ministry in New York City, and in that moment, with so many Redeemer members present, it was as if the whole gathering fell into a groove, the congregation slipping into the sweetness of the old rhythm, allowing the familiarity of words and melody to overtake them once more.
Today’s worship leaders would do well to look beyond the latest hits on Christian radio and develop a “canon” of time-tested hymns and songs that will be the standards we can turn to for funerals in 20 or 30 years. Every congregation needs their “go-to” songs—old hymns like “It Is Well” and newer ones like “In Christ Alone.” If we fail to sing the same songs and hymns, choosing instead to chase only whatever is most popular in a given moment, we may one day face moments of deep grief, searching for words and yet unable to find them.
Let’s not fail to appreciate the gift of repetition. Ancient words bring solace in ways modern ones will not. The well-trodden paths of prayer and Scripture, etched deep in our hearts, will sustain us when words falter, giving us a rhythm of faith and establishing a legacy for future generations.
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