The Refrain of Our Lives

Sunday after Sunday we worship using very similar words and actions each week. Why would we want to be so repetitive? The writer, Kathleen Norris, has written about the importance of repetition in her own process of having belief take root within her. In Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith, she wrote,

Repetition as Kierkegaard understood it, as "the daily bread of life that satisfies with benediction." Repetition as in a hymn such as "Amazing Grace," or the ballade for, in poetry, where although the refrain is the same from stanza to stanca, it conveys something different each time it is repeated because of what is in the lines that have come in between. Over time, it was the ordinary events of life itself, coming "in between" the refrain of the church service, with its familiar creeds, hymns, psalms, and scripture stories, that most developed my religious faith. Worship summed it up and held it together, and it all came to seem like a ballade to me, one that I was living.

For those who worship together each week at King of Peace, that worship becomes the refrain changing meaning slightly each week as it holds our lives in balance.