The Beauty of Repetitive Change

C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and G.K. Chesterton (Catholic) are two authors that have often and powerfully influenced my thinking.  Maybe because they both use their initials in their pen name.  Maybe I will start going by D.S. Clark, and see where it takes me.


Here, Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes about God's gift of repetitive change, and the dark substitution and perversion of that gift into the need for continuous novelty.

(This is written as if by a demon to his "student" demon nephew) "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart-an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.  The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.  But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balance the love of change in them by a love of permanence.  He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.  He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship.  If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas.  Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up." ¹

When I read that, I recognized in myself that incessant need for the novel, and I decided to begin to find, rather, delight in God's rhythms that he has gifted us with. 


Later, I was reading Orthodoxy, by Chesterton, and ran across this passage,.

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God make daisies separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." ²

These are some of the reasons that I have begun to return to a more agrarian lifestyle, planting gardens, and trying (rather unsuccessfully, to date) to keep bees and chickens.  Beginning to look for the enchantment inherent in the world God has created.  They are also contributing factors in my family beginning to enjoy the rhythms of the liturgical year.

Citations:

¹ Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1961.

Pages 126-129.

² Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers. 1994. Page 61.