I've never formally studied writing, but I've managed, somehow, to pick up various of the art's rules, especially the one about avoiding unnecessary repetition of the same words or phrases, except as a rhetorical device or for emphasis. For this to truly work, though, it needs an especially skilled hand, plus disciplined revision: otherwise, though my intention might be something to rival Dickens' introduction to A Tale of Two Cities, or King's I have a dream, the result is instead clunky and unimaginative, and, well... repetitive.
Otherwise - just as Dickens moved from times to epoch and season - why simply repeat, when you can echo, reiterate, reproduce or duplicate?
Which brings me to yesterday, when I wanted to look something up in my copy of the New Testament translated by Nicholas King. The book opened, of its own accord, at the First Letter of John, and these words - and their explanatory note - leapt out at me...
Love... in Greek agape... thirteen times in five verses - and several times thereafter. Love, repeated not as a rhetorical device or literary flourish, but simply because of its absolute centrality, and because no other word would do: because it contains and surpasses all its synonyms and expressions, and any amount of compassion, tenderness, affection, charity, altruism, kindness or care. Love as a verb and a noun, an ideal as well as a feeling; Love divine, and human, unconditional and universal; God's initiative, our response and our home.
As if for the first time, I read and re-read a classic text full of repetition - and there is absolutely nothing clunky or unimaginative about those verses!
It's been a week in which our public life and news headlines have been filled with anger, toxicity, rancour and inflammatory language. And yet, looking back, I can also see that the week has been filled with love, compassion, tenderness and care. There has been goodness; there has been love, and it lies at the heart of just about everything which has lifted my spirits, and given me hope. And it will endure, and it will increase, in the measure in which it is absolutely central in my life, and everyone else's.
May we live this new week in and through and overflowing with love...
Otherwise - just as Dickens moved from times to epoch and season - why simply repeat, when you can echo, reiterate, reproduce or duplicate?
Which brings me to yesterday, when I wanted to look something up in my copy of the New Testament translated by Nicholas King. The book opened, of its own accord, at the First Letter of John, and these words - and their explanatory note - leapt out at me...
Love... in Greek agape... thirteen times in five verses - and several times thereafter. Love, repeated not as a rhetorical device or literary flourish, but simply because of its absolute centrality, and because no other word would do: because it contains and surpasses all its synonyms and expressions, and any amount of compassion, tenderness, affection, charity, altruism, kindness or care. Love as a verb and a noun, an ideal as well as a feeling; Love divine, and human, unconditional and universal; God's initiative, our response and our home.
As if for the first time, I read and re-read a classic text full of repetition - and there is absolutely nothing clunky or unimaginative about those verses!
It's been a week in which our public life and news headlines have been filled with anger, toxicity, rancour and inflammatory language. And yet, looking back, I can also see that the week has been filled with love, compassion, tenderness and care. There has been goodness; there has been love, and it lies at the heart of just about everything which has lifted my spirits, and given me hope. And it will endure, and it will increase, in the measure in which it is absolutely central in my life, and everyone else's.
May we live this new week in and through and overflowing with love...
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