“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” So Ecclesiastes tells us. There’s a truth here, and the lament finds an echo in the voices of those who discover how deeply weary this world of ours has grown. But there’s a truth as well in the proclamation that, seen aright, everything is new under the sun. The Incarnation, which we are about to celebrate again, has cut time in two. Christmas is for all those who lament, and it has the power to turn their lamentation into joy.

In a different key, there’s also a philosophical case to be made for the newness of our lives. We are each unique, and so are our stories. Jacques Maritain observes that strictly speaking there are no precedents. “Each time I find myself in a situation requiring me to do a new thing,” I am charged “to bring into existence an act that is unique to the world.” The act must be in harmony with the moral law, and yet it is “under conditions belonging strictly to me alone.”

To be sure, we can categorize our acts. The song from Casablanca tells us, “It’s the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.” Yes, play it again, Sam! But each type of act differs in its instantiations. Every act is what it is and not another thing. Each particular act participates in its own way in what Maritain calls the generosity of being.

As a callow youth I resisted the educational maxim Repetitio est mater studiorum! Repetition might be an instrument of study, but surely it isn’t the inspiration. And doubtless with repetition semper aliquid haeret, that is, something always sticks. But, I wondered, for how long? Now, however, well past the witching age of 39, I understand that the point of repetition — why it works, when it does — is that we make the lesson we learn become part of us; we make that which is become part of who we are.

G.K. Chesterton, even more so than Charles Dickens, celebrated Christmas. Chesterton was alive to the Incarnation it heralds. He also celebrated children and encouraged us to recognize the source of their wonder. With pointed paradox he comments that “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.”

And what does God make of this phenomenon? Chesterton speculates boldly. Perhaps 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 makes every daisy 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.”

The Divine Liturgy, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, offered every day on our altars, is at once old and new. And, of course, our distracted rosaries, which mark out their mysteries for us, are repetitions which can become part of us. Indeed, our very lives are measured by familiar and repeated cycles which we variously record in keeping with their significance. So it goes! And, yes, lamentations there will be. But let them bend the knee to joy. The apostle Paul, unique in his conversion, wisely tells us, “Do not grow tired of doing good” (Galatians 6:9). Remember, gentle reader, that our Savior himself reveals what we might have only hoped: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5).