Anyone who regularly prays the rosary knows the experience of repetition. In the course of fingering the beads through five decades, you’ll have recited the same prayer, the Hail Mary, over 50 times. While repeating the same words over and over can sometimes have a dulling effect, taking our minds off the meaning of the words, there’s something about steady repetition that fits well into the life of a Vincentian, a follower of Jesus Christ, and indeed of a devotee of the Blessed Mother.

And that something is: consistency. Not doing separate, once-in-a-while good deeds, but behaving regularly in a consistent and unselfish manner. And this not always in big things, but in a steady, day-after-day, week-after-week love of the neighbor.

On first glance, the Good Samaritan’s heroic deed appears to be a one-time thing. But such spontaneous and outgoing concern is more than likely a habit, a way of acting, that because it so regularly happens, can be depended upon to keep happening. Repetition of selfless, other-centered action carves a kind of groove in a person’s makeup, making it ever more likely that he or she will keep on behaving in the same way.

Granted the Samaritan’s act is striking, the kind of challenge that wouldn’t occur every day. But more than likely, he’s been helpful in many other lesser ways, doing small services in his immediate circle. I’ve heard someone refer to these incidental helps as everyday love, or what he called a “take out the garbage love” — concern for the other that carries over into the taken-for-granted, unglamorous rhythms of daily life. Again, that pattern of steady and repeated behavior.

The thought is that repetition builds habits. That, even though boring, doing the same kinds of things to help others builds up a steady and characteristic way, not only of living but more so of being. Firm perseverance finds a home in the Vincentian world with its insistence on reliable care for the needy in season and out.

The tedium of saying the Hail Mary’s over and over in the rosary – might it have a spillover into attitudes and behaviors in the rest of life, outlooks and actions that bring us closer to the example of the Blessed Mother, a person whose life is filled with examples of steady, selfless and loving behavior? Repetition, though often tedious, can move us along on the road of discipleship, further on the “Way” that follows not only behind Vincent but especially the Son of Mary, Our Lord Jesus Christ.