In my family, people like to tell an anecdote about a favorite uncle, Bill, who had the reputation of being kind and open to everyone he met. Such was his good nature that he would greet strangers with warmth, so much so that we used to fear others taking advantage of him.

One day, it is told, Bill was coming down the front stairs inside his house. At the same time, another man, rather tipsy from imbibing too much, was walking up. Bill, according to the story, hailed the intruder with a friendly greeting, and then continued his way down and out the door.

This tale, not without fictitious added details perhaps, gets repeated often when our extended family gathers for anniversaries or other events. The younger members who have heard the story more than once are probably thoroughly bored with it by now. It’s the kind of tale that I myself in my younger days used to turn off as not worth repetition. I was looking instead for things that I had not heard before.

Now that I have reached a certain age, however, I have come to see that the telling of such stories can easily be underrated. Perhaps they amount to a rite that has great importance for the elders of the family and even for the younger members as well.

Writer James Hillman tells of interrupting his uncle in the middle of a time-worn story. “You’ve already told me that,” the nephew said. His uncle’s riposte, delivered at lightening speed, was “I like telling it.” Under his breath, the uncle probably said (as Hillman imagines), “And what the hell is wrong with telling it again? Don’t you know anything about the pleasure of telling the same stories?”

Of his uncle, Hillman adds, “He knew the pleasure of the groove.” He goes on to suggest that it is shortsighted to judge repetition as an addiction. “Why not, instead, conceive of the need for novelty as an addiction?” he asks.

In exploring the time-honored story, this Jungian analyst suggests that the story genre causes boredom only if you listen to it for facts. If, for example, grandmother tells about a fire that almost destroyed her house and details who did what to escape, the mere facts might leave listeners cold.

However, Hillman says, “The story is also a lesson about concealed dangers, about protecting ‘home,’ about family collaboration, and about the character of each of the ‘characters’ whose styles emerge through the emergency.”

Stories like the grandmother’s aim to establish a permanency that, amid the ceaseless flow of life’s events, reassure us that some things stay the same. “It is as if the soul begs for the same stories so that it knows that something will last.”

You may be tempted to dismiss this kind of analysis as the feverish speculations of an imagination run amok. But it does help me realize how superficial I can be in dismissing family rites and rituals cherished by friends. They do indeed often have the power to feed the soul and to enhance our lives.

Hillman carries it even further. “That forgetful old uncle, that tiresome grandmother offer a foretaste of the eternal. They function as ancestors, reminding us that recapitulation is the way the world really works.”

The writer concludes the matter thus: “Nothing is more tedious than practicing your scales or mumbling your beads. Yet the accomplishments of art, the efficacy of prayer, the beauty of ritual, and the force of character depend on petty repetitions any instant of which, taken for itself alone, seems utterly useless.”

If soul is what counts most, then family stories would seem to have great value indeed. Those who have cultivated “the pleasure of the groove” may have more wisdom than we think. Whether highly educated or not, they develop a sense of self-worth as tellers of the tale. They are fulfilling a role held important always and everywhere, I suspect, because it’s a powerful instrument for continuity.

If Hillman is right in suggesting that repetition does indeed point toward the eternal, then its spiritual content is even richer. “Is that all there is?” remains a potent question demanding an answer. Perhaps we can find in the traditions of family story-telling signs that point onward and upward. The actual stories may sound hokey sometimes but they can come freighted with values that we ignore only at our peril.

We could do worse than to ponder what Thomas Lynch writes in his 1998 book of poems, Still Life in Milford: “How we repeat ourselves, like stars in the dark night, / and after Darwin, Freud and popes and worlds at war, / we are still our father’s sons and daughters / still our mother’s darling girls and boys, / aging first, then aged then ageless.”

Richard Griffin