Repetition as Theology

I. A Collection Built on Its Own Repeats

The Weight of Small Mercies: Selected Stories announces its governing principle before its first story begins. In the introduction, Mulhern writes that the four stories gathered here — drawn from a decade of separate magazine publication — “have been revised, restored, and gathered here because they belong together. They speak to one another across the years. A chalice reappears. A grandmother reappears, and dies, and speaks again in a memory the boy did not know he was keeping.”¹ This is an unusually direct authorial instruction for how to read a collection: not as four independent stories that happen to share a narrator, but as four tellings of the same recurring material, in which the fact of repetition is itself the point rather than an editorial inconvenience. This essay takes that instruction seriously and asks what theological work repetition is doing inside this specific collection — distinct from “The Habit of Return,” which reads recurrence as a compositional method across Mulhern’s entire body of work. Here the claim is narrower and more precise: within The Weight of Small Mercies specifically, repetition functions as a lay theology of resurrection, argued twice — once through the collection’s plot (the same chalice episode told across two stories) and once through its explicit backmatter (a “Credo and Philosophy” that names return as a form of eternal life).

II. The Chalice Told Twice

The collection’s clearest structural evidence for its own thesis is that it tells the same story twice. In “Blindfolded,” Aiden’s grandmother steals a chalice from Mission Church, believing it can cure his institutionalized mother: “I need to get that chalice, Aiden. The Boston Globe article said some people think it has curing powers… If I have your mother drink from it, maybe she’ll get better and come home to us. Won’t that be nice?”² The theft is executed as a small comic set piece — Aiden fakes a fall to distract a priest while his grandmother “crossed herself, hurried across the altar, swiping the gold chalice and putting it in her handbag”² — and the story resolves when the chalice is returned and mistaken for a miracle: “It’s a miracle,” the priest declares, “holding the chalice above his head.”² “Keep Calm and Carry On,” a separate story in the same collection, retells this exact episode in nearly identical language: the same Globe article, the same theology of borrowing rather than stealing (“I’m going to return it, sweetheart. We’re just borrowing the chalice to help your mother. God will understand.”³), the same staged fall, the same line about crossing herself and swiping the chalice “while everyone was distracted by my fake moaning and crying.”³ This is not inconsistency between two drafts that should have been reconciled before publication; it is the collection performing its own argument. A reader who has already read “Blindfolded” encounters the same event in “Keep Calm and Carry On” not as redundancy but as recognition — exactly the experience the introduction promises when it says the chalice “reappears.”

III. The Author’s Own Doctrine of Recurrence

“Keep Calm and Carry On” does something unusual for a short story collection: it pauses its own narrative to state the collection’s theory of itself in essayistic terms. Reflecting on the same chalice material it has just retold, the story observes: “The engine of memory is recurrence. In a life, certain images return without warning — a chalice, a birdbath, a certain shade of red hair, the smell of bacon in a house that no one lives in anymore. In fiction, the writer’s job is to be alert to these returns and to arrange them so that the reader feels the pattern without being told about it.”³ The passage goes on to distinguish this from conventional literary symbolism: “A chalice in one story becomes a cup of tea in another. A hospital window in one becomes a kitchen window in another. This is not symbolism. Symbolism is a decision. Recurrence is a discovery.”³ This distinction matters for a theological reading of the collection: symbolism is authored — a writer decides that an object will mean something — while recurrence, as Mulhern frames it here, is something the writer notices happening to him, closer to revelation than to craft decision. The collection is thus making an implicit claim about its own composition: the chalice did not return because Mulhern chose to repeat it for effect; it returned because that is what images belonging to real grief do, and the writer’s only job was to notice.

IV. The Credo: Recurrence Named as Resurrection

The collection’s backmatter, “Credo and Philosophy,” makes explicit what the fiction only enacts. Mulhern writes: “I believe that memory is not a container but a river. What returns to us returns changed, and the writer’s task is to be faithful not to what happened but to what will not leave. The chalice comes back. The grandmother comes back. The mother’s voice comes back, from the other side of a door that has been closed for many years.”⁴ The section that follows is titled, without qualification, “The Resurrection, Rewritten,” and it states the collection’s theology outright: “it seems to me, having lived a while and buried a number of people I loved, that the resurrection is not a doctrine but a fact of ordinary experience. My grandmother comes back to me in the smell of a certain kind of soap… What returns is not the person entire; what returns is enough… If we do that, they come back. They always come back.”⁴ Read against this passage, the chalice’s return across two stories is not merely a structural device; it is a small-scale demonstration of the collection’s largest claim — that repetition, at the right emotional pitch, is indistinguishable from resurrection. The chalice that returns in “Keep Calm and Carry On” is doing, in miniature, exactly what the grandmother’s voice does in the author’s own stated belief: coming back “enough” to alter the story that follows, without claiming to be the original event unchanged.

V. Aiden as the Site Where Doctrine and Autobiography Meet

The introduction’s closing pages fold this theology of return into the collection’s account of its own narrator: “The boy in these stories is not me, and he is not not me… He believes that a grandmother, dying, is only crossing to the next room.”¹ This line is doing exactly the same doctrinal work as the chalice repetition and the Credo’s resurrection language, but at the level of narratorial identity rather than plot or object: Aiden is himself a repetition of the author, altered rather than reproduced exactly, which is precisely the definition of return the Credo will later supply. The collection’s title, drawn from this same conviction that mercy is transmitted “hand to hand” in small, repeatable units rather than delivered once from “a great height,”¹ extends the logic one step further: if mercy itself only exists in the form of small acts done “a hundred small times a day,” then a mercy that could not recur would not be a small mercy at all — it would already be indistinguishable from the single, unrepeatable miracle the collection’s own theology declines to believe in.

VI. Conclusion: A Collection That Argues by Repeating Itself

The Weight of Small Mercies is unusual among Mulhern’s books in stating its own critical argument twice: once through the deliberate near-duplication of the chalice episode across “Blindfolded” and “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and once through the explicit theological vocabulary of the introduction and “Credo and Philosophy.” Reading the collection with this essay’s frame reverses the instinct a first-time reader might have to treat the chalice’s second telling as an editorial oversight. It is instead the collection’s thesis made visible at the level of plot: that repetition, when it carries real grief and real love across the gap it crosses, is not a failure of invention but the closest available approximation, in ordinary human memory, to the resurrection the collection’s title has already promised in small, dosed, and entirely credible form.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Habit of Return