History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes

"History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."

These words, shared with me long ago by a theological tutor, echo louder in my heart with each passing year.

We live in times that feel eerily familiar… another season of global uncertainty, rising walls, deepening divides, and anxious economies. As if some old song is playing again, only in a new key.

The economic patterns are easy to trace. Capitalism has always moved to the rhythm of boom and bust… a cycle older than the stock market. Prosperity gives way to speculation… speculation to collapse… and collapse to the slow march of rebuilding. It’s a pattern as predictable as the tides, yet still we are surprised when the waters rise.

Overlaying this, another rhythm pulses: isolation and partnership. In times of fear, nations turn inward. Borders close. Flags rise. Protectionism becomes the creed of the day. And then, as the dust settles and the soul hungers for communion, we reach again across the divide… building bridges, treaties, shared visions.

We saw it in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs choked global trade… and again in the 1934 pivot toward cooperation through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. We saw it after World War II, when the wreckage of Europe gave birth to the Marshall Plan, the European Union, and the United Nations. Periods of division… then healing… then division again.

A human breathing. Inhale… exhale… connection… withdrawal.

But what if something else is happening beneath this rhythmic pattern — something deeper than economy and policy?

We are living, some say, in the age of technological acceleration… approaching a moment futurists call the singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and everything changes.

But I wonder: what if the human spirit is accelerating too?

What if we are being pulled… not just into a digital future… but into a spiritual singularity? A threshold moment in human consciousness. A convergence point where the old cycles strain and crack under the pressure of something vaster trying to be born?

A place beyond the boom and bust. Beyond nationalism and globalism. Beyond greed, ego, borders, and flags.

A moment where we glimpse the truth we’ve always known deep down:

That no one is truly separate. That the soul is shared. That the suffering of the stranger is our own.

Could it be that what looks like history repeating is actually history ascending, spiralling upwards, rhyming not in circles but in a sacred spiral… carrying us toward wholeness, if we are willing to see it?

Or will we fall again into the grooves of fear and survival… walling off our hearts as we wall off our nations?

Can we break the cycle?

Maybe not completely.

But perhaps we can interrupt it.

Slow it down.

Plant something new in the fertile soil of its decay.

Maybe that’s what spiritual communities are called to do in every age….to live, even imperfectly, as a rehearsal for the world to come.

To say, not with certainty, but with hope:

The cycle need not trap us.

The rhyme need not end in ruin.

Another verse is possible.