Anything but Boredom!: Half the Sins of Humankind Are Caused by the Fear of Boredom. But Boredom Can Be the Path to Holiness as Well

Boring! It’s the final condemnation, the complete put-down. Parents hear it after a concert or on a family vacation or in church. Actually, it’s pronounced, “Boooriing!” and it seems to emerge from the depths of disgust. It should be a four-letter word. The epithet never loses its power to terrify. Children, with blunt honesty, hurl the accusation like a hand grenade toward anything they consider undeserving of their presence, but adults, though perhaps more politely circumspect, fear it and feel it and flee it just as much.

In 1958 the American writer Barnaby Conrad was badly gored in a bullfight in Spain. Eva Gabor and Noel Coward were overheard talking about the incident in a New York restaurant. “Noel, dahling,” said Eva, “have you heard the news about poor Bahnaby? He vas terribly gored in Spain.”

“He was what?” asked Coward in alarm.

“He vas gored!”

“Thank heavens. I thought you said he was bored.”

The Boredom We Are Given

Since we all experience boredom, it’s worth thinking about. Like the gender of those who suffer it, boredom comes in two basic kinds—the boredom we choose and the boredom we are given.

What can you say about a person who is bored standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or bored in the presence of close friends, or bored listening to the music of Bach or Ellington, or bored watching Joe Montana complete a 30-yard pass? I suppose few would be interested in all these things. But if nothing penetrates the wall of indifference, something has died deep within. One can slumber through life without ever really waking up. Through lazy neglect, the ground of the soul can get too hardened to receive the common showers of blessings that fill a good and marvelous creation.

Such boredom results from turning our backs on what life has to offer; it is the ultimate lewd gesture of contempt. The church has called this one of the “seven deadly sins”—the sin of acedia, the sin Frederick Buechner describes as “a form of suicide.” It is a choice for death, a willing separation from the joys of life.

But another boredom afflicts us, and the church has rarely acknowledged it: the sort inherent in life itself. We do not choose it. It comes from being made for something more than we now experience. If the first type of boredom has to do with an inner dullness to worldly joys, this second type has to do with an inner glory that can never find fulfillment within worldly limitations.

We were made in God’s image, and this means we were made for something more than an existence torn apart by self-centeredness and limited by death. We were made for the Promised Land, we could say, but we’re not there yet and the wilderness can be pretty boring. This boredom isn’t sin. In fact, it’s a witness to our greatness. Being bored with a five-bedroom house at the beach, for example, may reveal a need for nothing less than the spaciousness and splendor of the kingdom of God. Being bored with a loved one may show hunger for an ecstasy for love that can be satisfied only through intimate communion with God.

Whatever the cause, boredom is not pleasant. It is like coming home from the dentist with a mouth deadened by anesthetic: You don’t feel anything, but the very lack of feeling hurts. You cannot wait for the numbness to wear off. So boredom cries out for relief.

There are two possible ways of escape: sin or holiness.

Bertrand Russell said that “boredom is a vital problem of the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.” I’m not sure how we could verify this, but I think he was accurate. A woman does not wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, it’s a perfect day to commit adultery.” No, she wakes up to another day where nothing much seems to be happening in her marriage and she finds relief from the wilderness in the oasis of another man’s attention; taking one little step after another, she eventually finds herself in a situation she could never before have imagined. Or a man does not set out to be greedy. But to relieve the boredom of business-as-usual at the office, he enters the game, struggles for tangible victories, and before long he is imprisoned in a pattern of grasping for more and more to prove his worth.

I imagine boredom was the chief reason the prodigal son left home. Life on the farm has its dreary routines; there are chores to do, day in and day out. And that insufferable brother—boring beyond belief! No wonder he ran off to the far country to squander his substance in riotous living.

Diana Humphries, a pretty 16-year-old from Houston, Texas, felt the routine of life was getting too monotonous. So to “escape from the boredom,” she ambushed and killed her 14-year-old brother Robert with a .22 rifle. Why? “Because nothing ever happens around here,” she sobbed.

Her problems went far beyond boredom. But don’t we have to admit that when we have given in to temptations, when we have done what we know we should not do, it has often been because “nothing much ever happens around here,” because we want some surge of adrenaline to energize us? Is it simply coincidence that Jesus, at the start of his ministry, was tempted in the wilderness? When gray washes over us, covering feeling and perceptions, we are far more likely to try things that promise some color.

Noticing What Really Happens

And yet there is another way. The only lasting relief from boredom comes not from sin but from holiness.

I know: The word conjures up images of dull, pale piety with all lifeblood drained out of it. But I am referring to authentic holiness, not the caricature. The term holy refers to God, to the Wholly Other One who infinitely transcends this world in perfection, in beauty and joy, the One the Bible defines as love. Holiness, therefore, has the glory of God about it, the dimension of eternity. It makes all earthly joys pale by comparison.

Why did the people follow Jesus with such interest? Why would thousands listen to his teaching, putting off as long as possible their journey home? What did they see in this carpenter from Nazareth? Whatever it was, it is safe to say it was not dull. There was something provocative about him; people could not be neutral about him. Whether they knew it or not, they encountered holiness, the presence of God.

The advent of Jesus, the babe of Bethlehem, was the great intrusion of holiness into this world’s inevitable boredom. Christmas celebrates the appearing of the Promised Land in the midst of the wilderness, the coming to us of that One who alone can set our restless hearts at peace.

But not everyone sees this. The desperate attempt to escape boredom can keep us so busy that we overlook the relief when it is standing in front of us.

From our earliest years in Sunday school we have heard how there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the Bethlehem inn and how Jesus was born in a stable. But did you ever think about the others at the inn, the ones who got there early enough to stake out a bed and a place at the bar? While the Son of God came into the world, they carried on with their usual pursuits—the innkeeper darting about to keep his guests happy as they knocked back drinks, played games, told stories, took their pleasure, and rested in beds.

But some noticed what really happened that evening. The gospel stories tell us the shepherds were the first to know the good news. They were what we would call blue-collar workers. Their culture did not respect them; it despised them. No court of law would accept their testimony as fact. You would not have run into them at the Bethlehem Country Club—unless it was to find them cleaning restrooms during their off-hours.

Why would God send angels announcing the birth of the Christ to such as these? Diogenes Allen, in a fine book called Temptation, has suggested that because they were close to the harsh realities of life they might have been more receptive to the news. Herding sheep was not especially difficult, but the hours were long and the tedium great. Their boredom must have made them ready for something more.

The shepherds were not unique in their boredom. Even the most exciting pursuits cannot protect from it. Doctors grow weary of complaining patients; attorneys get tired of arguing; professors wonder what good will come from the writing of one more book. But perhaps the shepherds, cut off from the ordinary means of escape, were in a boredom so unrelenting that they were able to see what others cannot see.

Angels And Misspelled Words

The most promising strategy for dealing with boredom is to accept it as an inevitable consequence of being made for more than this life has to offer. Rather than running from it and seeking relief in all sorts of diversions, we ought to embrace it, open ourselves to it. The pursuit of distracting pleasures can leave precious little time for the inner quietness necessary to hear the whispering of God in the ordinary.

Moses spent many years out in the desert tending sheep before God appeared in the burning bush. Perhaps it took that much tedium to prepare him for the encounter. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a poem about Moses, raising the issue of human sensitivity:

Earth is crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

A woman attends my church who has learned to quiet herself before God in unusual ways. I can see it in her face during worship services. She seems present but not present, somewhere else. Or maybe she is more intensely present. One thing certain is that she sees things no one else sees: angels, doorways opening into regions of intense light, stairways coming down from heaven.

My natural instincts make me think she needs psychiatric counseling, but there is nothing at all about her to confirm that. Between Sundays she is a competent professional, “normal” in every other way. She maintains that angels are always present, surrounding everyone, if only people would open their eyes to them.

Well, I don’t know. But I do know that while she is utterly open, quiet before God, I am worried about the misspelled word in the Order of Worship, the perversities of the sound system, the crying baby in the third row, and how well my sermon will be received. She is noticing the flame in the bush, and I am busy picking blackberries.

When we grow tired of the blackberries, we just might be ready to see the consuming fire that burns in the common things around us. That, I think, is boredom’s great gift to us. It forces us to see the ultimate emptiness of life in this world; it enables us to let go of diversions that distract us from being attentive to the presence of the Holy. “Vanity of vanity,” said the Old Testament apostle of boredom, “all is vanities.” Yes, and thus we pray, not as an empty ritual but as the cry of our hearts, “Thy kindgom come!”

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