The Venomous Bite of Boredom

Boredom is in hot pursuit of modern man. With the advancement of technology, he no longer needs to worry about things like staying fed, warm, cool, clothed, or protected. Not having to spend time and energy on attaining things like food or shelter, he has created for himself an excess of "spare" time and it is in this surplus of newly-found time that boredom often rears its awful head.

This concept of boredom- a perception of not having anything to do- seems to have been foreign to most civilizations who, in former times, immediately faced the repercussions of how they spent their time. If they did not exert themselves to gather resources for the following day, they would quickly find themselves in an unforgiving world.

Not so with us. Our societies are now built so as to remove us one step further away from concern of our imminent survival. Public utilities such as water, electricity, and gas enable us to get what we want with a rapidity that allows us time for leisure. So the question for our age is how do we prevent ourselves from being overtaken by the boredom of our leisure? Is this even a thing that we can prevent? Perhaps Voltaire was right: man is destined to live either "in the convulsions of distresses or in the lethargy of boredom" (Candide). Is there really a third option we can choose in order to escape from "this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay" (Gerorges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest)?

With these questions in mind, it seems wise to distinguish between not having anything eventful to do and not having anything worthwhile to do. Throughout human history man has always had worthwhile things to do, it is just a matter of him placing value on these things to judge them worth his while. Eventful or novel things, on the other hand, seem to be few and far between and it is unfortunate that we place such high value on them.

With what urgency and attention do we seek after thrills of one sort or another to the neglect of taking care of our minds, bodies, and souls? It has reached the point where taking care of these aspects of our person is tantamount to boredom itself because it holds no excitement for us. Reading, praying, grocery shopping, and work are not always on the top of the list of things we want to do.

If this is truly the situation we find ourselves in by placing such emphasis on excitement, what sense are we to make of the Gospels that tell us next to nothing about the majority of our Lord's earthly life? Can we assume that nothing important was happening as He "increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man" (Lk 2:52) because nothing noteworthy caught the attention of the Evangelists to warrant writing about it? Are we to think that our Lord led a boring life due to the Gospels' silence over the years from age 12 to 30?

What was His life like before being a public figure, before the miracles, before all the attention given to Him? What was it like even later on in between the mountaintop sermons and the miraculous wonders? When the crowds left Him, how did He occupy His time being a man? Our Lord helping others to grow in wisdom makes sense, but what are we to make of it when we say that He too was growing in wisdom, with no elaboration being given the idea? How does God in the flesh spend His spare time so as to grow in wisdom?

Perhaps a deeper understanding of the Incarnation surfaces for us as we ponder these quiet, unwritten about times in our Lord's life. As we search the headlines for eventful happenings in our own life, maybe the one great event in our life is the collection of our mundane, everyday experiences. The American playwright Thorton Wilder wrote in a preface to his play Our Town that "every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions." Does the Lord not also see it so? Does He not see the entirety of our life as one precious thing He loves rather than a segmented disunity of boredom-excitement- more boredom? "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day"(2 Pt 3:8). Maybe the lack of constant novelty in the life of man is what makes a man essentially human. What a travesty we get bored and seek diversions in our rejection of normalcy! In our fervent, insatiable search for novelty and change we have lost touch of the value of stability, permanence, and simplicity.

In Christ becoming man, He indeed made holy the everyday life of man. As He worked for His food and shelter, as He spent time in companionship with His fellow men, as He entered into solitude to encounter the Father in prayer, in all these things that the hopeless and despairing man thinks worthless, these Christ sanctified and made worthwhile as He increased in wisdom and in years. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said: "Christianity preaches the unending worth of the apparently worthless and the unending worthlessness of what is apparently so valuable"(Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity).

As we age, the temptation arises to examine the life that we have lived and see it highlighted by exciting or extraordinary events, much as a biographer segments a man's life by certain distinguishable milestones. Everything in between these noteworthy times and events seem to be nothing but blurry dreams in which we strenuously search to find some value. But to fail to see the eternal worth of that life ordinarily lived is to fail to understand the absence of any evangelical record of Christ's formative years or of His routine days. He did not merely come to die, He came to live, and live abundantly, a fully human life of wisdom, knowledge, and love just as we are meant to do as His brethren.

It is good to imagine what those quiet, normal times of our Lord's life were like, yet, could not those times just as well be mirrored in the quiet simplicity of our own uneventful life lived well? "Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God"(1 Cor 10:31) for to do so is to imitate Christ as He lived His blessed life here on earth- not in gnawing boredom- but in constant reverence of every given moment the Father lovingly gave Him.