Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness . . .
Frederick Buechner mentions four types of experience, four passageways through which we can enter into the full expanse of human life where the holy is hiding and waiting to be found if we look and listen deeply enough (See blog post of Nov. 19, 2012). Neither random nor exhaustive, they are meant to be representative of human experience, alluding to the full range of situations in daily life that contain revelatory potential and are where “grace happens.” He just as easily could have said “in the doubt and struggle of it no less than in the wonder and joy” and meant virtually the same thing. Let’s consider the first experience: boredom.
Boredom is the discomfort that arises when all conscious or unconscious efforts at amusement or distraction have run their course and persons are left alone with the emptiness of their lives. To say that boredom is revelatory means that it is a messenger bearing a message. When in faith we pay attention to our lives, when we listen with the ear of our heart, we discover that boredom is not a demon of death but an angel of mercy, not an invading malevolent phantom but an inviting ministering spirit. What then are the gifts boredom brings covered in its deceptively drab, world-weary, bow-less wrapping? When we dare to stay put, be still, and listen deeply to the boredom in our lives, what vital secrets might it reveal to us about ourselves. How might it change us? When it wins our attention, to what might it be inviting us? What guidance might it offer us for the art of living? Or, if applicable, what insights or new direction will it present for our ministry? . . . .
When children say they are bored, they mean, “There’s nothing to do.” I admit, when I hear children say this it makes me cringe, probably because it exposes me to my own spiritual ennui. But it is more than that. When the complaint, “I’m bored,” becomes a collective refrain, it signals that we have failed as a society, as communities of faith, as educators, parents, and spiritual guides, to help our children develop the ability to do nothing so that they can become contemporaries of their own souls. We have failed to instill in them a reverence for silence where they can develop not only a sense of who they are, but a sense of significant being as well. Oh, we have given them plenty to do: weekly music lessons, sporting events, religious education classes, hours of homework, DVD libraries to watch, IPhones complete with computer games galore to play. We have given them far fewer lessons in the art of being, hardly any opportunities to be bored without quickly rescuing them from themselves by shooing them toward the television or the laptop or the latest electronic gizmo-game to alleviate their boredom. Absent is the free time, the down time, the time to waste gracefully where they learn to sense the “mystery and manners” of their own being where on occasion they might learn to face and feel the boredom that is but an allusion to a subterranean hunger for something more, something crucial and significant, something beyond the tip of their noses, something unseen yet real, essential, even potentially hierophantic.
Recently I overheard a man bemoan that when he asked his granddaughter if she wanted to go with him on a short outing she replied, “Let me check my schedule.” She was twelve and deadly serious. Trains need schedules as do courthouses, nurses’ stations, and golf courses. Whether it is children or adults, human beings need time. Once when my oldest son was about seven he was laying on his bunk bed. Before he could be disturbed he announced to all within earshot: “Please don’t talk to me. I’m having a really good daydream and I’m on Chapter 2.” I remember how that delighted me: the inherent wisdom born of innocence, the emphatic tone of a child who knew innately what enlivened him, the certainty of his desire and his deliberate intention to make room for something others might deem shapeless and useless but that for him was a deep intuition and personal imperative.
We need time for nothing in particular, which is everything: time for imagining and pondering, time for simple pleasures, time to be alone with our thoughts and feelings, time to sense the grace and the gravity of being alive, time to be in nature, time to synchronize the ineffable movement of mystery that resides within us with the mystery moving in and through the community of creation, time to wait for something to happen or time to learn to wait when nothing happens, even time to be bored. We need time to listen in silence for the dreams that are dreaming their way into our consciousness or to the lonesome sadness that tugs on the sleeve of our heart like a child at her father’s arm or for the burning questions that generously seek our attention and to which our lives are meant to be a noble answer.
PRACTICE:
If you can’t TAKE some time today to do nothing, at least RECEIVE the time you already have to dwell intentionally, if only for a moment, in the divinity of “what just is.”