Rethinking Boredom

Do you think you feel bored? How do you experience your everyday Christianity?

The other day I was bored studying, so I started looking up words in the Oxford English Dictionary... and I found that the words "bored" and "boredom" were only used for the first time in 1852 in a Charles Dickens novel. This fascinated me because most words have very, very long histories going back to the 11th or 12th century. Why is "boredom" such a recent concept? Did people before then have the same feelings of the commonplace, but assume they were the norm rather than something to be described? Or did they feel the commonplace, but see it as neutral or even positive?

When I am doing something and it strikes me that I am bored doing it, suddenly I am less content in it. The concept does not describe, but rather creates a sense of dissatisfaction and impatience. I suddenly worry that I am missing something, that life is supposed to be more exciting, and that I'm supposed to have something in addition going on. But until that moment, I am actually quite happy and absorbed studying, cleaning, cooking, daydreaming or whatever.

Perhaps the newness of the term shows us that we don't have to frame the commonplace as a necessarily negative experience; it's not a given inherent in human experience, but rather an association of just the last hundred years.

What does this mean for our spiritual lives? Although it's good to be striving for holiness, maybe we don't have to freak out and doubt ourselves if there's not much happening at the moment. This past year and a half has been a great one for me as I've learned more about the Catholic faith, started spiritual direction, gone through RCIA, spent the summer with the Carmelites, helped with the Awakening retreat, sponsored in RCIA, etc. My mind has been expanding at a crazy rate and I know the Holy Spirit is in all of this and will be in it in the future.

But I surprised myself the other evening when I was reading about a saint and I suddenly worried that I was bored with it. For some reason, St. Therese just wasn't very interesting at the moment and I didn't even feel in the mood to read about any other saint, either. And I was concerned because this was negative lack, right? What if I was no longer on the edge, no longer on the ever-expanding horizon? What was wrong with me?

I don't know exactly what to make of this, but maybe it's just a moment or just a shift with no crisis attached. Experiencing feelings of the commonplace doesn't have to be framed as "boredom" which is a new term that unfortunately indexes existential negativity.

Maybe Therese will be more interesting tomorrow. Or maybe my new horizon isn't in the lives of the saints but rather in something else the church has to offer. Or maybe God just wants me to be content in the moment. In any case, I'll never say I'm bored, and then I won't be!