A Prayer About Boredom
But then again, how can I say there’s something you don’t know? Something you don’t understand? Of course you understand.
March 15, 2020 | By Shayley Martin, GH ‘22. Shayley is majoring in Linguistics.
Dear God,
Sometimes I wonder if you know what it feels like to be bored. If you would deal with it any better than we do. I know you can take the extremes of human experience, hunger and pain and persecution. What I wonder about is the monotony. I wonder if you, Lord, would be able to deal with the routine of over and over, same and same, again and again. Do you know that feeling? That desperation?
How would you make it as an old woman, stuck inside your house for months, unable to see her children and grandchildren, doing the same puzzles every day? Or as a little kid no longer allowed to go outside and play? Stuck?
You were great as a public figure, Jesus, reviled by some and loved by others. But overlooked? Powerless against some sweeping thing? Convinced that it didn’t really matter what you did anyway? Don’t tell me you ever felt that way.
No, of course you can’t be overlooked. How could the maker of all things be overlooked? And you have all the power; how could you know what it meant to be powerless? And you came up with everything, warthogs and platypuses and rafflesia flowers; how could we expect you to understand boredom or suffocation?
But then again, how can I say there’s something you don’t know? Something you don’t understand? Of course you understand.
The first day of Lent is interesting; that’s when Catholics get those ash crosses on their foreheads. And it’s interesting when it ends, at Easter, when everybody can eat chocolate again or what have you, when people dress up and seem almost to glow. When people are excited to see You. But during those forty days between, it’s monotonous, at least in my memory. It’s all rain and soup and fifty-degree weather. And if you give something up, you’ve got one less thing even than you had for the rest of the year. There’s nothing special, nothing to mark the passing time.
Hold on-- but Lent comes from an episode from Your life. Could it be that its monotony is also modeled on that episode? You spent forty days in the wilderness, the middle of nowhere, alone, hungry. That can’t have been interesting. Hunger and thirst are pure monotony, applied to the body. Looking back on those forty fasting days of Yours, they’re very noble, but at the time, it was just an empty stomach, on and on; the same dry mouth no matter how you held it or what prayers you said. And you could have done something to make yourself powerful; you could have made stones into bread, but you decided not to. You decided to be powerless before the wide desert, as we would have been.
You are with us in the memorable high-action moments; you care about big decisions and high-stakes conversations. Thank you. You are with us in pain and sorrow and anger, and in the times of greatest loss. Thank you. You are also with us when we’re bored. Thank you for that too.
You’re with us in the routine, when we feel like worthless cogs. You’re with us when we’re lonely. Not “with us” as in standing nearby, peering at us, wondering what could be going through our minds. No. You’ve been here. Done this. Stifling things, slowly and consistently exhausting things, grating things-- you’ve known them all, Jesus. They were a part of the human life that you took on.
I know that people have been saying this for two thousand years, but thank you for doing that. For living a human life, I mean. Who could have blamed you for looking the other way and letting us self-destruct? A human life has pain and vulnerability and limitation and boredom; the all-powerful God shouldn’t have to deal with that! But we needed you, and you loved us, and you didn’t hesitate.
Amen.