Boredom and a Prayer.

Every Sunday millions of people will flock to churches all over the world to be bored. Over the course of one hour, they will hear talks on, among other things, topical sermons - concerned with a particular subject of current concern, liturgical sermons or evangelistic sermons - seeking to convert the congregation or bring them back to their previous faith through a recount ing of the foundational story of the religion, in Christianity, and scriptures from the Bible. Finally ending in the sermon a lengthy or tedious speech delivered with great passion, by the pastor, to an uninterested audience. The main advantage is that they offer the believer the opportunity to mentally wander: In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think, or simply ogle at the women in the congregation. In Christian tradition, chronic boredom was “acedia”, a sin that’s sort of a proto-sloth. The “noonday demon”, as one of its early chroniclers called it, refers to a state of being simultaneously listless and restless and was often ascribed to monks and other people who led cloistered lives. By the Renaissance, it had morphed from a demon-induced sin into melancholia, a depression brought on by too aggressive study of math’s and sciences; later, it was the French ennui. Quakers who built the first “penitentiary” probably didn’t see it that way. The idea was that the silence would help them to seek forgiveness from God. In reality, it just drove them insane. Boredom has a much darker side, that it can be something much more akin to depression, another is that depression causes boredom; another is that they’re mutually causative; one theory is that boredom is the evolutionary cousin to disgust. And though getting out of boredom can lead to extreme measures to alleviate it, such as drug taking or an extramarital affair, it can also lead to positive change. - James Ward-