Making Peace with Boredom

In a recent blog post (“Three Ways I Want to Adopt a Listening Posture,” Jun 10, 2024) we explored what it means to adopt a listening posture with God: “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.”

This week I want to drill down on what it takes to adopt a listening posture.

If I want to hear from God, I must cultivate a quiet spirit in silence and solitude; I must make peace with boredom.

In my blog, I said that “silence and solitude are two of the ancient spiritual disciplines, much neglected in our hyper-stimulated world.”  Much neglected because we are – or I am – addicted to constant mental stimulation. When I’m driving or mowing the lawn or working anywhere by myself, I feel I must break up the silence with podcasts, audiobooks, radio sports talk, anything to fill the void.

Why is it that like many others in the modern West, I have come to see boredom as a problem that must be solved, an enemy to be defeated?

Why do I feel the urge to banish boredom by punching the button and cueing up the latest podcast?

Why is silence so difficult?

Why is boredom such a problem?

Many experts would point to our addiction to our digital devices as the cause, and they are surely partly correct. But our problems with boredom run much deeper than our recent technological innovations.

Someone once observed that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” That would be a keen observation of our present cultural moment, but the man who said that was Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth century French philosopher!

Apparently, our digital addiction has only exacerbated an underlying condition, a weak-ness that is deeply embedded in the human personality. This inability to be quiet and alone has a profound impact on our spiritual formation. A chattering and restless spirit has difficulty hearing the voice of God.

You remember the story of the prophet Elijah, who couldn’t hear God in the storm or in the earthquake or in the fire. Then, “after the fire the sound of a low whisper,” and the prophet finally heard from God (1 Kings 19). Yes, God does sometimes speak in the spectacular, but He far more often speaks quietly, in a voice only a quiet spirit can detect.

So there’s no getting around it: if I want to cultivate a quiet spirit in silence and solitude, I must learn to deal with boredom.
 
My problem is that being quiet before God is, frankly, unnatural. It feels far more natural for me to be active: to read the Bible, to pray, to serve others. Quieting my heart before God just feels weird. I’m so unaccustomed to the stillness that it feels strange to cut off the stream of sensory input that makes up the soundtrack of my life.

In other words, I must learn to get past boredom, just as a man who is fasting must learn to get past hunger.

I am always careful when I speak of the “spiritual disciplines.”
 
It is all too easy for a commitment to a spiritual discipline to devolve into checklist spirituality, that lose-lose posture where I either become spiritually arrogant because I have “victory” (that is, I am maintaining the spiritual disciplines), or I become disheartened because I am not. Either way, my spiritual formation will be warped by my “checklist” mindset, which is really my pre-occupation with myself.

But if I am going to push past the boredom to cultivate a quiet, listening spirit, I will have to discipline myself. I will have to do something my heart doesn’t naturally want to do (be quiet before God) and not do many things I want to do (check my email, scroll through my social media feeds, let my many distractions have their way with my troubled mind).

In other words, I must learn how to do what I always wanted my students to do: sit down and shut up. No easy task, not in my classroom back in the day nor in my own heart right now.

How do I push through the boredom to quiet my heart?

Because all the action is interior, this is at once the simplest and the most intimate and most demanding of the spiritual disciplines. To practice the discipline of silence and solitude, I must stop doing everything (no small task for this workaholic), I must stop the noise in my environment (even more difficult), and I must offer my wandering heart to my Master.

The discipline of silence and solitude is a skill that can be learned only by practice, and to learn it I must persist in the practice. As with any new skill, I must push past the awkwardness and seeming futility of my early efforts and simply persevere.

I wish I could say that I have pushed past the boredom and anxiety and could report that there is great joy in practicing this discipline that has served God’s people so well for such a long time. But I am a novice myself, just starting out on this journey.

So my prayer is primarily for myself – that I can learn how to cultivate this ancient holy habit; then for our people, that we each begin to explore the world of silence, solitude, and stillness of spirit in the Presence of the Almighty.  

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship