Bored?

First, a quick announcement: I've started blogging over at Catholic365. My first couple of pieces there will be about choosing a secular college wisely, so go have a look. I should be posting there about once each week and have no intention of letting this outlet go by the wayside. 

Now that that's out of the way.....[insert awkward segue].....today's topic: boredom. We live in a culture that is increasingly bored. People seek to fill the meaningless vacuum of their lives with increasingly shocking fare in order to alleviate the sense of purposelessness that permeates everything in the secular world. The problem is this: boredom is a sign that there is a widespread problem in society. No good Christian should be bored, for GK Chesterton states in his usual blunt manner why we shouldn't be bored at all:

“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’ … Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but he never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pg 41). 

Boredom is a sign of purposelessness. No Christian should live without purpose. We should find wonder in everything, for the hand of the Creator is evident in everything in the world. Yet we live in a bored culture. We live in times where scientific knowledge is expanding and providing insights into the mystery of creation and the seemingly boundless nature of creation....yet people are bored. We live in times where people can communicate with others from around the world, in cultures vastly different yet oddly familiar to us, yet people are bored.

Elsewhere, Chesterton tells us that we've lost our sense of awe. Perhaps it's the consequence of the constant stream of information we're subject to now. Maybe it's the increasingly shocking nature of music, movies and media that thrive on more and more excess, leaving the population jaded. Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have long recommended Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a dystopian end-times novel written in 1907 that has a sign of the end of days being rampant boredom. I just bought a copy and will write and post a review here. Personally I love dystopian fiction (1984 and Brave New World are favorites of mine) so I'm definitely looking forward to reading this.  I haven't any idea if boredom is a sign of something as spiritually apocalyptic as Hugh's thesis but I definitely believe it to be a sign of spiritual famine. Boredom and a love of Christ shouldn't go together. No Christian has reason to be perpetually bored.