Why did I join the Catholic Church?
Out of boredom, when it comes right down to it. Everything else bored me to death — except God’s love, God’s majesty, God’s infinite intimacy and yet infinite distance, His mystery. And only in the Catholic Church are those preserved. Everywhere else under the sun is a yawning chasm of yawns and boredom unto death.
And yet there are these formidable forces within the Church, working to strip it of that majesty and that love and that mystery, and make it a place where boredom once again reigns, as it reigns everywhere else on Earth. The most scandalous thing about the much-publicized sexual abuse scandal, for example, is that it is so essentially boring, arising out of boredom and leading from boredom unto boredom.
The Jews were bored in Egypt, so they made an exodus to the Holy Land. The Founding Fathers were bored with England, so they declared independence.
The North was bored with slavery, so they fought for abolition. Blacks were bored with segregation, so they fought for civil rights. Many a good work, good marriage and noble cause have resulted from plain boredom.
This whole discussion is boring.
Seriously, though, your post reminds me of Chesterton’s discussion of the maniac in Orthodoxy. Round and round the circle he goes….while the Christian can stretch out over infinity.
I am also a Catholic; I have 20 with half as many litterboxes strategically placed in various locations around that big, dark house at the end of the street, which always scared you a little bit as a kid whenever you walked by.
I am now thinking about getting a dog.
What’s all this about Jews, segregation, and some guy named Chesterton?
yrs trly,
the cat lady
What id rilly rilly like to no is whether God was bored when he tod Joshua to rilly rilly kik the crap out of the whole town of Jericho; or was Joshua REALLY ordained by God to rilly be than mean– I’m talkin SCORCHED earth here- dogs, kids, ya know the whole enchilada! Sounds like boredom to me– or maybe Joshua was actually a paranoid scitzie and those voices weren’t rilly God’s afterall– or may he just wanted to make Moses proud of him. Oh– Moses was dead. Oh well.
Okie From Muskogee
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jose Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up. Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair.
We live in the age of boredom. Technology has accelerated the rate at which we can bore ourselves to death, and we’re busy doing it.