The Liturgical Offering of Boredom

  • Timothy P. O'Malley University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, USA
Keywords: liturgy, culture, festivity, boredom

Abstract

Is there such a thing as a boring rite, or is boredom instead an affective experience of a subject? This article argues that nothing—including the post-conciliar rites of the Church—can be intrinsically boredom. Rather, boredom—or more clearly the refusal to undergo boredom—is a spiritual sickness of late modernity. The article begins with an analysis of the phenomenon of boredom with a particular focus on boredom in a digital ecology. The article then turns to the symptoms of boredom as examined by social and cultural theorists over the last decade including Zygmunt Bauman, Harmut Rosa, and Byung-Chul Han. Lastly, the article examines Romano Guardini's The Spirit of the Liturgy as providing a medicine against the kind of anti-festive culture that is the source of boredom in late modernity. Boredom is not a problem with a rite but with the self who has not yet learned to participate in the serious playfulness of the act of worship.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Bauman, Zygmunt. The Art of Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008.

Bullivant, Stephen. Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and American since Vatican II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1975.

Guardini Romano. Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

Guardini, Romano. Sacred Signs, trans. Grace Branham. St. Louis: Pio Decimo Press, 1956.

Guardini, Romano. The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. Ada Lane. New York: Crossroads, 1998.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler. Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2015.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals, trans. Daniel Steuer. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2020.

Kwasniewski, Peter. Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020.

Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

Lombardo, Nicholas E. “Boredom and Modern Culture.” Logos 20.2(2017): 36-59.

O'Malley, Timothy P. “Liturgical Memory and Liquid Modernity.” Antiphon 22(2018): 121-137.

O'Malley, Timothy P. Bored Again Catholic: How the Mass Could Save Your Life. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2017.

Pieper, Josef. In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 1999.

Raposa, Michael L. Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2020.

Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Hartmut Rosa. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Rosa, Hartmut. The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner. Malden, MA: Polity, 2020.

Teresa of Avila. The Way of Perfection, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriquez. Washington D.C.: Institute for Carmelite Studies, 2000.

Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontiers of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Published
2021-10-07
Section
Articles