I often marvel at the number of things my wife was intuitive about when we were raising our sons. One of them was that we didn't allow them to say that they were "bored." It wasn't a "heavy" thing, and they quickly learned to amuse themselves quite well. We just maintained a household that was lively and interesting, and with four active boys, that wasn't so hard.
I discovered in a book I am reading now, Blessed are the Uncool, that "...cool quickly gives way to boredom, a characteristic feature of the modern world with roots that go back to the Greek concept acedia, one of the ancient church's seven deadly sins:
[Acedia] contains a rejection of - or rather a detestation of - God and His creation. Acedia is the diametric opposite of the joy one ought to feel toward God and His works...Such an approach is unsatisfactory because it overlooks the possibility that the outside world - rather than the person - is the problem, or disallows that the world plays any role at all. Boredom is not just a phenomenon that afflicts individuals; it is, to just as great an extent, a social and cultural phenomenon.
Boredom is sometimes a mood in our hearts or our communities or even our churches, but at its core, boredom is the refusal to take delight in the world that God has made."
Blessed are the Uncool is by Paul Grant, and published by InterVarsity Press.
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