“This is boring.”
“Do we have to do this?”
“What’s the point?”
If you hear these phrases more than once a day, or perhaps more than once an hour, you might be a classroom teacher. The lesson didn’t engage the children, or it wasn’t exciting enough. “You just need to make it fun for them,” non-teachers tell you as though this were merely a matter of flipping a few switches. To them and to all I say the same thing: most of what you do in life turns out to be pretty boring, but a lot of it turns out to be pretty important anyway.
I introduce this with an example from education because I know it best above most things. We live in an age when information seemingly appears at the push of a button. Anyone who wants to know when Charlemagne died can learn that with a quick query to the search engine of their choice. I promise I am not joking when I say that I have been to teacher training meetings at which I have been told that I should not emphasize teaching facts “because students can just look those up on their own.” Instead, thus saith the party, we ought to emphasize “critical thinking” and “culturally responsive instruction.” We have had to migrate to activity-based learning that assumes our students know far more than they actually do. Applying knowledge you do not have, it would appear, presents certain challenges not rectified by self-affirmation. So we trot out every digital toy we know of, and every “creative” assignment we can to flatter every skill and inclination possible. Never does it occur to us that we might just end up doing someone a disservice.
I do not say this to disparage the very real challenges posed by instructional differentiation, itself a complicated topic, but by moving away from the “boring” aspects of teaching we have unintentionally fostered certain misapprehensions. The first, and perhaps most pernicious, is the illusion we create that the world will always mold itself to fit you. It may come as a nasty surprise, but not all of life is structured to your own preferences. People continue to expect to receive what they want because that is what has been done in the past. Secondly, by moving away from teaching basic information, we teach people, without meaning to, that they live in a simple, comprehensible world. You know how my 9th grade geography teacher taught us where all the countries of the world are? By making us memorize all of their locations and capitals. Was it easy? No. Was it always fun? Also no. Was it still important? Yes. Some things are just important to know, and we ought to emphasize the importance of knowing them, yes, even at the expense of it not being very interesting. When we create the false expectation that everything will be fun and engaging, we make that the object of everything in and of itself.
No, most of life is not fun. School isn’t all that fun, and guess what kids, church isn’t going to be either. One of the few things that incense-obsessed traditionalists have in common with fog machine-wielding charismatics is a nearly insurmountable capacity to miss the point. If your worship is traditional for the sake of being traditional, then whom, or what, are you actually worshiping, God or the the traditions you have built up around Him? If you know your worship is valid and good because of how it makes you feel, and because of the energy of your religious gatherings, are you serving God or your own state of mind? I can say much in favor of beautiful, sensory worship, but that is not the end of worship in and of itself. Oh, the liturgy wasn’t in Latin? You had to listen to somebody utter the Creed in that nasty, horrid, vernacular tongue? Oh, and you just don’t feel the presence of the spirit when you’re at those “boring” churches? Remind me again why you are there. If you want an exciting experience, go to a concert. If you want aesthetics, go to a museum. Neither of those things are by necessity alien to the church, but nor are they fundamental. Yes, Virginia, your parents’ boring church that sings Watts hymns, and where the pastor wears a collar is a valid church.
Indeed, one of the reasons we have liturgical calendars and the like is because worship is not about us. We have a lectionary that appoints specific texts to be read on specific days because the church decided that those texts were important. We have liturgies created by the church because they reflect what is important in God and in the church. The whole point of a common liturgy, whatever quibbles one might have as to details, is that the church follows an order, a rhythm. No, we aren’t going to read from non-Christian texts at the communion service just because we feel like it. The church’s bishops gave us a liturgy that we might use it for a particular purpose. Worship is not about you and what you think is cool. It is about glorifying God, and keeping His commandments. Is it tedious? Sometimes, but it also means we know what to expect. The sameness of the liturgy reflects, in some ways, the unfailingness of God. We adhere to a liturgy and rubrics and formularies not because they are exciting, but because of how they represent God. If you want incense and genuflection in your worship, arguments for such things exist, but keep a close eye on why you choose what you choose.
We ought to defend the boring, the dull, and the tedious because they represent certain things that possess a particular importance. They remind us that we are not as special as we might like to be. They keep us from thinking that everything, at bottom, centers on us. The true and the good do not become less so merely by dint of not interesting us in the moment. Given the choice between the flashy and flawed, and the banal and good, we ought to take the banal and good every time. Sadly, we are a people of unclean lips with idols in our hearts who continually fail to realize that no, not everything you want is really all that important.