boredom of being wrongfully locked away in prison, internally composing poetry addressed to the God whose voice he longed to hear. With our growing aversion to boredom, it is possible that we as Catholics are losing the capacity to receive such spiritual insight. Or perhaps, even, to pray at all. Spiritual formation should re-form us to seek anew the saving and sweet gift of boredom.
The Mass is Boring
Our fear of boredom is in fact most perilous to fruitful participation in the Mass. It often seems that what we desire most in the celebration of the Mass is an occasion to be entertained. We want a homilist who can make jokes and tell engaging stories about his life. We want music that is upbeat, a liturgical equivalent to what we listen to while working out at the gym. We want liturgies that are short so that we can resume our busy schedules. Yet in this desire for entertainment we distract ourselves from the contemplative encounter that each celebration of the Mass offers.
Boredom at Mass is not something that should be eliminated. The moment in which we find ourselves bored while listening to the readings and the homily, bored while hearing the same Eucharistic Prayer offered once again, and bored while singing this same hymn we chant every Advent, is also the moment in which we are invited to participate more fully in the love of God poured out in Christ.
To let our minds be distracted by the way that incense fractures the colored light, revealing the beauty of a beautiful God, or to let our imaginations wander during the homily, may be less a matter of frittering away the time and more often a moment in which God’s voice speaks in the stillness of our hearts. To lose our attention during the praying of the Eucharistic Prayer and find ourselves fascinated by the crucifix is not something that should be stopped but is instead our own particular way of participating in the Mass this day. For Catholics, fruitful participation in the Mass requires this ability to let the mind wander and wonder alike.
Our rejection of the state of boredom, therefore, makes it quite possible that full, conscious, and active participation in the Mass is actually made more difficult; for it is saving boredom that gives rise to wondrous contemplation of the Eucharistic love of Christ. Boredom during Mass, in this case, is in fact an invitation to new spiritual growth for the Christian. It is the way God calls us toward a deeper participation in the drama of redemption.
Good Boredom, Bad Boredom
While the kind of boredom addressed above is a very good thing for contemplation, it is often the case that there are types of boredom in the Mass that are not invitations toward deeper contemplation. Lyrics of hymns that fail to foster desire, to seed the imagination with a renewed sense of what it means to worship God, are not “good boring.” Homilies at Mass that are disorganized, disconnected from the Gospel, and delivered as if they are want ads from a newspaper are not “good boring.” Churches whose architecture has more in common with the local strip mall than those sacred spaces that have mattered to Catholics throughout history are not “good boring.”
There is another type of bad boredom that needs to be dealt with. Simply, the Mass often fails to capture our attention insofar as we have not been disposed to receive the Eucharist fruitfully. Those who gather in the Sunday assembly to listen to the Scripture readings proclaimed do not understand them. We seem less than committed to recognizing the gift of Christ’s presence among us in his Body and Blood. We remain indifferent to expressing the kind of Eucharistic friendship that is the consequence of our identity as those gathered into the body of Christ.
The reality at many of our parishes is that we often seem to deal with more of the “bad boring” than the “good boring.” The promise of the liturgical renewal enacted by the Second Vatican Council is still unmet at too many of our parishes either because of poor liturgy or poor catechetical formation. Yet at the heart of this negative sense of boredom is this: we do not rejoice in the Good News that Jesus Christ is Lord of the universe. Suffering and death are not the ultimate meaning of the human condition—the meaning of the world is revealed in the crucified and glorified God-man who offers to the Father the entire life of the Church as a sacrifice of love. We carry out the Mass as obligation and task but have forgotten to delight in the offering, to comprehend the glories revealed on the table of the Word and on the altar of sacrifice, the glories unfolding in my own life if I only had the courage to see them.
The response we must have, then, to the bad boring is to seek a renewed sense of the power of the Mass itself to evangelize the world. We seem to have forgotten the way that the beauty of the Mass can change not only us but the entire world. How Christ in the Eucharist, through the power of the Spirit, still draws the entire human family to himself and toward salvation.
A Lay Primer for Mass
This book invites readers to learn to pray through the good boredom, as well as to avoid the bad boredom that distracts us from the heart of the personal and communal encounter with Christ that takes place at every Mass. In the medieval era, Mass primers for laity helped women and men to participate in Mass by providing certain prayers and poems they could read while the liturgy was being celebrated.
While the Second Vatican Council requires more of us during the Mass than saying private prayers to dispose us toward worship, it is still the case that lay men and women are looking to be formed to participate spiritually in the Eucharistic life of the Church. We need to know what is happening at Mass during a specific time. We need to reflect on the spiritual implications of the Mass for our lives. We need to think about what keeps us from participating fully, whether it’s bad music or the frenzied nature of daily life. In fact, the need for these books has increased insofar as we are not simply to “hear” Mass on a Sunday, but to participate so fully in the Eucharist that our work, our family life, and our friendships take on a Eucharistic tenor.
Thus, this book functions as a lay primer for participating in the liturgy. It will offer a spiritual reflection on every part of the Mass, grounded in the experience of a husband and father who goes to Mass every Sunday with child in tow. This book is not meant to be read quickly, but will instead provide a personal and communal reflection on how we can learn to pray the liturgy better. The text will be honest, not sugarcoating the difficulties that arise as one learns to pray the liturgy well. It will attend very directly to the distractions that take place at every Mass, especially for those of us who come along with families. It will offer loving critiques of certain habits that the Church has developed in celebrating the Mass, ones that make it more difficult for many of us to fruitfully participate in the Mass. But most importantly, the book will offer a sketch of what a Eucharistic life looks like; how learning to pray the Mass might renew Church and society alike.
This book is dedicated to the thousands of students, youth ministers, campus ministers, and undergraduates I have been privileged to teach at Notre Dame. Like God in the book of Exodus, I have heard your cries of boredom. I know how difficult it is to attend parishes where it seems spiritual vitality is absent. I know the temptation that you inevitably feel to excuse yourself from Sunday practice because, really, no one will miss you. I know how hard it is to convince adolescents—whether you minister to them or parent them—to attend Mass each Sunday (or even once a month). But it is my hope that through reading this book many young adults will come to see—perhaps for the first time—the spiritual riches of the Eucharist. And to those ministers and teachers who struggle to convince these students to participate in the sacrifice of praise at the heart of the Mass: I hope you’ll discover in these pages something that will revive your weary souls.
This book could be considered a pastoral sequel to my earlier Liturgy and the New Evangelization: Practicing the Art of Self-Giving Love (Liturgical Press, 2014). It is the result of years of teaching undergraduates across the United States how to pray the Mass better. The reader will notice a number of endnotes that, if you want, can take you into the riveting world of liturgical and sacramental theology. On the other hand, if you’re happy praying better (and that should be our ultimate goal), ignore
