Most spiritual directors or pastors have heard some version of the complaint that spiritual practices are boring. Believers may bemoan that the practices are stale and dry. Reading Scripture feels lifeless and praying an act of futility. The person is tempted to stop their practice because of the discomfort that emerges whenever they try. They may feel that they are doing something wrong or are struck by the fact that they feel nothing at all. What they know they feel is just plain bored, and they wonder if there is something wrong with them. Something about the experience is unnerving.

Such a thought process or conversation is not uncommon for those involved in the practice of spiritual disciplines.Footnote 1 Within the ebb and flow of the life of faith, there are times when practices feel life-giving and times when they feel dry or just plain boring. It may seem as though something in the discipline is lacking or has changed. However, another possibility is that believers bring their histories and personalities to the devotional moment and the boredom therefore reveals something worth exploring.

It is the thesis of this article that psychoanalysis and spiritual theology may shed light on the concept and experience of boredom in the life of the believer. We use the psychoanalytic theorizing of D. W. Winnicott and theological reflections of ancient and contemporary spiritual theologians to explore the experience of boredom and its relationship to the practice of spiritual disciplines. By comparing and contrasting an intrapsychic psychological understanding of boredom with the spiritual formational understanding, we posit that psychoanalysis will not only explicate the underlying dynamics at work in certain types of boredom but will also provide a practical methodology for discernment and navigation. In doing so, we are seeking to participate in the conversation between spiritual formation and psychology, two areas that “share in common a focus on discovering and defining the nature and purpose of human persons as well as an understanding and articulation of development, pathology (what goes awry and why), and change” (Tisdale 2014, p. 220). Ultimately, we strive not to operationally define boredom as a concept but to explicate it as an intrapsychic process.

Boredom and spirituality

It is important to note that ancient spiritual writers have not been silent on the issue of boredom as a common experience of a believer’s relationship with God. These writers have also recognized the multifaceted experience of boredom.Footnote 2 Boredom might occur in prayer, spiritual practices, listening to sermons, or various other spiritual exercises, but it is almost inevitable that one’s journey with God will hit stale patches where spiritual experiences become boring. This unsettling experience drives spiritual theologians to discern what God might be doing in these moments or to consider that there may be some kind of psychological problem. The difficulty is that there are varying definitions of what might be happening during boredom, including acedia, laziness, spiritual dryness, desolation, emptiness, sloth, and apathy (Norris 2008; Raposa 1999, pp. 11–40).

The variety of these terms indicates that there have been many attempts to define this elusive construct or, as we prefer to refer to it, experience, but we would like to submit that there are three main categories outlined in the spiritual literature for understanding the experience of boredom. We arrive at these categories from the work of St. John of the Cross and his writings on the dark night of the soul. St. John of the Cross (1991) posited three possible origins for the experience of aridity or boredom: sin, God’s purgation (the dark night of the soul), or “some bad humor or bodily indisposition” (p. 377). We will refer to these categories as sinful choice, God-initiated purgation, and psychological developmental capacity or deficit.

It is important to note that all of these categories are connected to spirituality, can include God’s activity, and are not mutually exclusive. Additionally, because these categories can, and often do, overlap, it is not infrequent for mental or emotional pain to be misdiagnosed as the dark night of the soul (Dubay 1989, pp. 163, 295; May 2009). Therefore, a challenge emerges when attempting to discern one category from another. Raposa (1999) provides a helpful heuristic for differentiating these categories according to one’s culpability (p. 14). The culpability of one’s experience of boredom would be assessed along the lines of responsibility for and/or resolution of the experience (p. 14). In addition to culpability, there is also the role of the spiritual director’s discernment work with the Holy Spirit and their understanding of the directee’s symptomology (see Dubay 1989, pp. 163–164; May 2009).Footnote 3 We now turn to an explication of these three categories to aid in distinguishing them from one another and to address the spiritual director’s responses to them.

Spiritual boredom as sinful choice

Aquinas (1964) conceptualized the sin of acedia or “spiritual apathy” as “sorrow over spiritual things,” which is a willed lack of interest in spiritual goods (p. 23). He explains this as sin: “Since, then, a spiritual good is a real good, the sorrowing over it is bad in itself” (Aquinas 1964, p. 23). Rather than continuing in spiritual disciplines or intention to seek God regardless of experience, this person chooses to become disinterested when they do not receive what it is they seek from such practices. As a result of becoming disinterested in the things of God, this person may become interested in things that are not of God since their attention may find its aim in things that seek to fulfill their sensory experience. Thus, Aquinas (1964) argues that such acedia is “doubly evil, both in itself and in its effects and so is a sin” (p. 23). From this perspective, the person is culpable for the boredom due to their lack of effort and subsequently making no attempt toward resolution.

St. John of the Cross (1991) also indicates that such experiences of dryness or boredom can be a result of one’s sin. He explains that “lukewarm people do not care much for the things of God nor are they inwardly solicitous about them” (p. 378). This person’s “sin and imperfection, or weakness and lukewarmness,” is a result of their not committing to God’s will (p. 377; p. 374). When this person seeks God in prayer or spiritual disciplines, they may be expecting a certain experience in return. When this does not happen as expected, they give up, boredom sets in and they choose not to continue in their practice.

For the spiritual director, paying attention to the directee’s resistance to God’s will and ambivalence toward spiritual disciplines aids in understanding boredom as a sinful choice. In discerning the directee’s attitude toward spiritual disciplines and understanding the role it plays for the directee, the director can better understand if they are loving God for their own personal benefit rather than communion with God. When spiritual disciplines cease to cause the wished-for result for the directee, they will experience boredom as a consequence. The director’s role here may be to promote and foster awareness of how this is playing out for the directee.

Spiritual boredom as God-initiated purgation

St. John of the Cross also suggests that the “dark night of the soul” or the “sensory night,” which could be experienced as subjective boredom or dryness, is a move initiated by God resulting in feelings of desolation, the felt absence of God’s presence, with the goal being deepening intimacy with God. By inducing dryness in the believer, God is purging them of the desire to find their delight in things other than God. St. John claims that this is to “lead them into the exercise of spirit, in which they become capable of a communion with God that is more abundant and more free of imperfections” (St. John of the Cross 1991, p. 376). The type of communion that he describes is one that is more purely grounded in loving God for who God is and not for whatever delightful experiences God provides.

Likewise, St. Ignatius of Loyola (2000) indicates that God may be the initiator of desolation or dryness for two reasons. He writes that God may “try us, to see how much we are worth, and how much we will advance in His service and praise,” but also that God may “give us a true knowledge and understanding of ourselves, so that we may have an intimate perception of the fact that it is not within our power to acquire and attain great devotion. .. but that all this is the gift and grace of God our Lord” (p. 117). Ignatius parses out two moves of God: refinement and humility. In the first instance, God is using dryness to reveal or refine our hearts to show us our character. In the silence and dryness, our love for God is refined by developing love not based on consolations. In the second instance, God may use dryness to show us that we cannot do anything to force God’s consolation for us but must realize that it is completely a gift. God humbles the believer by showing them that they cannot produce feelings toward God at will but are totally dependent on God’s grace. In these two instances, God is making the move toward the believer to purge them of imperfections that are preventing greater intimacy.

This experience is distinguished most from a mental/emotional or developmental issue in that the sensation of “darkness” is located most acutely within the directee’s spiritual life. Rather than a depressive mood that one takes with one, God’s purgation does not necessarily carry into robbing joy from other aspects of life (Dubay 1989, p. 163). The difficulty for the director arises when the directee is experiencing a depressive mood in addition to God’s purgation. It is here that directors may need to consult with mental health providers to better identify the directee’s issues and to prevent misdiagnosis and unintended effects (May 2009).

Spiritual boredom as developmental capacity or deficit

In addition to these categories, St. John notes that the subjective experience of aridity could also be due to a third explanation, what Raposa (1999) labels a psychic deficit (p. 31). So, while the dark night could be a way for God to draw the believer into greater intimacy, St. John (1991) states that dryness could also be a result of “some bad humor or bodily indisposition” (p. 377). That is, the person has some kind of underdeveloped psychological capacity that is the cause of the experience. The resulting experiences of dryness and boredom are neither attributed to the person’s sin nor primarily to God’s initiative to purge the believer as a way of initiating intimacy and growth. Thus, this third option for understanding boredom maybe categorized as a kind of developmental (psychic) deficit. While a developmental deficit, at times, may lead to various forms of psychopathology such as debilitating depression, that is not necessarily always the case. Therefore, spiritual directors must attempt to assess the origins of the boredom using the guidelines stated above and below as well as consulting, when necessary, with a mental health professional.

One diagnostic criterion for the person with a psychic deficit, St John’s “bad humor,” is that they experience boredom not only in their relationship with God but in many other settings as well. As a way of discerning this distinction, St. John (1991) notes that for a person with a bad humor, “Everything ends in displeasure and does harm to one’s nature” (p. 378). This person might even be considered to have a melancholic mood in general.Footnote 4 Thus, the deficit impacts the person in all their relational capacities and is not unique to their relationship with God.

Although there is benefit in looking at the different dynamics at play when God is the primary initiator in a purgative experience (i.e., the dark night of the soul), utilizing St. John’s concept of the experience of boredom as a result of a developmental psychic deficit is of particular use in a psychological understanding. From a deficit perspective, spiritual boredom is not bound solely to one’s interactions with God but can also be experienced in other interpersonal relationships. St. John (1991) notes that this “indisposition or melancholic humor. .. frequently prevents one from being satisfied with anything” (p. 377). This would indicate that there is a kind of boredom “I carry around with me” (Raposa 1999, p. 38). Thus, the boredom that comes to life in one’s spiritual practices may be indicative of some deeper psychological dynamic at work.

Although this kind of developmental deficit is problematic, it is not destiny, and St. John would even consider the psychological deficit of the person an opportunity for them to continue to grow developmentally in their relationship with God. St. John (1991) states that this experience of “dryness may be furthered by melancholia or some other humor—as it often is,” but he says “it does not thereby fail to produce its purgative effect in the appetite” (p. 377). Here, he indicates that there is an opportunity for one’s developmental psychic deficit to be used by God, in tandem with the dark night, for growth. Though he does not spend much time parsing out the specifics of the psychic deficit, St. John’s categories suggest a relationship between psychological capacities and a person’s spiritual experiences. It is here that St. John’s discernment of boredom in spirituality builds a bridge to psychoanalysis.

Responses to experiencing spiritual boredom as deficit

Thomas Aquinas (1964) suggested there were two main responses individuals have to the experience of boredom in spirituality when not navigated in a developmentally appropriate manner. The first response to boredom may be a rise in anxiety. Rather than feeling capable of tolerating the boredom, the person defends against their discomfort by seeking distraction by other sensory-fulfilling endeavors. Aquinas (1964) says that this person “will go over to the things that bring him pleasure” to find some relief from such disinterest (p. 31). The person may turn to alternative experiences to soothe their sense of boredom in an unconscious attempt to assuage their existential loneliness. If done in a pious manner, this may include switching (sometimes frequently) to a new spiritual discipline in an attempt to relieve the experience of boredom. The seeker might be tempted to try a new way of praying or a new devotional practice in order to rekindle what has been lost. Although this may be a healthier way of dealing with such anxiety then the second response, it still avoids the possibility of tolerating such boredom to see what might emerge. Aquinas (1964) also indicates that the person might even indulge in sensual pleasures as a more pathological attempt to distract themselves from their current reality.

The second response is more of a depressed and despairing reaction. Because the individual cannot tolerate the boredom, they give in to the existential loneliness of boredom by giving up the pursuit of God. Their boredom and loneliness become the very reality of their relationship with God. They may stop praying and may quit attending church altogether. All attempts at seeking God return with emptiness, a feeling so hard to bear that they would rather just stop trying. In this way, the person detaches from and dismisses God and the journey of growth in relationship.

These two responses, anxiety or despair, are characteristics of the deficit described above by theologians such as St. John and contemporary writer Michael Raposa. Raposa (1999), a professor of religion who has written explicitly on boredom and the spiritual life, like St. John has offered the idea that boredom may be the result of a psychic deficit within the person that is centered on confronting the dread of the nothingness of life (p. 31). He suggests that the person who cannot tolerate boredom in spirituality is actually confronted with an experience that evokes feelings of abandonment. He goes so far as to state, “All significant experiences of boredom (acedia and all of its ‘cousins,’ if you will) have something to do with the awareness of death, the recognition that all things must pass away in time” (p. 33). When this person is in a practice of solitary devotion, they experience themselves as totally alone. The person experiences the dread of utter aloneness in which they experience the absence of God (and everyone else) and are unable to trust that God is in fact still present. Raposa says that it is “the heightened awareness of nothingness that makes chronic boredom so intolerable” (p. 34).

Individuals who cannot be bored in adaptive ways, as psychoanalysis explains (discussed below), are not capable of waiting in the space of this experience of aloneness for something (i.e., desire) to emerge. When they experience this interpersonal aloneness, they become anxious and are driven to engage in defensive distracting behaviors. And/or, they may feel overcome by despair and hopelessness and fall into a kind of existential angst, accepting their lot in life in a kind of depressive giving up. In both cases, the person suffering more from a psychological deficit, rather than sin or a God-initiated purgation, is incapable of tolerating boredom and, in the face of this kind of aloneness, becomes overwhelmed. The insights of St. John of the Cross, Aquinas, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Raposa beg the questions “Why and how has this deficit come into being?” and “If it is a deficit, what is the capacity that has not been realized?” Psychoanalytic theory can help answer these questions by looking at how the experience of being able to use boredom is a developmental achievement but is one that, when derailed, may be used in defensive ways to protect one’s sense of self.

Psychoanalytic contributions to the understanding of boredom

Psychoanalysis may be utilized to both understand the developmental and defensive aspects of boredom as well as provide a methodology for working with it. The psychotherapeutic setting serves as an analogy for the types of moments that may need attention in spiritual direction and pastoral care. For example, when a person reports they are bored, the psychoanalyst wonders what being bored means to this person. There was a preceding moment when the person was not bored, and now they are implying that boredom has emerged between these two moments. What does the emergence mean?

Frequently, individuals report feeling bored as a “bad” thing. The experience may be undesirable, uncomfortable, shameful, or some other affect, but the bored person usually infers that the experience of boredom should not be there and should be jettisoned. The bored person wants to get out of this boring space/moment and into whatever might be next. But the psychoanalyst might also ask, “What if being bored is not a bad thing? What if it is not something to be avoided or quickly rushed away? What if being bored is a kind of rest stop, a waiting between things or, to put it another way, a desiring of a desire? What if it is more of a process than simply an affect or construct to be defined?” If it is a “desiring of a desire” it implies that something has been lost: desire. It is a space between the preceding desire and what is next. Maybe being bored is a form of waiting for something and simultaneously looking for something (Phillips 1993, p. 69). And, this loss of something, this “no idea what is next,” may be anxiety-provoking for the person.

When it comes to boredom, one may relish it, defend against it, or even use it to protect themselves from something uncomfortable or even dangerous. We argue, with psychoanalysis, that to be able to use boredom profitably implies that in one sense the useful experience of boredom may best be understood as a developmental capacity or achievement. We also assert, along with the spiritual writers above, that boredom, if not developmentally achieved, is a form of psychic deficit and will be utilized by the person in defensive ways.

The essayist and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1993), suggests that boredom is a natural part of childhood. He notes that sometimes we see children who are unable to be bored and sometimes we meet children who can be nothing but bored.

The bored child is waiting, unconsciously, for an experience of anticipation. In ordinary states of boredom the child returns to the possibility of his own desire. . . . In the muffled, sometimes irritable confusion of boredom the child is reaching to a recurrent sense of emptiness out of which his real desire can crystallize. But to begin with, of course, the child needs the adult to hold, and hold to, the experience—that is, to recognize it as such, rather than to sabotage it by distraction. The child’s boredom starts as a regular crisis in the child’s developing capacity to be alone in the presence of the mother. In other words, the capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child. (p. 69, emphasis added)

Imagine this fictional dialogue between a mother and her bored child.

“I’m bored,” says the young child.

“Well, let’s see what we can get you doing,” says the anxious parent. “How about if you color?”

“No, that sounds boring,” replies the child.

“Well, how about if you build with your blocks?” asks the parent.

“Yuck!” exclaims the child.

Getting more anxious, the parent suggests, “How about if you go outside? Yes, let’s get you outside.”

“Outside is smelly, yucky and boring!” Now the child is really whining.

Totally exasperated, the parent exclaims, “Well what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know!” the child retorts.

And we, the authors, exclaim, “Wonderful and exactly!”

Phillips writes, “It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested rather than take the time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time” (p. 69).

Phillips (1993) notes a connection between a child’s being bored and their capacity to be alone in the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and D. W. Winnicott (p. 72). Phillips points out that for Freud a child’s sense of being alone, or what Freud would call solitude, is one of the child’s first phobias. Freud was certain that this fear emerged when the child felt the absence of its primary caregiver. Phillips further interprets Freud to be saying that humans can tolerate solitude but remain unconscious to its dangers—which for Freud is connected to death or to being dropped.Footnote 5 As a thought experiment, we are invited to imagine a baby in solitude—waiting too long for its mother to return. Is this felt sense of absence akin to the infant’s fear of being dropped? Does the infant experience what Winnicott (1965) called a fear of “falling for ever?” (p. 58). This would be an absence that one would want to avoid. But Phillips wonders if we should in fact avoid this solitude altogether. He points out that it is impossible for psychoanalysis to conceive of an absence of something without some kind of anticipation of another thing. He argues that it is a child’s first desire for the parent that makes it aware of its solitude—its aloneness. And so he suggests, “Through desire the child discovers his solitude, and through solitude his desire” (Phillips 1993, p. 29).

For Winnicott (1965), a psychoanalyst who was first a child pediatrician, a child can only develop the capacity for solitude, or what he called the capacity to be alone, by being in the benign presence of the nonintrusive parent (p. 30). He states that this capacity to be alone may be one of the most important signs of psychological maturity. Winnicott recognizes and names the paradox that, for the small child, nontraumatic aloneness “is the experience of being alone while someone else is present” (p. 30). He calls this ego-relatedness and even compares it to the kind of contented state that adults have after intercourse. They are content, Winnicott suggests, to be alone in each other’s presence. Through good enough mothering, the child comes to build up “a belief in the benign environment” (p. 32). And, he says that it is in this state of being alone, in the benign presence of another (usually the mother) who is available but not intrusive, that the child can “discover his own personal life” (p. 34).

Furthermore, Winnicott states that this is what in the adult life can be called relaxing. Over time, of course, this experience is internalized and the child (and subsequent adult) doesn’t actually need the physical presence of the mother, but it is the environmental experience that has been internalized to the point that the child and then the adult can be alone, can relax. Being alone is not anxiety inducing but rather is relaxing. This state of relaxation, of rest, makes it possible for the child to be between states of desire, to not be afraid, and to be healthily bored.

When the capacity for boredom doesn’t develop

Phillips (1993) notes the similarity between the child’s solitude in the presence of the mother and the psychotherapy situation.Footnote 6 We explore his work here as an analogy to relational practices such as spiritual direction.

We follow on in a curious solitude à deux called the analytic situation. And in that setting we find, again and again, that the patient is faced with the risk of entrusting himself. Indeed, one of the aims of the analysis will be to reveal the full nature of the risk. In the induced regression of the analytic treatment the patient is invited—to redescribe the “golden rule”—to hand over to the analyst something that we refer to, after Winnicott, as a holding function. In free association the patient takes the risk of not knowing what he is going to say. (p. 29)

It is in the holding environment of the mother and now the psychoanalyst that the child/patient develops the capacity to be alone in such a way that its desires can materialize or, as Winnicott (1965) would say, it can “discover its personal life” (p. 34). The child is dependent on the parent to facilitate this experience, but what if this didn’t take place during the course of normal development? As noted above, in therapy the patient hands this over to the “good enough” therapist. In a relational spiritual practice such as spiritual direction, the directee hands it over to the “good enough” director. But, even more importantly, the bored directee must find a way to hand this over to the “good enough” God.Footnote 7

There is a further interesting paradox here, however, in that the dependent person must give themselves over to a person who cannot be controlled. Phillips (1993) writes, “One of the central paradoxes for the adolescent is his discovery that only the object beyond his control can be found to be reliable” (p. 30). He utilizes the analogy that one must recognize one’s capacity to float in order to learn to swim. Remaining in water in which one can stand up is “omnipotence born of anxiety” (p. 30). But venturing into deep water where one can allow the water to truly hold one—that is, to float—does not have to lead to feared impotence but may lead to a learned capacity to entrust oneself to the water (Phillips 1993, p. 30).Footnote 8

To be able to entrust oneself to another, one must risk. The risks are twofold. One, individuals endanger themselves by entrusting the other to hold them up, to be available without being intrusive or impinging. Of course, small children at first have no choice in this, but over time they develop more choice. Second, individuals endanger something they value—that is, the holding environment (the caregiver) itself. Winnicott (1965) postulated that psychopathology could be understood as a kind of compliance with the environment—that is, with the caregivers’ desires. If the child is always in the position to respond to the demands and impingements of the caregiving environment, they will never be able to develop their true self—that is, to find themselves, their desire. Paradoxically (and Winnicott loved paradox), the only way to find oneself is to risk endangering the caregiver environment through the child’s “ruthlessness” (p. 22), which Phillips (1993) describes as the way the child “carelessly loves” the mother (p. 35). Through this “careless loving,” the child destroys the mother (i.e., the child experiences their feelings, especially anger, as hurtful to the caregiver and fears they are hurting the parent), and if she survives (that is, she does not retaliate) the child learns that (a) the child is not omnipotent and (b) the mother is a separate subject in the world to be used by the child. Stated simply, this mother is a real other that I can trust and depend on and that will let me be and become myself, even though I can’t control her.

A central task in any psychotherapy, then, is for the patient to give themselves over to the therapist’s holding environment.Footnote 9 This is not the first thing done in therapy, but it may be the first thing that really matters. And, relationally, this means that the client, just like the small child, must be able to engage in a kind of lack of concern for the therapist. They must come to believe through experience that the therapist can survive whatever the patient needs to experience: anger, sexual longings, idealization, and even boredom. The patient must come to believe that the therapist survives, i.e., keeps caring, even when the patient acts as if they (the patient) don’t care.

In summary, it is in this “alone but not alone” space facilitated by the “good enough” therapist that the client can be bored and find their desire. This will be a corrective to the deficit experienced by the child, now adult, who didn’t receive this kind of caregiving growing up. But this boredom will only be safe in the presence of a sturdy, capable therapist that, ironically, the patient doesn’t have to “care about” (i.e., they can love carelessly). This allows boredom to lead to desire, facilitating it as a developmental achievement.

Interestingly, Sherry Turkle, professor of social science and technology at MIT, in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), suggests that the advent of social media and especially texting creates an illusion of being together when in actuality we may feel very alone. Her research bears this out as young people report feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of “connection” while suffering a loss of genuine togetherness. In this way, communicative technology, especially, does not promote the Winnicottian (1965) experience of “being alone while someone else is present” (p. 30). The sheer amount of communication coming at us via technology can feel like an impingement on us, rendering the technology incapable of promoting the kind of holding environment necessary for the child to “discover his own personal life” (p. 34). Or, in the language of Philips (1993), technology disallows the child from finding its way to boredom and solitude while in the presence of a benign other in order for desire to emerge.

Boredom as defense

If, however, the patient has not had the kind of facilitating environment described above, there is no room to be authentically bored, silent, or even engaged in genuine free association. As Phillips (1993) writes, “We can think of boredom as a defense against waiting, which is, at one remove, an acknowledgment of the possibility of desire” (p. 76). Rather than discovering their desire and subsequently themselves, the person develops a “false-self” based on compliance (Winnicott 1965, pp. 142–143). They can’t wait in boredom for desire to crystallize because they have not been able to entrust themselves to a benign holding environment that they could love carelessly. So, instead, they become intent on figuring out what the other desires. This is illustrated by the spiritual directee who tries desperately to figure out what they believe the director wants them to do or practice. This type of individual may not only be unaware of their own desire to engage in particular types of practices but may not even know that their desire could be a part of the equation.

In this sense, then, boredom can be conceptualized as defense rather than achievement. What the client may be saying is something akin to, “I don’t know what you want me to do and this frightens me. It is your desire that is primary. Not only do I not know my own desire, but in fact it may never be knowable.” It is our contention that for this person the boredom and subsequent anxiety they report is a way to resist knowing their desire while they frantically attempt to evoke the other’s.

Let’s return to the common experience of boredom in spiritual practices noted at the beginning of the article. When a directee becomes bored and can’t wait in a relaxed manner, can’t use their boredom to facilitate desire, they become anxious and feel the need to “do something.” They can’t wait for desire to emerge but may quickly look to the director to tell them what to do.

If the director can resist the urge to rescue the directee, he or she may provide a new experience for the directee (i.e., a developmental need) and gently begin to move the directee toward the understanding that much of their anxiety is related to performance fear aimed toward the director and probably God as well.

Turkle (2015) argues that this problem of being rescued from our boredom is in fact exacerbated by technology. While parents are often quick to claim that technology is causing their child to be bored, Turkle turns this on its head. Of course, the speed, stimulation, and novelty of technology (something the brain enjoys) can make it hard for the real world to compete with the virtual world, but Turkle actually worries about what technology teaches us.

Our mobile devices seem to grant three wishes, as though gifts from a benevolent genie: first, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone. And the granting of these three wishes implies another reward: that we will never have to be bored. (p. 26)

Turkle asserts that boredom is one of the most important fundamentals in child development. She posits that in boredom the child has the opportunity to transform boredom into solitude and creativity through the process of looking into the self (Turkle 2018). Turkle worries that technologies like the cell phone offer us a way to avoid boredom and its attendant anxiety as well as the expectation that we should do so. Technology rescues us in the same way the anxiously bored directee may attempt to enlist the director to rescue them.

But both of these [anxiety and boredom] signal that you are learning something new, something alive and disruptive. You may be stretching yourself, in a new direction. Boredom and anxiety are signs to attend more closely to things, not to turn away. (Turkle 2015, p. 38)

For Turkle, technology, like many other things internal and external, becomes a defense against boredom. Taking her cue from Winnicott, she too believes that the experiences of solitude and boredom emerge by way of a child being in the presence of the loving nonintrusive mother. But instead of truly learning to be comfortably alone in our boredom, we use our devices to give us the illusion of being connected, and we remain unsatisfyingly alone together.

Boredom and spiritual disciplines

To summarize, it is our contention, based on the confluence of the developmental argument in conversation with the spiritual theologians (and even contemporary work in technology) cited in this article, that when a person reports that they can’t engage in spiritual practices because they are boring this may mean one of three things: sinful choice, God’s purgation, or developmental psychological deficit. From the vantage point of this third explanation, we suggest two understandings. First, the person is unable to entrust themselves to God (and the spiritual director, if the person is in direction) in a way that creates space for desire to emerge. The person is unable to experience God as a benign presence who can be loved carelessly. This is a space in which they don’t need to perform for God, or worry if God thinks they are “doing it right or not.” It is a space where they don’t have to be worried about God but can tune in to “what is next” for them, believing that God will be present even if God feels absent.Footnote 10

Second, and related to the first point, boredom may mean that the person is so oriented to the other for their sense of desire that they are attempting to figure out what God wants from them. Boredom may be a defense against waiting (the opposite of boredom as developmental achievement or capacity) for their own desire to crystallize and rather a way to “wait out the other’s desire”—in this case, God’s desire. The person may try all types of spiritual disciplines in an attempt to see if any of them please God, only to find that they can never be sure and subsequently fall back into a defensive boredom. While the first response may lead to anxiety, it is our contention that the second response may lead to despair (see our discussion of Aquinas above).

So, what of the person who reports that spiritual practices are boring and therefore impossible to do? Below, we engage in an invented exchange, recognizing the dangers and potential critiques when one attempts such a task. It is our hope that this dialogue may be helpful to spiritual directors and disciplers/mentors who find themselves in similar conversations.

Directee: So, I was trying again to pray and read my Bible, but I get so bored and my mind wanders and I just feel “yuck” and I give up.

Director: You say you feel bored?

Directee: Yes.

Director: Can you say more about what that feels like?

Directee: It’s like I’m not really into it.

Director: It sounds like it doesn’t feel like what you want to do.

Directee: Yes, and that sounds awful to say because we are supposed to want to do the practices.

Director: I hear your desire to connect, but I also hear that the way you have been trying to pray and read your Bible has not felt right for you.

Directee: I think that’s right. I do want to connect with God, but everything I try is just a waste.

Director: Maybe that is because you don’t know how you desire to connect.

Directee: Hmm, I’m not sure I know what you mean.

Director: You try to do the thing you think you are supposed to do—maybe what you think God, or I, want you to do. But this feels confusing, forced, maybe a little anxiety-provoking, and so you find yourself stuck. Is that right?

Directee: I think that is pretty accurate. But I can’t conceive of an alternative.

Director: I wonder if something similar happens in here with us when you don’t know what to say and we sit quietly till you find what is important for you.

Directee: That usually makes me uncomfortable because I sometimes worry what you are thinking.

Director: Yes, you end up worrying about what I want rather than believing that I am okay with you taking the time to find out what you want.

Directee: Yes, but when I am able to get past that anxiety then there is a kind of comfort or peace in which I can let my mind wander till, as you said, I find what is important to me.

Director: When you find yourself able to not worry about me, or God, then you can find yourself and your desire.

Directee: Yes

Director: So, being bored together until you find what you want to talk about can be connecting?

Directee: Yes. So, if I am getting this, maybe I could do a similar thing with God?

Director: What do you think that would look like?

Directee: I guess similar to what it looks like in here. Just being quiet and trying to believe that God is okay with that and doesn’t have an agenda for me. That God is actually just pleased that I am in His presence no matter what I am doing or thinking or feeling.

In any fictional dialogue like this one, the best-case scenario is often advanced. Nevertheless, what the reader may be able to take from this imagined exchange is a kind of analogy to how the child/parent situation of aloneness, the directee/director situation, and the believer/God situation may overlap. Perhaps most importantly, and maybe it goes without saying, is that in spiritual practices the person must be able to give themselves over to the One that they can’t control, to love carelessly, and to ultimately find that that One can hold them. Of course, if a person has not experienced this in childhood they will be greatly hampered in their ability to use boredom as a kind of achievement in which they wait and search for their desire. Rather, they will be more likely to use boredom defensively as a kind of searching out what the other, in this case God, may want. This person may first need to experience careless loving, holding, and boredom in therapy or spiritual direction before they can ever experience it in devotion with God.