Pastors—Catholic priests especially—hear a lot of people’s sins. We can describe them many ways—destructive, insidious, tangled—but perhaps the most unexpected description of sin is boring. As one pastor puts it: he believes in original sin, but he also believes that sin itself is thoroughly unoriginal.
The Bible gives us plenty of examples. Here’s one: when David starts making terrible choices—using his power to coerce a woman to sleep with him, and murdering her husband—he disappears from 2 Samuel. He’s still there, but he becomes a non-actor, just drifting along while terrible things happen to his children that he could have stopped.
There are many literary examples. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, there’s nothing interesting about Satan—he’s frozen to his waist in a lake of ice—whereas God dwells at the center of a mysterious cosmic flower of light surrounded by planets (awesome!).
Actually, not all literature makes sin boring. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan is super-interesting, while his God is a royal snooze-fest. It’s a major flaw in the poem, but typical of pop-culture. The devil and his minions are nearly always depicted as interesting—most recently, for instance, in the television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens where the main demon drives a cool car, wears shades, and walks with an old-British-rocker swagger. The angel is stuffy and owns an antiquarian book shop.
Lies.
James wrote that (illicit) desire conceives sin, and sin gives birth to death. Being dead is the ultimate boredom—totally uninteresting—while life is endlessly interesting because anything can happen. And the more time you spend in life—not just living, but in life’s forms, commitments and relationships—the more opportunities there are for astonishment.
Form? Structure? Booooring!
Bear with me. It’s not easy to find examples. I could talk about my own, but they are not easy to describe. How can I explain how I feel when my wife turns to look at me to ask for a cup and I’m struck dumb with wonder? Nearly twenty years of knowing her led to that moment. Twenty years of ordinary life. Do you have twenty years for me to explain?
Let’s try this. Over the past weekend our family watched two documentaries about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Yep, two documentaries. And I tell the truth: I heard my kids say wow!
What’s so great about Goldsworthy? On the surface, nothing much. He’s an artist, but he only uses what he finds in nature—ordinary materials like leaves, rocks, sticks, water. And yet he creates astonishing work. How does he do it?
He’s faithful to the materials, and he insists on looking, watching, for a long time.
Half of both documentaries film Goldsworthy walking around, looking. Most of his work comes from his little village in Scotland where he has been looking and watching for decades. He’s spent years with one tree, an elm that fell over in 2013. He says he could “work” with that tree until he dies.
After that tree fell, Goldsworthy used yellow leaves to border a great crack, where the massive trunk had splintered in half. We see the violence as if we are watching the moment it happened. Over the years the edges softened and Goldsworthy reveals the tree again with brightly colored leaves, except this time covering the limbs, revealing human lines and shapes in that old tree, familiar lines and shapes, and yet brilliant and lovely.
I think my favorite work of his is when he crawls along (not through) a hedge. He starts on one end of a hedge 10 feet tall, climbs into it and moves horizontally along it until he reaches the other end.
He’s not up there to make a work; his climbing/crawling is the work. (Remember: he’s an artist.)
Most of the time he’s struggling through the middle of the hedge, getting scratched. He bruised a rib once. It’s ridiculous, borderline absurd, hilarious, and intensely interesting to watch him navigate up there in the wind and cold, getting stuck, capable of falling at any moment. Everyone else is strolling along next to him, looking up at Goldsworthy The Idiot.
But what is more interesting? To move as fast as possible to the next thing? And then when you get there, to do what? Has it ever been interesting to get exactly what you want? Isn’t that actually the definition of boredom?
Desiring and getting what you want isn’t sin, but as James says, it’s good place to start. And if we listen to Dante, it ends in a frozen lake of ice.
Instead, let us commit to what now seems absurd—attending to the ordinary, practicing patient love. And like climbing along a hedge, let the decades of these decisions become a performance that brings wonder, joy.
