After my second post on The Innovation Problem, I had a private comment sent to me by my friend Tim Schwindt. With his permission, here is a portion of:
I find that the pressure to constantly create, recreate, be fresh, and change the ways we do everything is a direct reflection of not only accelerating change in our world, but also of our ever-increasing tendency to be too quickly bored with what we’ve done before. It’s as though things are not worth repeating unless it’s been long enough that they feel new enough again. We often forget that the reason people connect so well with certain things we do is precisely because they are familiar, repeatable, and give a sense of stability in increasingly unstable times. And when we feel the need to change them again, we don’t realize that we can actually contribute to the uncertainty and unfamiliarity that hinders our effectiveness, and thereby lessen the potential of real connection that people need - with church, one another, meaningful practices, and God. May we pursue the creativity that the Holy Spirit brings, let go of the self-imposed pressure to constantly innovate, and rest in the love and grace of the Lord who is building His Church!
This such a helpful comment. Two quick reflections.
First, boredom, it appears, is an innovation itself. Lauren Winner talks about this in her book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis:
“The word boredom wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century. ‘If people felt bored before the late eighteenth century,’ writes the literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘they didn’t know it.’”1
And this:
“Boredom, to again quote Spacks, ‘presents itself as a trivial emotion . . . [and] can trivialize the world.’ One might add, it can trivialize the one who is bored, too.2
Boredom, it seems, is not a neutral category. It’s a trivializing one.
Second Reflection. Just this past week I was reading Serene Jones’ stunning book Trauma + Grace. I’ve been immersed in trauma literature in the past month or so, and my eyes have really been opened to the nature of trauma and, unfortunately, how prevalent it is. Those who have been traumatized face enormous challenges. Not least, their experience of time gets broken. Judith Herman, a leading expert in the field, explains:
“Long after the danger is past, traumatized people relive the event as though it were continually recurring in the present. They cannot resume the normal course of their lives, for the trauma repeatedly interrupts. It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory.”3
Sometimes people become so overwhelmed by the traumatic interruption that they freeze. They can’t remember normal things, like their names, for example. In Jones’ book, she tells about going to church with a woman she had recently befriended named Leah. Something about the blood of Jesus was said during the service that triggered her trauma event. She abruptly left the service, went to the bathroom and, overwhelmed, wanted to wash her face but couldn’t remember which tap was hot and which was cold.4 At a later conversation, the women explained, “I can’t control my imagination–it does weird things to me. It freaks me out. Gets all shattered and chaotic and plays out scenes I don’t want.” 5
Time and memory get disrupted. But notice what this woman, Leah, says helps her in the worship service in particular:
She [Leah] also added that part of the beauty and power of church for her was the comforting order that our stories and our order of worship provided for her. “The Bible stories, they are so alive and simple and good—it’s like they override the bad stuff.” It was not just the content of the stories, either. It was also their repetition and their constant reenactment, at an embodied level. “When I sing, I relax, especially if it’s an old song I love. I don’t even have to think about it. And praying, it’s like a meditative exercise that slows down the chaos and stops the bad thoughts.” In words that I found most telling of all, she described how the language of faith gave her a graced imagination: “It’s like a poem that centers me and calms me down and gives me hope and makes everything feel so real.”6
I love new songs. I writes new songs. I created. But people need repetition. Not just want, need. It grounds them, particularly in their (and our) worst moments. Like Tim said, “We often forget that the reason people connect so well with certain things we do is precisely because they are familiar, repeatable, and give a sense of stability in increasingly unstable times.” Indeed.
Some food for thought on a Saturday afternoon.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 12–14. Quoted in Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 123.
ibid. 124
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992, this ed. 1997), 37
Serene Jones, Trauma + Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 4
ibid. 19
ibid. 19-20