Transplanting and Sustaining: Covid-19 Special Issue

A Prayer About Boredom
Shayley Martin
Mercy by the Sea
Sharla Moody
Dear God,
Sometimes I wonder if you know what
it feels like to be bored. If you would
deal with it any better than we do. I
know you can take the extremes of human
experience: hunger and pain and
persecution. What I wonder about is
the monotony. I wonder if you, Lord,
would be able to deal with the routine
of over and over, same and same, again
and again. Do you know that feeling?
That desperation?
How would you make it as an old
woman, stuck inside her house for
months, unable to see her children and
grandchildren, doing the same puzzles
every day? Or as a little kid no longer
allowed to go outside and play? Stuck?
You were great as a public figure, Jesus,
reviled by some and loved by others.
But overlooked? Powerless against
some sweeping thing? Convinced that
it didn’t really matter what you did
anyway? Don’t tell me you’ve ever felt
that way.
No, of course you couldn’t have been
overlooked. How could the maker of
all things be overlooked? You have all
the power; how could you have known
what it meant to be powerless? And
you came up with everything: warthogs
and platypuses and rafflesia flowers;
how could we expect you to understand
boredom or suffocation?
it’s monotonous, at least in my memory.
It’s all rain and soup and fifty-degree
weather. And if you give something
up, you’ve got one fewer thing
even than you had for the rest of the
year. There’s nothing special, nothing
to mark the passing time.
Hold on––but Lent comes from an
episode from your life. Could it be
that Lent’s monotony is also modeled
on that episode? You spent forty days
alone and hungry in the wilderness,
in the middle of nowhere. That can’t
have been interesting. Hunger and
thirst are pure monotony applied to
the body. Looking back on those forty
fasting days of yours, they’re very
noble. But at the time, it was just an
empty stomach: the same dry mouth
no matter how you held it or what
prayers you said. And you could have
done something to make yourself powerful;
you could have made stones into
bread, but you decided not to. You decided
to be powerless before the wide
desert, as we would have been.
You are with us in the memorable
high-action moments; you care about
big decisions and high-stakes conversations.
Thank you.
You are with us in pain and sorrow
and anger, and in the times of greatest
loss. Thank you.
Thank you for that too.
You’re with us in the routine, when we
feel like worthless cogs. You’re with us
when we’re lonely. Not “with us” as in
standing nearby, peering at us, wondering
what could be going through
our minds. No. You’ve been here.
Done this. Stifling things, slowly and
consistently exhausting things, grating
things––you’ve known them all, Jesus.
They were a part of the human life
that you took on.
I know that people have been saying
this for two thousand years, but thank
you for doing that. For living a human
life, I mean. Who could have blamed
you for looking the other way and letting
us self-destruct? A human life has
pain and vulnerability and limitation
and boredom; the all-powerful God
shouldn’t have to deal with that! But
we needed you, and you loved us, and
you didn’t hesitate.
Amen.
Water left on rocks from last tide
freezes before it has the chance
to ebb or dry away, crystalized,
calcified life abandoned from the body
that birthed it.
Cast from waves, the water freezes on rocks,
restrained from polluting the ocean.
O Lord, You take away the residue
of my passions before I meet or
bid them goodbye, become
hardened artifacts of the former life
that spat them out.
Cast them into Your divine waters,
swallow the pieces whole.
But then again, how can I say there’s
something you don’t know? Something
you don’t understand? Of course you
understand.
You are also with us when we’re bored.
The first day of Lent is interesting;
that’s when some denominations get
those ash crosses on their foreheads.
And it’s interesting when it ends, at
Easter, when everybody can eat chocolate
again or what have you, when people
dress up and seem almost to glow.
When people are excited to see you.
But during those forty days between,
.
8 Covid-19: Spring 2020 logos . 9