This article is the second half of a two-part article on "boredom." You can read the first half here.
And we're back at it! There's so much in this Ratzinger paragraph that we need two parts to even scratch the surface. Here's the paragraph again:
“Goethe once termed the struggle between belief and unbelief the great theme of world history, picking up a theme of Augustine’s philosophy of history. Augustine himself, of course, expressed this differently: he sees in world history the struggle between two kinds of love, love for self, which goes as far as despising God, and love of God, which goes as far as despising oneself. Today, we can perhaps formulate this in still another way: history is marked by the confrontation between love and the inability to love, that devastation of the soul that comes when the only values man is able to recognize at all as values and realities are quantifiable values. The capacity to love, that is, the capacity to wait in patience for what is not under one’s own control and to let oneself receive this as a gift, is suffocated by the speedy fulfillments in which I am dependent on no one but in which I am never obliged to emerge from my own self and thus never find the path into my own self. The destruction of the capacity to love gives birth to lethal boredom. It is the poisoning of man. If he were to have his way, man would be destroyed, and the world with him. In this drama, we should not hesitate to oppose the omnipotence of the quantitative and to take up our position on the side of love. This is the decision that the present hour demands of us.”
Last time we dove into the phrases "quantifiable values" and the capacity to love as the capacity to wait in patience and receptivity, despite the possibility of speedy fulfillments.
This time, let's start with this fascinating phrase: "is suffocated by the speedy fulfillments in which I am dependent on no one but in which I am never obliged to emerge from my own self and thus never find the path into my own self." Ratzinger is here saying something profound about what it means to be human here: a life that is ruled by speedy fulfillments and lack of patience is one that never requires a person to be drawn out of himself or herself, which absolutely makes sense. If I can supposedly have all my needs met with a few apps and some wild experiences, I never really need to cultivate the kind of personal relationships that constitute a healthy life, because those take time and patience and don't seem to always be immediately fruitful. Isn't it just easier to interact with people online where I can control the pace of the conversation and what they see and read from me? Isn't it easier to get a sense of satisfaction from winning a video game than from building something with your hands? Isn't it easier to have entertainment on-demand, piped into your screens, rather than having to go out and search for something intriguing? Speedy fulfillments does sound like a good option...
Until you get to Ratzinger's next clause in the sentence though: if you are never obliged to emerge from your own self, you "thus never find the path into my own self." Ratzinger seems to be claiming that if I never have to be drawn out of myself into the alive and scary realm of real relationships, I won't ever actually find out who I am. There's something about being a human person that requires these vulnerable places in order to actually know who we are. In our conversation at the young adult night, we posited that this is actually a sign of being created in the image and likeness of God; since God is Triune, a communion on persons that cannot be defined except in relation with one another, so also must we humans be defined in relation with one another, for no man is an island. My identity is actually bound up in community; I am made and destined for communion with other humans and with God. This boredom, fueled by speedy fulfillments, often leads me away from communion, for it offers cheap substitutes to a real need in my heart, like trying to only eat candy instead of real food. They are very enticing in the moment, but if all I ever eat is candy, it will likely be the death of me.
The awkward thing about writing about all of this is that the culture is doing a great job of convincing followers of Christ that they are in fact the bored ones. On the surface, those living for the world and for speedy fulfillments seem to be having much more "fun and adventure" than those who are trying to follow Christ; they might be going to more parties or buying more things or living a kind of lifestyle that gets glorified in movies and music. They seem totally free and content, and when they hear that you don't stay out late Saturday night because you'll be up early Sunday morning for Mass, or that you don't live with your boyfriend/girlfriend, or that you avoid all sorts of situations and experiences, all in the name of following after Christ, they'll usually end up asking you in these or similar words: isn't that kind of boring?
And the follower of Christ has to wrestle with that question. Are Christians the bored ones? Is following Jesus worth it? I can't answer this question for you, it's one that you have to answer for yourself. I know that I personally had to run into it many times over the years, especially my last semester of undergrad. I had just been accepted into seminary and would be entering in the fall, and that many parts of my life were going to have to change. And so many times that semester and that summer I would have to decline invitations to all sorts of things, because I knew that it wouldn't be healthy for me to go out to the bar all the time, or to engage in some of the things my friends and classmates were doing. Not going to lie, there were some difficult moments in there, some times where I questioned whether following this call from the Lord was really going to be worth it. But waiting in patience in those months brought a whole new dimension to it all: I began to see the value of silence and wonder with the Lord. He began to show the things in life with truly lasting value, real food and living water; things like honesty and integrity, service and the value of a hard day's work, silence and the beholding of the world around me, and deep communion with those whom He placed in my life, and ultimately with Him.