Peripheral Visions

that other kinds of attention might be learned instead that would reshape life profoundly.
    For months I had been dropping in at the college noon-day masses, after teaching an eleven o’clock class. One of the Jesuits would come and hurry through the service in a big, bleak room, temporarily fitted out as a chapel. This was in 1968, when liturgical renewal was barely beginning and most of the liturgy was still in Latin. The priests mumbled, and the responses were hardly spoken by the congregation, four or five students and some older women from the neighborhood, busy with their rosaries, perhaps a dozen people in all, scattered far from the altar. At the same time, although I felt very much an outsider, I found myself going back repeatedly, watching and wondering and musing. Not bored.
    With the beginning of summer, one of the younger Filipino Jesuits took over the service. He created a stir by consecrating in English, which was still not officially allowed in the diocese of Manila, and by giving the communion cup to the laity. He got students to bring guitars, and soon the chapel was crowded at noontime, full of enthusiastic, folk-singing students, gathered in a circle around the altar. Almost every day he introduced some novelty, interspersing comments or slight alterations in wording. Then one day in the crowded chapel, with sun streaming through the side windows, I noticed absentmindedly that nothing particularly different was happening: the same old phrases, the same old simple chords. Suddenly slack and indifferent, I thought, But this is dull, why on earth go through this same boring thing day after day…
    Boredom is so familiar that we rarely recognize that we are trained in it, addicted to a consumerism of the spirit, jaded to need ever more vivid diversions. Activities we once did not expect to find full of novelty and stimulation get recast as entertainment—and then become burdensome when entertainment flags. Some peoples eat the same foods at meal after meal, but we have learned to expect not only varied meals but varied mustards and vinegars. Getting up in the morning, taking a shower, brushing one’s teeth, eating a bowl of cereal, hundreds of such peaceful activities have been tarted up with flavorings and music and gadgetry, so that after a brief period of novelty they become not bland and comfortingly familiar but irritatingly boring. Boredom does no doubt occur naturally, not only for humans but for other mammals, under circumstances of extreme lack of stimulation, but we have made every area of life subject to an acquired pathology of attention.
    There have been a series of experiments in educational television, devoted to packaging reading or geography in the frenetic cadences of quiz shows, cartoons, and commercials. It is hard to criticize programming that seems to work in conveying something useful, but children who are given chocolate milk to get calcium into them grow up as chocolate eaters, not as milk drinkers. Children prepared for school by children’s television arrive better prepared for the content of their lessons but perhaps less tolerant of the rhythms of reflection and multiple return appropriate to gradual growth in understanding, for attention that is exacted tips over easily into boredom, while learning flourishes on the subtleties of recycled attention. Recognizing that education should be enjoyable rather than punitive, we sometimes attempt to alleviate boredom by making bits and pieces of education entertaining, instead of discovering and supporting those modes of activity to which the experience of boredom is simply irrelevant. When a people at war become mirror images of the enemy, the war is already lost.
    In Manila, I was able to watch a microcosm of a struggle throughout the Christian world to reshape forms of worship; the movement for liturgical renewal prefigured some of the efforts in education today, and suggests some of the dangers to be avoided. It was fashionable for a time for couples to seek greater authenticity by composing their own wedding services, but words that cannot stand repetition year after year provide brittle shelter for the shifting understandings of marriage. It was easy to dismiss as reactionary diehards those who wanted to stay with the old forms, without analyzing what was being lost, but loss there was. During the same period when the mainline denominations were seeking greater simplicity, intelligibility, and participation, young people