Setting up a crazy golf course in the nave of Rochester cathedral is all about inclusive access and generosity of welcome. And those who decry the idea are elitist snobs whose treasured sense of musty ecclesiastical silence certainly hasn’t proved to be box-office for ordinary people. After all, weren’t cathedrals originally also meeting places of market-place chaos and light-hearted ribaldry. A Christianity that takes seriously the incarnation has no need of protecting the sacred from the profane. Cathedrals should stop taking themselves so seriously. Throw open the doors. Give people a little of what they want. [...]
But we have developed this extraordinary sense that boredom is some sort of moral failing. The philosopher Lars Svendsen – author of a Philosophy of Boredom – makes the interesting argument that the idea of boredom being a moral failing is something that comes about with modernity. That in having replaced a belief in God with a belief in the self as the ultimate source of meaning, modern boredom is a bit like a loss of faith in the self’s ability to generate its own meaning. It is almost as if bored people have let themselves down. This is modernity’s equivalent to loss of faith. [...]
Crazy golf in the nave is not, strictly speaking, a desecration of the holy. The holy has no need of our protection; still less the protection of pompous priests and bossy vergers. But a space for silence and the possibility of prayer does need careful ring-fencing. Where else in our noisy culture is one able deliberately to sit quietly and contemplate the meaning of our existence?
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