Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.

How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.

Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy—as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship—allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day. Changing this ritual allowed me to form a new repetitive and contemplative habit that pointed me toward a different way of being-in-the-world.

The work of repentance and faith is daily and repetitive. Again and again, we repent and believe.

Peace takes a whole lot of work. Conflict and resentment seem to be the easier route. Shorter, anyway. Less humiliating. Anne Lamott writes that we learn the practice of reconciliation by starting with those nearest us. “Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.”7

We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.7 We have sinned and grown old, and become dulled to the wonders around us. Though it may seem counterintuitive, enjoyment takes practice. Throughout our life we must relearn the abandon of revelry and merriment.

Sleep habits also reveal and shape what we trust. We lay awake fretting about our job or our health or the people we love. The wee hours greet us with our problems and our inability to solve them. What we trust in, lying in our beds at the end of a long day, is where our hearts truly lie.

Mark Galli has said, “The strength of the evangelical movement is its activism; the weakness of the evangelical movement is its activism.”11 Evangelicalism’s energetic history has produced genuine and needed changes in society: the progress of women’s rights, the protection of children, and antislavery legislation, among many others. But it can also foster attitudes that depreciate sustainability and rest. When our zealous activism is coupled with a culture of frenzy and grandiosity, the aim of our Christian life can become a list of goals, initiatives, meetings, conferences, and activities that leave us exhausted.