Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis devotes a delightful letter to the subject of pleasure. His advice: begin where you are. He writes that he once thought he had to start “by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life.’”10 Instead, he says, we ought to begin with the pleasures at hand—for him, a walk beside a babbling brook; for me at the moment, the wonder of hot water and dried leaves. Most of us love these moments in our day at a gut level. We intuitively know that goodness and beauty are connected to the divine, that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). We aren’t overly ascetic fundamentalists trying to stamp out delight or pleasure wherever it is found. We naturally greet these moments with gratitude. But more than that, we respond with adoration. We are not only grateful for pleasure; our hearts wonder what kind of Creator makes a world that overflows with such loveliness and beauty. As Lewis says, “One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”11 Yet so much wars against these little moments of glory in our day. For me, anxiety and needling worries are always clanging in the background, robbing me of the ability to simply exhale. I have to learn to surrender, to give up my flimsy illusion of control, and relax into beauty. As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattenti...