Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

In doing so, Tish dismantles that most stubborn of Christian heresies: the idea that there is any part of our lives that is secular, untouched by and disconnected from the real sacred work of worship and prayer.

Whether we’re children or heads of state, we sit in our pajamas for a moment, yawning, with messy hair and bad breath, unproductive, groping toward the day. Soon we’ll get buttoned up into our identities: mothers, business people, students, friends, citizens.

And before we begin the liturgies of our day—the cooking, sitting in traffic, emailing, accomplishing, working, resting—we begin beloved.

What would it mean to believe the gospel, not just in my brain, but also in my body?

my body is inseparable from my soul, and that both deserve care.

Rod Dreher writes about his struggle with despair in an average day. “Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won the lottery or bought that thing you really wanted. It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair.”2

I need to hear from someone who knows me that there is grace enough for me, that Christ’s work is on my behalf, even as I’m on my knees confessing that I’ve blown it again this week.

The economy of the Eucharist is true abundance. There is enough for me, not in spite of others, but because we receive Christ together as a community.

He can make revolution stories out of smallness.

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.

Time is just another commodity that we seek to maximize.

We come to believe that our worth must be proved by the way we spend our hours and that our ultimate safety depends on our own good management.

We live in the truth that, however slowly or quickly we may be traveling, we are going somewhere. Or, more accurately, somewhere (and Someone) is drawing near to us.

Flannery O’Connor said, “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. . . . The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”