Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out. Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?

There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.

Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

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

Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.

Most of our days, and therefore most of our lives, are driven by habit and routine.

Though we believe deeply in the gospel, though we put our hope in the resurrection, we often feel like the way we spend our days looks very similar to our unbelieving neighbors—with perhaps a bit of extra spirituality thrown in.

Whoever we are, whatever we believe, wherever we live, and whatever our consumer preferences may be, we spend our days doing things—we live in routines formed by habits and practices.

These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.

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 mind is so prone to want to engage with the world, it will take any opportunity to do so.”

The thing that most annoyed me about bed making—the fact that it must be done over and over again—reflects the very rhythm of faith.

The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.

We must be shaped into people who value that which gives life, not just what’s trendy or loud or exciting.

Our addiction to stimulation, input, and entertainment empties us out and makes us boring—unable to embrace the ordinary wonders of life in Christ.

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

The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root and grows.

THISSSS

I needed to retrain my mind not to bolt at the first sight of boredom or buck against stillness. That took the cultivation of habit. And habits have to start small and to start somewhere—sitting half bored to pray and to listen on sheets tucked in, covers pulled tight.

Start small but stick with it till it becomes a habit!

it wasn’t enough for me to know—as simply another point of doctrine—that our bodies are important. I needed to be trained to offer my body as a living sacrifice through my body.

“practicing the presentation of our bodies as living sacrifices in a corporate context through raising hands, lifting our eyes to the heavens, kneeling, and reciting prayers simply trains us in our whole person, body and soul, to be oriented around the throne of grace.”

A challenge to my physical posture in musical worship!

I couldn’t find words, but I could kneel.

The bodies we use in our worship service each week are the same bodies we take to our kitchen table, into our bathtubs, and under our covers at night.

When the day is lovely and sunny and everything is going according to plan, I can look like a pretty good person. But little things gone wrong and interrupted plans reveal who I really am; my cracks show and I see that I am profoundly in need of grace.

I had a theology of suffering that allowed me to pay attention in crisis, to seek small flickers of mercy in profound darkness. But my theology was too big to touch a typical day in my life. I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.

I can’t simply will myself to, as Paul says, “do all things without grumbling or disputing” (Phil 2:14). It’s not enough to merely want to be more content or to tell myself to cheer up. I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this

We are people who desperately need each other if we are to seek Christ and walk in repentance. If we are saved, we are saved together—as the body of Christ, as a church. Because of this, I need to hear my forgiveness proclaimed not only by God but by a representative of the body of Christ in which I receive grace, to remind me that though my sin is worse than I care to admit, I’m still welcome here. I’m still called into this community and loved.

We may confess quietly, even silently. But we are reminded of our forgiveness out loud, with standing and shouting. We need to be sure to hear it.

God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.

This habit of praying before my meal trains me in a way of being-in-the-world. It reminds me that my personal experience is not what determines whether or not something is a grace and a wonder, and that some of the most astonishing gifts are the most easily overlooked.

Habits shape our desires. I desired ramen noodles more than good, nourishing food because, over time, I had taught myself to crave certain things and not others.

The truth is I get along with most people pretty well. When I do have conflict, it is usually with those I love most. The struggle to “love thy neighbor” is most often tested in my home, with my husband and my kids, when I’m tired, fearful, discouraged, off my game, or just want to be left alone.

Convicted - loving thy neighbor starts literally in your own home.

Like those under Screwtape’s influence, I often neglect the obvious, proclaiming a radical love for the world even as I neglect to care for those closest to me.

It’s a liturgical enactment of the reality that we cannot approach the table of the Prince of Peace if we aren’t at peace with our neighbor.

in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown, beginning on the smallest scale, in the daily grind, in homes, churches, and neighborhoods.

Out of gratitude over the enormous debt our king has forgiven, we forgive our debtors. Receiving God’s gift of reconciliation enables us to give and receive reconciliation with those around us.

Each kind of work is therefore its own kind of craft that must be developed over time, both for our own sanctification and for the good of the community.

we are blessed and sent into the real ways that we spend our hours.

Part of my sanctification and part of the world’s redemption is for me to learn to do my work well—or at least better than I currently do it.

In the liturgical year there is never celebration without preparation. First we wait, we mourn, we ache, we repent. We aren’t ready to celebrate until we acknowledge, over time through ritual and worship, that we and this world are not yet right and whole.3 Before Easter, we have Lent. Before Christmas, we have Advent. We fast. Then we feast. We prepare. We practice waiting.

The practice of liturgical time teaches me, day by day, that time is not mine. It does not revolve around me. Time revolves around God—what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.

God is at work in us and through us as we wait. Our waiting is active and purposeful.

our love for the church universal is worked out in the hard pews (or folding chairs) of our particular, local congregation.

God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them.

In our house, quiet moments like this are rare. In order to embrace them, tasks, distractions, and pestering worries have to be willfully set aside.

Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.

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.

Taking pleasure in the simple things takes effort!

I have to learn the habits of adoration intentionally—to get out of my head and stop to notice the colors in my daughter’s eyes or the sound of rain on our back porch. Part of me—the Taskmaster General in my brain—can feel guilty about the moments when I slow down to enjoy the beauty around me. Tea and an empty hour can feel frivolous or frittering. I feel guilty about not doing something more important with my time,

The idol of productivity produces guilt in a quiet moment ALWAYS

Making space for one hour of pure enjoyment began to fill my hollowness with a weighty kind of joy.

As we learn to practice enjoyment, we need to learn the craft of discernment—how to enjoy rightly, to “have” and “read” pleasure well.