Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

It is not just that the secular is shot through with the sacred. Worship itself is made up of ordinary stuff. We use plain words.

Some of the most the glorious words in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer are, well, common and plain enough to make you weep—“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.”

That we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.

Christ’s ordinary years are part of our redemption story. Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity. If Christ spent most of his life in quotidian ways, then all of life is brought under his lordship. 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.”6 I came across Dillard’s words a couple years before I went to seminary, and throughout those years of heady theological study I kept them in my back pocket. They remind me that today is the proving ground of what I believe and of whom I worship.

If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an average day. 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.

Some Christians seem to think that we push back against the age primarily by believing correctly—by getting the right ideas in our heads or having a biblical worldview. While doctrinal orthodoxy is crucial in the Christian life, for the most part we are not primarily motivated by our conscious thoughts. Most of what we do is precognitive.4 We do not usually think about our beliefs or worldview as we brush our teeth, go grocery shopping, and drive our cars. Most of what shapes our life and culture works “below the mind”—in our gut, in our loves.

We have everyday habits—formative practices—that constitute daily liturgies. By reaching for my smartphone every morning, I had developed a ritual that trained me toward a certain end: entertainment and stimulation via technology. Regardless of my professed worldview or particular Christian subculture, my unexamined daily habit was shaping me into a worshiper of glowing screens.

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.

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

When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body. I am dust polishing dust.

I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.

Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.

When we confess and receive absolution together, we are like a football team practicing its plays, or a theater company rehearsing its lines. Together as a church we are practicing, learning the strokes that teach us to live our lives.

Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread. We are endlessly in need of nourishment, and nourishment comes, usually, like taco soup. Abundant and overlooked.

My subculture of evangelicalism tends to focus on excitement, passion, and risk, the kind of worship that gives a rush. Eugene Peterson calls this quest for spiritual intensity a consumer-driven “market for religious experience in our world.” He says that “there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by a tourist mindset. . . . We

There are indeed moments of spiritual ecstasy in the Christian life and in gathered worship. Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality, any more than the unforgettable pappardelle pasta dish I ate years ago in Boston’s North End is the point of eating.

Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.

In the same way I am either formed by the practices of the church into a worshiper who can receive all of life as a gift, or I am formed, inevitably, as a mere consumer, even a consumer of spirituality.

The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it’s just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished.

And God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.

This “global theology” of consumerism has transformed both the way we eat and the way we worship. The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as an individual consumer.

In the end, God is the peacemaker. It is not simply “peace” that we pass to each other. It is the peace of Christ, the peace of our peacemaker. Christ’s peace is never a cheap peace. It is never a peace that skims the surface or papers over the wrong that’s been done. It is not a peace that plays nicey-nice, denies hurt, or avoids conflict. It is never a peace that is insincere or ignores injustice. It’s a peace that is honest and hard-won, that speaks truth and seeks justice, that costs something, and that takes time. It is a peace that offers reconciliation.

We cannot seek peace out of our own strength. We all blow it—we fail those around us, we pass judgment instead, we retreat into selfishness as often as we extend a hand. If we are ever peacemakers, it is not without a good deal of war within our hearts.

I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.

Christians are marked not only by patience, but also by longing. We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show, but we can also “amuse ourselves to death.”18 My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment, we need to learn the craft of discernment—how to enjoy rightly, to “have” and “read” pleasure well.

If rest is learned through habit and repetition, so is restlessness. These habits of rest or restlessness form us over time.

My willingness to sacrifice much-needed rest and my prioritizing amusement or work over the basic needs of my body and the people around me (with whom I’m far more likely to be short-tempered after a night of little sleep) reveal that these good things—entertainment and work—have taken a place of ascendancy in my life.

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.

By embracing sleep each day we submit to the humiliation of our creatureliness and fragility. And in that place of weakness we learn to rest in the reality that our life and death—our days and everything in them—are hidden in Christ.

Each night when we yield to sleep, we practice letting go of our reliance on self-effort and abiding in the good grace of our Creator. Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us.