Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

It’s remarkable that when the Father declares at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” Jesus hasn’t yet done much of anything that many would find impressive.

God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.

Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6

the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”

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

I worry that when our gathered worship looks like a rock show or an entertainment special, we are being formed as consumers—people after a thrill and a rush—when what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith.

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

Being surrounded by such great minds was a gift, but I began to feel like the sort of Christianity that I gravitated toward only required my brain.

If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.

I told her that forgiveness is from God, and yet I still need to be told. I need to hear in a loud voice that I am forgiven and loved, a voice that is truer, louder, and more tangible than the accusing voices within and without that tell me I’m not.

Soon after we were married, Jonathan and I discovered the writing of Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry, both of whom critique the industrial food system and extol the virtues of eating food that is local, homegrown, and organic.

Like most of what I’ll eat in this life, it’s necessary and forgettable.

At the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples to eat in remembrance of him. Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal.

There are a few very goods meals I remember and there are a few truly terrible meals I remember. But most of the meals I’ve eaten, thousands upon thousands, were utterly unremarkable.

He would be the first to say that the problem of poverty is not simply a lack of money. It’s a lack of community, a lack of deep ties—family, friends, people you can count on, people to catch you when you fall.

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

One of my favorite scenes in literature is when the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels think that, because Gulliver keeps checking his clock, it must be his god.1 It was Swift’s clever commentary on his era’s worship of time, hurry, and efficiency, which applies just as easily to us today. (By the Lilliputians’ logic, my god is my smartphone.)

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.

Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find. We are hedonistic cynics and gluttonous stoics. In our consumerist society we spend endless energy and money seeking pleasure, but we are never sated.

Pleasure is a gift, but it can become an idol. We overindulge. We become addicts. What once was a gift becomes a trap.

Rest takes practice. We need a ritual and routine to learn to fall asleep. Infants learn by habit, over time, how to cease fighting sleepiness. A regular bedtime, dim lights, bath time, book time, rocking, allow their brains to carve out a pattern, a biochemical path to rest. Without a ritual and routine, they become hyperactive and often exhibit behavioral problems. Adults aren’t much different.

Wendell Berry warned, “It is easy . . . to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”5