Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

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.

After my makeshift sociological study on bed making, I decided that for Lent that year I’d exchange routines: I’d stop waking up with my phone, and instead I’d make the bed, first thing.

I also decided to spend the first few minutes after I made the bed sitting (on my freshly made bed) in silence. So I banished my smartphone from the bedroom.

In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order.

We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices—rituals and liturgies that make us who we are.

Smith, following Augustine, argues that to be an alternative people is to be formed differently—to take up practices and habits that aim our love and desire toward God.

We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.

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

By reaching for my smartphone every morning, I had developed a ritual that trained me toward a certain end: entertainment and stimulation via technology.

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.

A fascinating and somewhat disturbing study out of the University of Virginia showed that, given the choice, many preferred undergoing electric shock to sitting alone with their thoughts.

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

when we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the church and find them dull and uninteresting, it’s actually we who have been hollowed out.

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.

We need to learn the slow habits of loving God and those around us.

Our addiction to stimulation, input, and entertainment empties us out and makes us boring—unable to embrace the or...

Kathleen Norris writes, Like liturgy, the work of cleaning draws much of its meaning and value from repetition, from the fact that it is never completed, but only set aside until the next day. Both liturgy and what is euphemistically termed “domestic” work also have an intense relation with the present moment, a kind of fa...

But what I am slowly seeing is that you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes.

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—t...

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

But when we use our bodies for their intended purpose—in gathered worship, raising our hands or singing or kneeling, or, in our average day, sleeping or savoring a meal or jumping or hiking or running or having sex with our spouse or kneeling in prayer or nursing a baby or digging a garden—it is glorious, as glorious as a great cathedral being used just as its architect had dreamt it would be.

In the same way, care for the body—even these small, daily tasks of maintenance—is a way we honor our bodies as sacred parts of worship.

In my anger, grumbling, self-berating, cursing, doubt, and despair, I glimpsed, for a few minutes, how tightly I cling to control and how little control I actually have.

And yet here is where I find myself on an ordinary day, and here, in my petty anger and irritation, is where the Savior deigns to meet me.

In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis says that people are “merely ‘amusing themselves’ by asking for patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling.”1