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Key insights from
Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred
Practices in Everyday Life
By
Tish Harrison Warren
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What you’ll learn
The average day flows in a
blur of triviality. Hours shift from this task to the next in an endless
list of chores, flinging us into lifestyles that feel limp, lifeless, and
lacking. After all, there’s nothing special about cooking a weeknight
dinner, taking a walk around the block, or slipping helplessly to sleep,
right? But what if the draining items on your daily checklist actually
manifested spiritual truths? How might your days, satisfaction, and purpose
change as you realize that God moves within the pulse of the common and the
small? Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren answers these questions,
unraveling the contents of a life into the motions of the liturgy to
discover deep revelations in the typical day—an unlikely landing place for
the miraculous.
Read
on for key insights from Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday
Life.
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1. God pulls
goodness from the unglamorous—no day moves unseen in the light of baptism.
Jesus lived a relatively human
life prior to his baptism when, before his ministry even began, God
splashed words of love and favor over him. With God’s love directing his
days, Jesus accomplished the work his Father set before him. The revelation
of God’s love dripped over him like baptismal water, anointing his hours
with a purpose that would soon fall onto the heads of innumerable
believers.
In the Anglican church,
baptism is a crucial component of the typical liturgy, and it parallels the
way believers awaken into days filled with God’s love for them. Believers
in the Anglican church participate in infant baptism, guided by the
knowledge that God’s love for the individual eclipses each person’s
behavior, making it possible for them to receive this gift even as babies.
As believers enter their churches, they pause for a moment at the baptismal
font. While there, they place their fingers in the water before signing the
cross in acknowledgement of their baptism and the grace Jesus demonstrated
for them in his life and his death on the cross. This moment at the
baptismal font encapsulates what it means to live as people who know that
the miracle of their redemption wasn’t gathered by their own hands—there’s
nothing any believer did, can do, or will ever do to secure the Father’s
love. It’s always there, simply waiting for his followers to notice.
Similarly, the typical day
begins with extraordinary grace. Galatians 3:27 says, “for all of you who
were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ,” allowing
every bleary-eyed believer to stumble from her bed to the coffee pot
knowing that her life is gilded by grace. Who she is as a unique individual
and a child of God, is the prelude to her day. The tasks she accomplishes
afterward have no bearing on who she is—her actions are already grounded
and empowered by God. As the author poignantly writes, “Grace is a mystery
and the joyful scandal of the universe,” a fact that drifts in the ebb and
flow of everyday living and breathes color into days that feel tedious and
dim.
The hours that unfurl
before us, no matter how uninspired they appear, are the vehicles within
which we catch glimmers of the God who simultaneously fills and rises above
them. No part of the day is unimportant to him—every part, no matter how
trivial, is cradled by God. In his work The
Divine Conspiracy, philosopher and Christian thinker Dallas
Willard writes about the necessity of the average day to the believer’s
spirituality—her family situation, job, hobbies, limitations—these are the
things within which God moves.
The frustrating or
uneventful elements of our lives are necessary for the more evidently
meaningful parts to grow. Oftentimes, truth requires the breathing reality
of our seemingly small lives—the hours that fall in line like tired,
disillusioned soldiers are infused with unimaginable purpose.
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2. Routines
determine more than we think, and they yield meanings we may or may not
desire.
Most people give little
thought to the patterns that stitch their days into weeks, months, and
years. These nearly unconscious motions do their work undercover, prompting
people to perceive the world in a particular way. After growing
disillusioned with her typical morning habit of scrolling on her phone
before getting out of bed, the author switched things up. Normally, her
seemingly meaningless and short digital excursion moved her to seek
distraction in technology throughout the remainder of her day, and she’d
had enough. For Lent, she abandoned the early morning phone scrolling in
favor of a new practice. Upon waking, the author began making her bed and
enjoying a few moments of quiet in God’s presence, positioning her to
recognize his heart in all parts of her day.
The liturgy the author
practices in her Anglican church operates in a similarly constructive way.
As a particular kind of worship within the church, liturgies determine the
progression of a congregation’s Sunday service every week. Empowered by
God, the patterns of these liturgies move believers to glimpse reality
through a certain lens and act accordingly. Just as bad habits push people
into particular lifestyles, honorable ones do the same, prompting people to
establish lives that respect their health and humanity. Whether it’s
through pausing at a baptismal font, taking communion, or ending the
service with prayer, every church’s liturgy molds a believer in a
particular way, inclining her to expect a certain kind of spiritual
experience and to strive after a certain kind of daily experience as
well.
Excavating the deeply
buried bones that construct our day-to-day experience is crucial to
understanding the ways we perceive and build daily life ourselves. The
philosopher James K. A. Smith confronts the oftentimes subliminal, yet
highly impactful, power of cultural habits in his book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship,
Worldview, and Cultural Formation. In his work, Smith
encourages people to peer closely at their days, searching for underlying
habits that mark out a false path toward a seemingly ideal life.
It sounds far-fetched to
say that an innocent, harmless little scrolling addiction compels users to
seek a particular kind of damaging lifestyle, but it’s true. In a study by
the University of Virginia, participants chose either to undergo a
previously tried, unpleasant electric shock or sit in a 15-minute lapse of
silence. Not surprisingly, a majority of the men and a quarter of the women
opted for the voluntary shock instead of the small moment of quietude,
revealing the pervasiveness of culture’s drives for distraction,
excitement, and stimuli.
Days start to lose
their charm when we constantly demand the new, the fast, and the diverting.
As the day strains to meet our false expectations, we forfeit our ability
to catch sight of God and his goodness. Recapturing the simple loveliness
of everyday living requires that we untether ourselves from the noise. Just
as the author must make her bed every single morning regardless of how
often she completed the task before, we also must learn to accept the
routine, repetitive beauty of common life and authentic faith.
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3. The revelation
of truth isn’t always a strike of lightning; often it's a slow unwinding.
The average weeknight
dinner isn’t usually a gourmet spread, or a feast laid out on linen
tablecloths between candlesticks twinkling with dim flames. More likely,
your typical weeknight dinner is thrown together, an amalgam of a few
mismatched items that were cowering in your pantry for the last several
months. And yet, food is still food—whether dinner is filet mignon or a
bologna sandwich, life is sustained and strengthened through both. Just as
the plain, common old dinner provides sustenance, transformative truths
arrive gently in ways that may feel unexceptional. Truth is like a slow
cooked meal—it’s our job both to wait for it and to enjoy it when it
arrives.
In the Anglican liturgy,
believers’ reception of the Word and the sacraments is similarly edifying.
In many Protestant traditions, the sacraments include baptism and
Communion. The sacrament of Communion is also called the Eucharist, and in
the author’s Anglican tradition, it consists of a congregational meal.
These components are central both to the liturgy and to Christian life,
providing the strength believers need to discern truth in the everyday.
Similarly, these practices are interrelated, each informing the other and
ultimately provided by and leading to Jesus as the believer’s principal
source of provision.
While sitting around a
common dinner table, Jesus asked his disciples to eat the bread and drink
the wine in honorable memory of the things he had done and the things he
was yet to do for them. Jesus used something as simple and essential as
partaking in food to lead his disciples to ponder him and the gift of
redemption. Moreover, in John 6:55, Jesus tells his followers that his body
is the only “true food” that’s capable of sustaining life. Not only does
all earthly sustenance fall from Jesus, but all spiritual provision is
found in him as well.
Sometimes though, reading
the Bible feels like a chore—various passages are strange or nearly
impossible to understand, making believers who desire truth and revelation
want to close the book’s leather-bound cover with a flourish. But amidst
the believer’s inability to understand every detail of the Word, its power
fills her day. Reading the Word, despite confusing or lackluster
experiences, operates in the same way as one’s eating habits do—each
strengthens and inclines the person to hunger for particular things. In the
case of reading the Bible, the believer is situated to desire truth as an
authentic “worshiper” of Christ rather than a “consumer of spirituality.”
When the believer
approaches the Word, the sacrament, and even her simple breakfast with an
eye for truth and the humility required to perceive it as a blessing, she
is sustained. As words of grace fall from her lips and onto her simple
food, she’s restored and upheld in a truth that’s anything but bland.
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4. Beauty is
potent—no matter how miniature, its joy is magnetic.
We all know the feeling
that rises as we face an object of extraordinary beauty—a Rembrandt, the
Himalayan mountains, or a few notes of Bach are enough to inflame hidden
embers of joy. In Genesis 1, God creates his endlessly beautiful world
complete with light, water, sky, land, plants, animals, human beings, and
all manner of living things, calling each of his works “good,” worthy of
recognition and rapture. Even the seemingly commonplace beauties of the day
express the inherent elegance of God’s world. When a believer
experiences even a tiny fraction of the world’s beauty, she experiences an
aspect of God’s character.
Liturgical worship
manifests God’s beauty in a wealth of ways. Contemporary congregations and
ancient traditions have consistently used music, architecture, and other
art forms as a way to praise and recognize the praiseworthiness of God. In
the author’s own Anglican church, the sanctuary or sanctuarium in Latin,
a name drawn from the Latin word for “holy,” outwardly expresses the
details of the Bible with an elegantly rendered, symbolically potent space
of color, candles, and beauty. James K. A. Smith takes note of the historic
relevance of these external emblems of faith, observing that a significant
portion of a believer’s spiritual shaping initially takes place in physical
ways. Loveliness teaches believers about God, and worship channels this joy
and longing for beauty toward him.
Drawing from C. S. Lewis’s
fictional work The
Screwtape Letters, the author argues that moments of joy and
delight in the beautiful, however small they may seem, are not superfluous
to the Christian life—they are absolutely necessary to acknowledging one of
God’s most entrancing traits. That’s why the wizened demon of Lewis’s work
implores his protégé to prevent his assigned person from relishing even
tiny hints of the good, as together with the sensation of its opposite,
they’re “unmistakably real, and therefore...they give the man who feels
them a touchstone of reality,”—a terrifying revelation for a demon to
muster considering that “reality” is God himself.
Similarly, a member of the
Anglican church plays small hand chimes before the preparation of the
Eucharist as a melodic reminder that the time to partake has come. Just
like the tiny notes of church bells, even slight flashes of beauty move
people to ponder what lies beyond a simple purple flower or an especially
riveting film—small wonders are hints of a beautiful God.
In a society where truth is
often shunned as an irrelevant, outdated notion, the radiance of a
spiritual reality is more crucial than ever. When the recognition of truth
leaves, beauty must arise and reawaken people to the revelation of God, as
the literary artists and spiritual thinkers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Czesław
Miłosz note. Whether it’s through the light-smattered frames of stained
glass or the electrifying sensation of a hot shower in the morning, beauty
infuses our days with joy and thrills us toward thoughts of the Creator
himself.
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5. Nodding off at
night acknowledges human inability and invites God’s provision.
On the surface, there’s
nothing special about clambering into bed and shutting your eyes, but even
the necessary cycle of sleep encapsulates deep spiritual truths. Whether you
slumber in a bed fit for a king, or twist and turn on a tiny twin-sized
mattress, falling asleep resonates with revelations of God’s provision for
his people. The act of falling into bed at night recognizes human
insufficiency—the ability to close one’s eyes mirrors the believer’s
capacity to trust a God who is entirely sufficient, both as she breathes
through the day and as she snores in the night.
The power of the Anglican
liturgy lies not in its carefully ordered routine or its beautifully
crafted atmosphere—the spiritual significance of the liturgy lies in its
complete reliance upon Jesus for believers’ renewal. Just as people slip
into sleep at night, worshipful believers fall into the movement of the
liturgy, dependent only upon God for refreshment. Protestant author Mark
Galli writes in his work Beyond
Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy,
that despite culture’s growing influence on the church, leading congregants
to attempt to encounter God by their own strength, the liturgy makes space
for authentic restoration directed by God himself. Presence is all a
believer needs to invite God’s renewal.
But as culture chafes
against any indications of dependency, sleep drifts into a rare commodity.
According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
conducted in 2013, too many sleepless nights have created a public health
problem, signaling what the author calls a “spiritual crisis—a culture of
disordered love and disordered worship.” In an attempt to accomplish all
that’s humanly possible in a thin slice of day, many people skimp on sleep
and destroy their health and wellbeing in the process. At the altar of
human proficiency, culture places human ability above the real power of
God.
Believers must learn to
reorder their physical days and spiritual lives within the context of a God
who provides endlessly. Genesis 1 and the customs of Judaism capture how
believers can do just that, replacing self-denial with the gift of God’s
supply. As Genesis 1 states several times, “And there was evening and there
was morning,” the Jewish tradition recognizes the restorative abilities of
God by welcoming the day with a good night’s sleep. The drift into night
marks the beginning of day and creates space for God to enter and refresh
weary believers with his love.
Relinquishing oneself to
sleep mirrors how believers may approach God—both freely and dependently,
weary and hopeful that Jesus will breathe his love into yet another
seemingly average, relentlessly divine day.
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