Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Mundane, routine, and unspiritual. For many I know, those words describe how their everyday life feels. They hope for more, but due to the pace of life and the quality of life they are seeking to maintain or achieve, a life of meaning and a closer connection with God seem reserved for pastors and monks. Yet, it is precisely in those moments that seem ordinary, routine, and un-sacred that are the very places ripe with opportunity. That’s the take-a-way from Tish Harrison Warren’s book Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life.Tish, an Anglican priest, examines the mundane and the struggles that we inevitable encounter on a daily basis to connect our daily liturgy with the Sunday liturgy. While such an inspection could lead a book that comes across preachy, Tish’s book instead feels like a candid yet principled look at a normal day with its moments that reveal our brokenness and daily circumstances that invite us toward abundance.The way Tish achieves this is by chronicling her daily routines to uncover how it serves as a formational liturgy. Tish connects our weekly worship liturgy, “a ritualized way of worship” (no matter how high or informal a church you attend, there is a rhythm that constitutes a liturgy or), with our daily routines and activities that are more formative than our Sunday liturgy. She rightly notes the purpose of the Sunday liturgy, “[to] teach us a particular idea of the good life, and we are sent out into our week as people who bear out that vision in our workaday world” (31). However, our everyday habits often form us with a different aim or vision of the good life. Tish builds on a question from the work of James K. A. Smith, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?” (31). Thus, Tish seeks to uncover how her daily activities shape her for a life lived in God’s presence.While not preachy, Tish is brutally honest with the readers, “I’m a pacifist who yells at her husband” (76). Such candor makes Tish’s book relatable. This makes her critiques and insights more palpable. Tish observes that “In contemporary America…daily formation is often at odds with our formation in Word and sacrament” (73). It is no wonder then that too often and for too many of us the sacraments in worship come off as irrelevant and the sermon as dry. Perhaps it is not the fault of worship or the sermon, but perhaps it is our lack of formation. Tish’s exploration is revealing of her faults which gives us the safety to examine our own routines. While mostly descriptive, Tish is prescriptive at times as well, giving us a way of recovering practices that might help us live into what our worship and sacraments teach.While I share a life-stage (parent) and career (pastor), the daily habits Tish inspects are habits we can likely all relate. Like Tish, many of our morning routines begin with the “digital caffeine” of checking our smartphones. What makes Tish’s book so beneficial is taking these observations and then connecting them with how these habits form us in ways we might be unaware. “How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life” (24).An example comes from chapter five entitled, “eating leftovers” which she uses to contemplate justice issues. “Despite what a culture of consumerism may lead me to believe, my leftovers are not theologically neutral” (70). By contrast, “the economy of the Eucharist calls me to a life of self-emptying worship” (72).Though some connections might be novel for some, many times she voices moments of reflection that we’ve all probably pondered. While attempting to enjoying a glass of tea, she’s trying not to be distracted by the many other chores clamoring. This leads her to consider, “Tea and an empty hour can feel frivolous or frittering. I feel guilty about not doing something more important with my time, like laundry or balancing the checkbook or meeting my neighbors or working or volunteering or serving the poor” (136).The real benefit to Tish’s work is in exposing how we can and should be theologically reflective about the life we are called to live without romanticizing that call. I knew this book was for me when I read the title of chapter 4, “losing keys” and chapter 8 “sitting in traffic.” For me, such moments are when I am tempted to seek an escapist attitude and am tempted to believe that I could be more holy if I didn’t have to bother about these sorts of activities. But Tish’s observation is biting, “We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out” (22). She reinforces what I believe but not what I want. I want sanctification that happens instantly. But what we believe as Wesleyans is that sanctification is precisely through the daily stuff of life, when connected to who we are called be in by our baptism and from our communion liturgy, that real growth occurs.She is even able to note how our sleep rituals reveal. “Our sleep habits both reveal and shape our lives. A decent indicator of what we love is that for which we willingly give up sleep” (142). Thus, she confesses, “My disordered sleep reveals a disordered love, idols of entertainment or productivity” (142).The critiques Tish does offer are not cynical but rather are offered to reveal how these habits we too easily fall into, as a church and as individuals, mis-form us for kingdom living. As it relates to how our worship does or does not form us, “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” (34-35). Reflecting our how our dietary habits relate to our desires and the church’s consumer based program model: “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 gluten and malnourished” (69). And again, “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” (69).As biting as her critiques might be she articulates a reality that is desperately needed, “Biblically, there is no divide between ‘radical’ and ‘ordinary’ believers” (84). While a consumerist society that dulls our senses might shape us into desiring an “edgy faith”, Tish proclaims, “the kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary” (35).As you can probably tell by now, I would highly recommend this book to church leaders and laity a like. This book includes discussion questions and suggested practices for each chapter, making it great for groups. If you have a class or are in a class looking for book to connect spirituality and the every day, I think Tish’s book is a great starting point.Though not explicitly Wesleyan, this book fits seamlessly with Wesley’s ideas of building holy tempers. Tish has done the church a great service by reflecting on and critiquing her implicit liturgy for all to learn from and become more aware of how to live a sanctified life.

Good read. And a good reminder of how living a life of discipleship to Christ is in the day-to-day decisions as much (or even more) than in those fewer and father between life changing decisions. Have to note, that half the pages were printed in error, with a half inch vertical offset, starting at page 121. Of course I did not get there until several months after I bought it or I would have requested re-print.

I’ve always had a hard time seeing how the spiritual and the mundane can overlap. It seems like trying to push together two magnets with the same poles, or trying to mix oil and water: it will never work. Yet in a quiet, unassuming manner, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary does the extraordinary by making the case that we are meant to live life intertwining our spiritual practices with our daily routines.Warren begins the first chapter comparing our waking up in the morning with the sacrament of baptism, pointing out that just as with waking we have not yet done anything worthy of recognition, in a similar manner baptism acknowledges that God sanctifies us while we are still sinners and we do nothing to earn his grace. Warren writes, “We are marked from our first waking moment by an identity that is given to us by grace: an identity that is deeper and more real than any other identity we will don that day.”In subsequent chapters, she takes readers through the course of an average day, exploring the overlooked significance of other mundane rituals such as eating leftovers, checking email, and waiting in traffic, and articulating how we have the opportunity to meet God in each of these simple tasks. (Even brushing teeth gets its own chapter.) “Our hearts and our loves,” Warren says, “are shaped by what we do again and again and again.” This applies not only to what we practice inside the walls of a church but also what we practice inside the walls of our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and out and about in the rest of the world.Throughout this book, the author demonstrates in very simple, concrete examples how the ordinary can be sacred and the sacred can be ordinary. After all, what does ordinary mean but “the regular or customary condition or course of things” (according to Merriam-Webster)? Don’t we have regular routines and customs in church liturgy as well as in our daily liturgies of waking, eating, working, and sleeping? And didn’t Jesus, the son of God, walk among us as a fully embodied human being who needed to eat and sleep as well as pray and preach?Above all, as Warren points out, “And before we begin the liturgies of our day—the cooking, sitting in traffic, emailing, accomplishing, working, resting—we begin beloved.” What a matchless blessing that is! No matter what we do or don’t do, God still loves us, and he is ready to meet us right where we are—whether we are just waking up, looking for our missing keys, or staring down another plate of boring leftovers.(Note: My church read this as a congregation during Lent, discussing the book in our small groups. With questions and suggested exercises in the back of the book, it is very well suited for group discussion, but I think it would also work well as a personal devotional.)

Tish Harrison Warren shows us the way to holiness by paying attention to the everyday occurrences of our lives. There is so much wisdom in this book one cannot do justice to her insights in a short review. The most important sentence in my view occurs near the end of the book. ". . .Jesus calls us to give up our faith in our own spiritual striving and to abide in him. 'The liturgy is a place where we wait for Jesus to show up . . ." (pp. 149-50) It seems to me that the entire book is a lesson about waiting for Jesus to show up in our daily lives. The author's thoughts, not only in this book but also in other writings are a map for fruitful and holy daily living.