Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Summary: Seeking spiritual depth from ordinary life.

I have been reluctant to pick this up because so many have recommended it. I know I shouldn't do that, but contrarianism is part of who I am. I also picked it up toward the end of the year when I was already way over my self imposed limit on reading more White authors. It seemed relevant at the time to the paper I was working on for my spiritual direction class. Although I ended up cutting the section of my paper that I referenced Liturgy of the Ordinary because it was too long, it did help me focus the essay.

The general focus of the book is to seek to find God in the mundane because the mundane is where we are most of the time. One of my objections to the book is also one of its strengths. Reflections like this are necessarily personal and encultured. We cannot make broad reflections that our outside of our culture and experience because they are then not ours. We are Christians, not abstractly but within our culture and experience.  So while I assumed going in that this book would be White, middle class, educated reflections, there was still some frustration with falling into stereotypes, and some pleasure when there were sections that I did not expect.

Even though Liturgy of the Ordinary is only three years old, it feels like so many people have previously read it that I can see its impact in other books and especially other articles. Part of that perception of widespread impact is that what is happening in the book is not actually new. I picked this up as a counterpoint to William Berry's Finding God in All Things, which is an exploration of Ignatian spiritual practice and very similar in broad theme.

There is a lot of grace in the Liturgy of the Ordinary, and that grace is necessary and helpful; ordinary life can be hard. Rev Warren's discussion about getting into arguments with her husband and needing to seek forgiveness, of having human limitations, of needing others, is part of what it means to be human. Humans are limited creatures and part of Christian discipleship is to embrace the limitations and live within them. Our culture wants us to perform and rise above our human limitations, but part of what Christ's incarnation should show us is that even Christ, the true God made man, was human and had human limitations. Jesus needed sleep; he needed rest and time alone, he needed friends and community, and he could not have been born without a mother, and he could not have been a human without being a baby that had to be cared for.

The Liturgy of the Ordinary is a model of finding God. And it is a good one. God is in the mundane, and we do need to strive to see him there. At the same time, we also need to be striving to see God outside of ourselves and to have grace toward others that find him differently than we do.

Tish Harrison Warren takes a close look at the liturgy as it stands in traditional Christian churches and then highlights elements of our ordinary lives that serve as daily sacred liturgy.

Doesn't that sound fabulous? It is.

All you will have to do is look at the table of contents and you will want to read this marvelous book.

1. Waking: Baptism and Learning to Be Beloved
2. Making the Bed: Liturgy, Ritual, and What Forms a Life
3. Brushing Teeth: Standing, Kneeling, Bowing, and Living in a Body
4. Losing Keys: Confession and the Truth about Ourselves
5. Eating Leftovers: Word, Sacrament, and Overlooked Nourishment
6. Fighting with My Husband: Passing the Peace and the Everyday Work of Shalom
7. Checking Email: Blessing and Sending
8. Sitting in Traffic: Liturgical Time and an Unhurried God
9. Calling a Friend: Congregation and Community
10. Drinking Tea: Sanctuary and Savoring
11. Sleeping: Sabbath, Rest, and the Work of God

A dear friend loaned this book to me. Over the last couple of years, she and I have had several conversations about what it means or looks like to pray, what worship looks like in daily life, making time for quiet time with God amidst all the things. I struggle with the latter one especially, even on the best of days, and on the worst days, I can't seem to find God (or maybe space for God is the right phrase) even though I know He's there somewhere. My friend had recently picked up this book, read the first chapter and decided I needed to read it first. (She knows I read and return books, because I'm a good friend. Matt saw me reading this and also wanted to read it, but I'm going to give it back to my friend first because Matt is not a reader of books or a returner-er of borrowed books, and therefore is not a good friend. ;))

I guess the best way to describe this book was restful. It felt peaceful to read about all the things I also do on a given day (or at least some days - I don't lose my keys or fight with my spouse often), and thinking about those things through the lens of worship, especially on days when it's hard to pray. Plus, the breaks in each chapter offer different perspectives on the same actions/ideas, and I liked that a lot.

Chapters:
• Waking: baptism and learning to be beloved - remembering the renewal of baptism and greeting every morning as a new creation
• Making the bed: liturgy, ritual and what forms a life - being intentional in our routines, and how worshipful liturgy forms a guide in doing so
• Brushing teeth: standing, kneeling, bowing and living in a body - remembering that Jesus was a man, and had the same issues we do of having to care for himself; how these daily tasks of body care are not meaningless, and denigrating ourselves is to denigrate what God has created
• Losing keys: confession and the truth about ourselves - acknowledging our sin and allowing ourselves the knowledge of forgiveness even when our selves in these moments aren't pretty or good
• Eating leftovers: Word, sacrament and overlooked nourishment - daily bread, and similar to the brushing teeth chapter, that so much is just maintenance, but that doesn't make it unimportant
• Fighting with my husband: passing the peace and the everyday work of shalom - the action of “passing the peace”/greeting our neighbors at church, and what it looks like to have actual community and peace with those around you
• Checking email: blessing and sending - being content with the work put in front of you, whatever it is; the idea that no vocation is holier or better than another
• Sitting in traffic: liturgical time and an unhurried God - how rhythms of time make us feel like we have control over time, and how the annual liturgical calendar displays God's time
• Calling a friend: congregation and community - a personal relationship with God, and “being the church”
• Drinking tea: sanctuary and savoring - the small pleasures of life and the delight we get in them, and the delight of God in his creation
• Sleeping: Sabbath, rest and the work of God - we are not limitless, we have and need patterns of rest, and what we do in place of rest displays our values

I love what this book represents, and my interest levels were high going into it. I love how Warren was creative in splitting the chapters up into parts of the day, and experiences that the regular human will find themselves in day by day. However, maybe it's because I've been exploring ‘faith in the mundane' over the last few years or so (and have therefore dived deeper than I thought down the rabbit hole), but I found that this book failed to expand the conversation into any meaningful area. I don't know if it was the overly-domesticated Texan Mom examples, or the (at times) unnecessary length of the chapters, but it didn't feel succinct. It's definitely 2.5 stars for me but I rounded down, rather than up, for the reasons above.

I thought this book was okay. Was a little too Christianese for me at times. I love the encouragement of rituals it gives tho. My favorite part was the end where reflection / journaling questions are asked from each chapter / topic.