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Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary invites us to uncover the sacred in the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life. How ordinary, you ask? Incredibly ordinary! With chapter titles like Waking, Making the Bed, Brushing Teeth, and Losing Keys, this book takes you on a journey through a day so familiar it feels like your own.
But don’t be fooled by the simplicity. Warren masterfully weaves earthy, practical experiences with profound theological insights, reminding us that our extraordinary God is present in the smallest, most ordinary details of our lives.
Through the lens of her life as a mother, wife, friend, Anglican priest, and campus minister, Warren shares wisdom and humor that will open your eyes to the holiness woven into your everyday routine.
Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and comforted as you explore the divine beauty in your ordinary day. Come along and see how the sacred meets the simple!
See below my Kindle highlights.
Notebook for
Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
Citation (APA): Warren, T. H. (2016). Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
1 Waking: Baptism and Learning to Be Beloved
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Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe.
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The psalmist declares, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” This one. We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God. God, in delight and wisdom, has made, named, and blessed this average day. What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.
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God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.
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we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”4
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What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?
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There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.
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Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6
2 Making the Bed: Liturgy, Ritual, and What Forms a Life
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The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.
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and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary.
3 Brushing Teeth: Standing, Kneeling, Bowing, and Living in a Body
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So much of life, unavoidably, is just maintenance.
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This is especially true of our bodies.
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Having a body is a lot of work.
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in orthodox Christianity, our bodies matter profoundly.
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the Christianity we find in Scripture values and honors the body.
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When Jesus redeems us, that redemption occurs in our bodies. And when we die, we will not float away to heaven and leave our bodies behind but will experience the resurrection of our bodies.
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Our bodies and souls are inseparable, and therefore what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined.
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Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship and discipleship.
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If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.
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we must learn the habit of beholding our bodies as a gift, and learn to delight in the body God has made for us, that God loves, and that God will one day redeem and make whole.
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Because of the embodied work of Jesus, my body is destined for redemption and for eternal worship—for eternal skipping and jumping and twirling and hand raising and kneeling and dancing and singing and chewing and tasting.
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When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body.
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I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious.
4 Losing Keys: Confession and the Truth About Ourselves
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This is the roadside ditch of broken things and lost objects, the potholes of gloom and unwanted interruptions. 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. These moments are an opportunity for formation, for sanctification.
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When the day is lovely and sunny and everything is going according to plan, I can look like a pretty good person. But little things gone wrong and interrupted plans reveal who I really am; my cracks show and I see that I am profoundly in need of grace.
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When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.
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The call to contentment is a call amidst the concrete circumstances I find myself in today.
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I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.
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I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.
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repentance and faith are the constant, daily rhythms of the Christian life, our breathing out and breathing in.
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Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.
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The practice of confession and absolution must find its way into the small moments of sinfulness in my day. When it does, the gospel—grace itself—seeps into my day, and these moments are transformed.
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God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.
5 Eating Leftovers: Word, Sacrament, and Overlooked Nourishment
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Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread. We are endlessly in need of nourishment, and nourishment comes, usually, like taco soup. Abundant and overlooked.
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Eugene Peterson calls this quest for spiritual intensity a consumer-driven “market for religious experience in our world.” He says that “there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
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How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread.
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with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice.
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God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.
6 Fighting with My Husband: Passing the Peace and the Everyday Work of Shalom
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I can get caught up in big ideas of justice and truth and neglect the small opportunities around me to extend kindness, forgiveness, and grace.
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I am increasingly aware that I cannot seek God’s peace and mission in the world without beginning right where I am, in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church, with the real people right around me.
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Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.
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Steven reminds me of reality—the world is no tea party.
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I also need to remember that my small sphere, my ordinary day, matters to the mission—that the ordinary and unnoticed passing of the peace each day is part of what God is growing in and through me. It will bring a harvest, in good time.
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We can become far too comfortable with the American status quo, and we need prophetic voices that challenge us to follow our radical, comfort-afflicting Redeemer. But we must also learn to follow Jesus in this workaday world of raising kids, caring for our neighbors, budgeting, doing laundry, and living our days responsibly with stability, generosity, and faithfulness.
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It will cost us something to be about this ministry of reconciliation—even in our kitchens, even in comfy pants.
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We are quarreling people, but God is reforming us to be people who, through our ordinary moments, establish his kingdom of peace.
7 Checking Email: Blessing and Sending
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The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices.
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We are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.
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The idea that all good work is holy work was revolutionary. The Reformation toppled a vocational hierarchy that had placed monks, nuns, and priests at the top and everyone else below.
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The Reformers taught that a farmer may worship God by being a good farmer and that a parent changing diapers could be as near to Jesus as the pope. This was a scandal.
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The Christian faith teaches that all work that is not immoral or unethical is part of God’s kingdom mission.
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all work, even a simple, small task, matters eternally.
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Each week when we gather for worship we enact again the reality that we are blessed and sent.
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This kingdom vision—our identity as those blessed and sent—must work itself out in the small routines of our daily work and vocation, as we go to meetings, check our email, make our children dinner, or mow the lawn.
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Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet above the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.
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Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.
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We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life.
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Garber says, In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplaces of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.
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We are part of God’s big vision and mission—the redemption of all things—through the earthy craft of living out our vocation, hour by hour, task by task. I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.
8 Sitting in Traffic: Liturgical Time and an Unhurried God
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In my frenetic life, I forget how to slow down and wait.
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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.
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the reality is that I do not control time. Every day I wait. I wait for help, for healing, for days to come, for rescue and redemption. And like all of us, I’m waiting to die.
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Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.
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How can I live as one who watches and waits for the coming kingdom when I can barely wait for water to boil?
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Patience [is] the basic constituent of Christianity . . . the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one’s own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the lamb which is led.
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Because of Christ’s work, we wait with expectation. We replace the despair that the passing of time inevitably brings—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—with faith—“if we have died with him, we shall also live with him.”
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Scripture tells us that when we “hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:25). We live each ordinary day in the light of a future reality. Our best life is still to come.
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Jan, who had practiced waiting far longer and better than I, knew what it was like to wait patiently, believing that God’s timing is perfect and that, mysteriously, there is more happening while we wait than just waiting.
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Tertullian. The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.
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our patience does not make us passive about the brokenness of the world. We are not blithely waiting to abandon this world for another. Christian faith is never an otherwordly, pie-in-the-sky sentimentality that ignores the injustice and darkness around us. We know that things are not as they should be.
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Christians are marked not only by patience, but also by longing. We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world. As Smith puts it, we “will always sit somewhat uneasy in the present, haunted by the brokenness of the ‘now.’ The future we hope for—a future when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream—hangs over our present and gives us a vision of what to work for in the here and now as we continue to pray, ‘Your kingdom come.’”
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The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom to come.
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we are people who live by a different story. And not just by a story, but in a story. God is redeeming all things, and our lives—even our days—are part of that redemption.
9 Calling a Friend: Congregation and Community
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In his Institutes, John Calvin quotes Cyprian’s famous dictum (drawing on Paul’s language in Galatians 4) that “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
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our love for the church universal is worked out in the hard pews (or folding chairs) of our particular, local congregation. A local congregation, a parish, is our small, concrete entry into the universal church. It is the basic unit of Christian community and the place where we encounter God in Word and sacrament.
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God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them.
10 Drinking Tea: Sanctuary and Savoring
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Workaholism and constant connectivity fight against our ability to be present to the pleasure of the moment.
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Chesterton imagines that God revels in the pleasure of his creation like an enthusiastic child: Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
11 Sleeping: Sabbath, Rest, and the Work of God
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my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.
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Our need for sleep reveals that we have limits. We are unable to defend ourselves, to keep ourselves safe, to master the world around us. Sleep exposes reality. We are frail and weak. We need a guide and a guard.
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Most of us spend much time and energy trying to avoid the reality that we and those we love will die. But in facing the reality of death, we learn how to live rightly. We learn how to live in light of our limits and the brevity of our lives. And we learn to live in the hope of the resurrection.
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Each night when we yield to sleep, we practice letting go of our reliance on self-effort and abiding in the good grace of our Creator. Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us.
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In our workaholic, image-barraged, overcaffeinated, entertainment-addicted, and supercharged culture, submission to our creatureliness is a necessary and often overlooked part of discipleship.
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God wants to give us not just lives of holiness and prayer but also of sufficient rest.
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