I’m changing track slightly today and reviewing a nonfiction book (gasp!).
While I can (and often do) read a novel in a day, nonfiction takes me a lot longer. Liturgy of the Ordinary certainly did—it released in 2016, and mine is an advance reviewer copy …
There are several reasons for this. One is that I find I have to slow down for nonfiction—I can’t devour good nonfiction in a day the way I devour a great novel. I also find that nonfiction tends to speak to us in different seasons of life. If I’m trying to read a book in the wrong season, it’s like trying to build a snowman in midsummer: I might be willing, but there is just nothing there to work with.
Liturgy of the Ordinary was like that.
It’s a book to be read slowly and savoured, not devoured in a day.
Ironic, given it’s structured around the activities of a typical day.
Different people will probably read different things into the book (isn’t that one of the brilliant things about writing?). My view is that the overarching theme is that most of us do live ordinary lives … and that’s okay. That’s what God has called us to. That’s how we are to honour God, in the ordinary.
Warren says:
I’m living this life, the life right in front of me. This one where we aren’t living as we thought we might or as we hoped we would.
(Actually, that makes sense. Ordinary is the opposite of extraordinary. If we were all pastors of mega-churches or world-famous evangelists or sought-after preachers, those things wouldn’t be the extraordinary. They’d be the ordinary, and we’d all be longing for what we now disparagingly call ordinary).
When Warren refers to liturgies, she isn’t just referring to the worship practices of traditional churches. She’s talking about our everyday liturgies … our habits and traditions:
Examining our daily life through the lens of liturgy allows us to see who these habits are shaping us to be, and the ways we can live as people who have been loved and transformed by God.
She confronts and challenges our subconscious views, our desire to get rid of the boring stuff to live a thrilling, edgy kind of faith. She worries that we’re addicted to novelty and stimulation rather than actively seeking solitude and silence, as Jesus did. She challenges us to be content in all circumstances, even dirty dishes and unmade beds and lost keys. She challenges our impatience, our desire to be happy and fulfilled now, our never-ending quest to control our time and get to the end of the to-do list.
She quotes Dorothy Bass in Receiving the Day:
We come to believe that we, not God, are the masters of time. We come to believe that our worth must be proved by the way we spend our hours and that our ultimate safety depends on our own good management.
Guilty as charged … I have been tracking my daily mobile phone usage this year, and have discovered (!) that the days where I feel I’ve been most productive are the days when I’ve spent the least time on my phone (who knew, right?).
Finally, Warren challenges us to rest.
She points out that while evangelism has produced many positive changes in society (such as the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and the protection of children), it has also embraced a “culture of frenzy and grandiosity” to the point where we’re all exhausted. We need to reclaim the Sabbath and actually rest.
We don’t need to go all out, doing all the things, to get Jesus to show up. He’s already here. We just need to slow down for long enough to notice.
We need to rest.
So if you’re stuck on the never-ending hamster wheel of doing, perhaps it’s time to pick up Liturgy of the Ordinary and allow yourself to focus on the small instead of the big, on being instead of doing.
Thanks to InterVarsity Press and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review. And sorry for taking over six years to read it.
About Tish Harrison Warren
Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. After eight years with InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries at Vanderbilt and The University of Texas at Austin, she currently serves as Co-Associate Rector at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, PA.
She writes regularly for The Well, CT Women, and Christianity Today. Her work has also appeared in Comment Magazine, Christ and Pop Culture, Art House America, Anglicanpastor.com, and elsewhere. She is author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (IVP). She is from Austin, TX, and now lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two young daughters in a house chock full of books with no matching forks or matching socks anywhere to be found.
Find Tish Harrison Warren online at:
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About Liturgy of the Ordinary
Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something―making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys―that the author does every day. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Tish Harrison Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday. Each activity is related to a spiritual practice as well as an aspect of our Sunday worship.
Come and discover the holiness of your every day.
