Liturgy of the Ordinary

Everyone already has a liturgy. Drawing on philosopher James K. A. Smith, Warren argues we are shaped less by conscious beliefs than by repeated practices that aim our loves. A liturgy is any ritualized pattern that forms us. The question is never whether you have one, but what kind of person it is making you.

The smartphone as false sacrament. Warren describes grabbing her phone first thing each morning like digital caffeine, becoming imprinted on glowing screens the way a rescued wild animal imprints on humans. For Lent she swapped the ritual: she made her bed and sat in silence. A University of Virginia study found two-thirds of men chose to self-administer electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. Repetition, not novelty, forms a durable faith.

Christianity is embodied, not floaty. Brushing teeth becomes a meditation on the incarnation. Warren rejects both Christian body-denial and body-obsession, insisting Scripture treats the body as integral to worship. Jesus slept, ate, groomed, and would have had bad breath. She cites the Jewish Asher Yatzar, a prayer recited after using the bathroom that thanks God for the body's openings and hollows.

Bodies are the most sacred objects on earth. Warren argues our muscles and teeth are more sacred than any communion chalice. Sexual sin scandalizes Scripture not because the body is dirty but because misusing it profanes something holy, like using consecrated wine in an occult rite. When words for prayer failed her after a hard year, she found she could still kneel; her body led her into prayer.

Lost keys as apocalypse. Warren narrates losing her keys and spiraling through logic, self-condemnation, vexation, desperation, and despair over a two-inch piece of metal. Apocalypse literally means unveiling. These petty crises expose how tightly she clings to control and how little she has. Her lost keys reveal anxiety about competence; her broken dishwasher reveals an idolatry of ease.

Repentance is a daily rhythm, not a dramatic event. She cites musician Rich Mullins, who as a boy rededicated his life yearly at camp, then quarterly, then in his forties about four times a day. C. S. Lewis noted people ask for the patience a famine would require while grumbling at bad weather. Warren argues we have a robust theology for great suffering but ignore God in the daily grind, spending real days in low-grade despair.

A pacifist who yells at her husband. Warren confesses she dreams of global shalom while quarreling with her spouse over their daughter's schooling. Shalom is a Hebrew word for God's all-encompassing, all-redeeming peace. She quotes C. S. Lewis's demon Screwtape, who coaches a junior devil to keep a man praying passionately for humanity's soul while insulting his actual wife.

Passing the peace rehearses reconciliation. In liturgy, worshipers greet each other with the peace of Christ right before communion, enacting that you cannot approach the table unreconciled. Early Christians kissed; a third-century deacon would cry out asking if anyone held a grudge. Warren connects this to William Wilberforce's abolition, achieved not by one hero but by thousands of unnamed people making small choices, like a shopkeeper refusing to sell slave-harvested sugar. Anne Lamott calls earth Forgiveness School, best begun at the dinner table.

Vocational holiness. Checking a dreaded email inbox becomes a meditation on work. The Puritans taught that we are sanctified not abstractly but through our specific craft: you become a holy blacksmith, mother, or systems analyst, not holy in general. The Reformation's scandal was declaring a diaper-changing parent as near to God as the pope, toppling the medieval ranking of monks and priests above ordinary laborers.

Beware the new hierarchy. Warren notes evangelicals now often elevate world-changing, poverty-focused jobs and quietly denigrate the rest. A friend left a conference feeling only radical careers mattered and everyone else just funded them. She commends the ministry of competence, illustrated by Dee, an excellent medical scheduler who kept a soulless office humane. She seeks a third way between workaholism and escapist contemplation, working as prayer, ora et labora.

Traffic as spiritual training. Stuck on Interstate 35, Warren confronts her illusion that she controls time. Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argues sin is essentially impatience, breaking out of time, snatching prematurely at what God intends to give slowly. Christians live in liminal time, the already and not yet, perpetually waiting.

Liturgical time reorders the calendar. The church year, with Advent before Christmas and Lent before Easter, always pairs preparation with celebration: first we fast, then we feast. This counters a consumer culture that rushes from Halloween to Christmas to the Super Bowl in constant revelry. Warren's friend Jan, painting through recurring cancer, made a canvas with a keyhole and told her, I always felt I was waiting for the gift, but I've come to see the waiting is the gift. A fallow field is never truly dormant.

Call and response friendship. Warren's long-distance friendship with Rebekka, sustained by rambling voicemails, models Christian community as antiphonal, speaking the good news back and forth. But she insists private friendship is not a substitute for church. Quoting Cyprian via Calvin, she argues you cannot have God as Father without the church as mother.

Love the church that wounds you. Warren rejects the popular consumer view that treats church as an optional service for individual spiritual needs, citing an author who claims to have graduated from church. After being deeply wounded by someone powerful in her congregation, she nearly quit, but a new church nursed her back, calling her the walking wounded. Flannery O'Connor said you suffer as much from the church as for it. The universal church is only ever accessed through a particular, irritating, local congregation.

Pleasure as touchstone of reality. Drinking tea, Warren argues delight is a legitimate response to God's goodness, not a distraction from holiness. Screwtape, the senior demon, frets that genuine pleasure gives a person a touchstone of reality and breeds self-forgetfulness. Contrary to the Puritan stereotype, monks invented coffee culture; cappuccino is named for the brown of Capuchin habits.

Enjoyment is a muscle. Overwhelmed after her first child's birth, Warren asked her mentor Father Kenny what to give up for Lent. He said, your whole life is Lent right now, and told her to take up the discipline of pleasure instead. Chesterton imagined God with childlike vitality, telling the sun do it again each morning, never tiring of monotony. Warren distinguishes pleasures of need from pleasures of appreciation, warning that the greedy cry of Encore turns a gift into an addiction.

Rest exposes your limits. Warren closes the day arguing that sleep forces us to admit we are finite creatures, not the unlimited beings advertising promises we can be. Nearly 30 percent of American adults sleep under six hours nightly; the CDC calls insufficient sleep a public health problem. She reads this not merely as a medical issue but as a spiritual one, a culture of disordered love that disdains creaturely limits.

Sleep rehearses death and trust. Scripture uses death and sleep interchangeably; each night is a small memento mori, a reminder we will die. Early Wesleyan circuit-riding preachers worked up to a hundred hours a week until so many collapsed that the church created a worn-out ministers' fund, treating exhaustion as another cause rather than rethinking it. In Jewish time, the day begins at evening, so we start by sleeping while God works. We wake up, as one pastor put it, better people than when we lay down.