Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Habits shape our desires. I desired ramen noodles more than good, nourishing food because, over time, I had taught myself to crave certain things and not others. In the same way 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

he says that this heavenly bread is his very flesh and calls them to feed on it as their “true food”

We need this kind of embodied beauty—smells and bells—in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are.

you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary.

Nourishment is always far more than biological nutrition. We are nourished by our communities. We are nourished by gratitude. We are nourished by justice. We are nourished when we know and love our neighbors.

Religion in our time has been captured by a tourist mindset. . . . We go to see a new personality, to hear a new truth, to get a new experience and so somehow to expand our otherwise humdrum life.”

Our powerful need for sleep is a reminder that we are finite. God is the only one who never slumbers nor sleeps.

In the Christian faith it’s almost a philosophical principle that the universal is known through the particular and the abstract through the concrete.

Food has so much to teach us about nourishment, and as a culture we struggle with what it means to be not simply fed, but profoundly and holistically nourished.

This is not the Valley of the Shadow of Death. This is the roadside ditch of broken things and lost objects, the potholes of gloom and unwanted interruptions.