Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

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.”

The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”7

The body of Christ is made of all kinds of people, some of whom I find obnoxious, arrogant, self-righteous, or misguided (charges, I’m sure, others have rightly applied to me).

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

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.

I began to feel like the sort of Christianity that I gravitated toward only required my brain.

We prepare. We practice waiting.

what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith. We need to learn the slow habits of loving God and those around us.

Both involve discipline and ritual. Both require that we cease relying on our own effort and activity and lean on God for his sufficiency.

The words of the liturgy felt like a mother rocking me, singing over me, speaking words of blessing again and again. I was relaxing into the church like an overtired child collapsing on her mom.