Routine, Ritual, and Liturgy

Whether it is a pandemic, a heartbreak, a world upside down, financial bleakness, raw nerves from tussling children...we wear down. At some point, we hedge a bit of the battle as we push back entropy, the physics principle that tells us the universe is in a state of decline unless acted upon by an outside force.

In these weary times (dangerous tired?), we need to find banks for our river...the river of our thoughts, our feelings, our expectations, banks that hold our coping and our enduring and our overcoming.

These banks can be found in rituals, routines, liturgy, and ceremony.  More or less, I refer to these interchangeably. They all have the quality of repetition and crossing the threshold of seen and unseen.  They connect us to our spiritual nature. 

It is important to acknowledge routine because it shapes us. Whether or not we realize it, we all walk and move in ritual.  Do you wake up and take a shower?  Make a cup of coffee?  Look at your phone for what you missed in the handful of hours you were asleep?  And that is just examining the first 30 minutes of your day.  Suspicion would suggest that you would find routine and mini-rituals in most aspects of our moments and days.

They are more significant than we would ever accidentally notice. Their power is worth examining because even after we incline our attention toward them, we don’t effortlessly acknowledge them; or as I love to say….govern them. They govern us.

There is a search for the string laced between mundane meals, making beds and money and moving dishes from washer to cabinet...and a lifestyle of encounter with the Lord.

It’s one that is categorically a lifeline to those of us stifled in too much hustle- traction, and too little spinning-wheeled-traction.

I would like to offer that the search for this string lacing together holiness into the mundane can be found in rituals, routines, liturgy, and ceremony.

The design of ritual is to call to attention parts of your spirit that are needed to engage with the present moment, to engage with the presence of God, to engage with life from a place of worth and purpose.

When we are looking for holiness in the mundane, rituals and ceremony can be the lens to look through if you want to find it.

We show up to rituals when our humanness most resists the mundane and is most vulnerable to “autopilot”.

They slow us down, call our inner being to pay attention, and get past what we “feel like” doing...to the thing we really NEED to do for nourishment from the well, for boundaries on the river of your external life.

They help us incline our hearts toward the Kingdom and Savior King we long for (Psalm 119:36).

And finally, Warren (2019) offers wisdom again in reminding us that showing up for habit, liturgy, ceremony, ritual...whatever you call it...is not what we do to earn the ear of the Lord or concoct his blessing or evoke his Presence:

“When Jesus was baptized, he had not set one toe in the waters of his ministry. Yet, upon baptism the Father said, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.” He didn’t serve or do a miracle or teach a single thing, and he was counted loved and favored. So go you and the approach to integrating new practices into your life...you do not do them to acquire love or favor...that is already in tact: We look at practices--how we spend our days, how we worship together. But before we begin we must note that though these rituals and habits may form us as an alternative people marked by the love and new life of Jesus, they are not what make us beloved. The reality underlying every practice in our life is the triune God and his story, mercy, abundance, generosity, initiative, and pleasure” (Warren, 2019)

*This content is so rich I had to split it up into two parts. The important follow up includes a practical HOW-TO so don’t miss it!*

2019. Warren, Tish Harrison. Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. IVP, an Imprint of InterVarsity Press