There’s the television serial 24, and then there’s Tish Harrison Warren’s new book, liturgy of the ordinary. Both cover the events of a single day but Warren says her book is “the anti-24, the most boring parts are included.”
Warren, an Anglican priest from Texas, began the book here in Madison, at an InterVarsity writers workshop in 2014. (The book is published by InterVarsity Press.) So she came back to Madison for a book launch party this week at Upper House, reading from the book and talking about it at a gathering of about 60 people.
Why boast about the boring parts of the book? Because it confronts the boring, ordinary parts of our daily lives in an effort to give them meaning and significance. “The only place we can love God and serve others is in the limited circumstances that we find ourselves in today,” she said.
Warren, who describes herself as a former radical, struggles to reconcile her former life with the routine sameness that we are all a part of as we go about our daily duties. “If Jesus spent most of his life in obscurity,” she said, referring to the years not described in the Gospels, “there’s meaning for us in our obscurity.”
Thus, the book has chapters with titles such as Making the Bed, Brushing Teeth, Losing Keys, Eating Leftovers, Sitting in Traffic, etc. “These ordinary things are what God uses to change the world,” she said. How we use our time shapes us, and Warren notes that these rituals are also the liturgy of our daily lives.
As tempting as it is to think that our lives are dull and other people’s lives are more interesting, Warren believes most lives are pretty much the same. In her work as an InterVarsity campus minister, she noted that one of the biggest challenges facing the grad students she worked with was boring sameness.
Warren was working with grad students at Vanderbilt University in 2011 when the chapter was derecognized, along with about a dozen other Christian organizations, for defending Christian orthodoxy against Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy. Her eloquent defense, printed in the student newspaper, was where I first began to admire her writing. She wrote further about the situation in 2014 in Christianity Today. Her first article grappling with ordinariness is found on The Well.
An ordinary writer writing about ordinary things would be unremarkable. But Warren’s observations transcend ordinariness and help us see that our ordinary lives can be much more than we usually think.
“There’s no such thing as radical or ordinary in Scripture,” Warren said. “There’s the Christian life that we are called to live. I think the ordinary becomes the revolutionary.”
More from Tish Harrison Warren in this video: